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November 24th, 2009 – At Sea, 04 22N, 048 10W
by Herb McCormick

In the library aboard Ocean Watch, nestled among the novels, the scholarly tomes and the tales of adventure, is a book called Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer & Eric Scigliano. Just for the record, that’s not the text of the entire manuscript: That’s just the title!

Like a lot of journalists, several years ago, working on a story that involved ocean currents, I picked up the phone and called Dr. Ebbesmeyer, who holds a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Washington, is still based in Seattle, and has become one of the eminent authorities on the movements and mysteries of, to put it in the most basic terms, the horizontal movement of grand expanses of water.  Also, like many fellow reporters, though I hadn’t actually planned on doing so, I ended up talking to him about, yes, rubber ducks.

It would take me some time to explain all this, but I still couldn’t do as concise a job as the co-author of Flotsametrics in the preface to the book. “Over the years,” writes Scigliano, “I’ve often seen Ebbesmeyer quoted in the local and national papers or heard him answer a (journalist’s) questions. The topics have grown ever stranger: spilled shipping containers, ‘shoenamis’ of sneakers, flotsam flocks of rubber (actually plastic) duckies, drifting corpses, even severed feet.

“But however exotic these objects might be,” he continues, “they had one quality in common: They all floated on the sea, sometimes for astonishing distances, and in the process revealed oceanic processes as intricate and finely meshed as the workings of a clock or a living organism. Many speak of the sea as a living thing, but for most that’s just a metaphor or vague intuition. For Curt Ebbesmeyer it’s a concrete reality, to be studied in the same way a physiologist deciphers the body’s processes and a physician diagnoses its ills.”

So, no, though you won’t see it in the dictionary, Ebbesmeyer’s occupation can be summed up in one mouthful of a word: “flotsametrician.” He tracks the world’s watery, well-marked oceanic highways by means of the stuff that floats – “sometimes astonishing distances” – upon them. Thus our new, made-up word is really just a trick way of saying he studies age-old oceanic currents by very contemporary means. Today on Ocean Watch, the larger topic, ocean currents, has more than our passing attention. For here off the coast of Brazil, the entire crew has become flotsametricians.

On Tuesday, Ocean Watch was continuing eastward in a challenging attempt to sail clear of the “hump” of Brazil and head south. The problem, ever since setting forth from Cayenne, French Guiana, on Sunday, has been a stiff current directly on the nose. At times, the boat has been making anywhere from six to nine knots through the water, but recording half (or less) of that speed through the water. It’s an annoying situation, to say the very least.

At the nav station, scientist Michael Reynolds and skipper Mark Schrader have been poring over current charts (and, due to the continuing heat above and below decks, pouring perspiration, as well) in an attempt to decipher the best way out of the maw of unfavorable current, and into a region where the flow is an aid, not a hindrance. The entire exercise is reminiscent of a line from an old Fleetwood Mac song: Working on mysteries without any clues.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. For the first twenty-four hours or so out of Cayenne, flat patches of very visible seaway signaled an opposing current of up to three knots, which we avoided when we could. And the aforementioned current charts, from multiple sources, also show very clear striations of moving water, with the speed and direction (strictly contrary, thus far) plainly marked in numbers and corresponding color codes. The conundrum is that many of these sources offer contradictory data, so figuring out the optimum path is not always as easy as it would seem.

For the moment, Ocean Watch is bashing its way through the western wall of a huge, spinning current gyre.

For the moment, we’re bashing our way through the western wall of a huge, spinning current gyre, with a 2.5-3 boost over the northern edge (too far away), and a nearly negligible -0.5 expanse in the center (at which we’re presently, desperately, aiming for). Again, our boatspeed is good, we have nice tradewinds in the 15-20 knot range in the highly favorable direction of just north and east, and we’re holding a very nice course that at the moment has us clearing the bulge with plenty of room to spare. However, because of the foul current, we’re basically walking up the down escalator.

The world’s complex system of ocean currents and countercurrents include, among others, the North and South Equatorial Currents, the Equatorial Countercurrent, the Agulhas Current off South Africa, the Southern Ocean Current, and in the North Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, which gave us rather a rude spanking on the voyage from New York to Charleston, South Carolina. Now, we’re seeing that movie again here in the notorious, northerly setting Brazilian Current.

Everyone is frustrated, including the skipper.

“I’m tired of looking at ocean-current models and I’m tired of talking about currents,” he confided in his personal daily log. “Suffice it to say, Spanish Galleons did not sail south along this coast. I’m beginning to doubt that anyone has ever sailed south along this coast. North would be fine, might even be fun – but south, not so much.

“Yes, I did more or less pick this course so the responsibility for our slow going can’t be off loaded or denied. In my defense I had assumed we would be sailing direct from Puerto Rico and heading well offshore away from currents, pirates, Amazon outflow and more currents. But that’s not the way is happened so here we are, enjoying good sailing and good boat speed: Through the water at seven or eight knots all day isn’t bad. But SOG, or speed over the ground, well…it’s hard to ignore threes and fours but we’re trying.”

And oh yes, we took another big wave into the interior today, wreaking more havoc down below, but that’s an entirely different story, and one we’ll leave for another day.

In the meantime, the Ocean Watch crew is receiving an advance lesson in currents, gyres, rings, and vortexes and eddies…and that led us back to the bookshelves and Flotsametrics.

Despite all his scientific research and endeavors, two serendipitous incidents put Dr. Ebbesmeyer on the map, and the talk-show circuit as well. The first was in 1990, when 21 freight containers outbound from South Korea went over the side in a South Pacific storm, sending 78,932 Nike sneakers into the sea. Eight months and two thousand miles later, thanks to Pacific currents, the shoes began washing up on Vancouver Island, and later, after a wind shift, along the Oregon coastline, a few short miles from Nike headquarters. They Just Did It!

With a colleague named Jim Ingraham, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, who’d developed a program called OSCURS (Ocean Surface Current Simulation) to calculate the effects of ocean currents on salmon migration, Ebbesmeyer was able to show how and why the Nikes had traveled across the sea, thus proving that the system worked as well on inanimate objects as it did with fish.

Two years later, another batch of containers was tossed into the ocean during a massive gale, and before he knew it, Ebbesmeyer was once again in sleuth mode, and in a nifty bit of high-seas detective work, was able to determine the route the 28,800 bathtub toys formerly “contained” – yes, rubber ducks – had sailed to freedom.

The good news? Both the sneakers and the duckies ultimately made it to shore. So even though at the moment things seem rather bleak, there’s reason to hope that the very animate Ocean Watch will soon do the same.

- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson

This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

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