Eat your heart out, Abby Sunderland. A group of Americans recently created an extremely cool looking catamaran sailing vessel from 12,500 plastic bottles, and then traveled more than 8,000 nautical miles from San Francisco to Australia. They landed on Monday in Sydney Harbor after a four-month journey to raise awareness for how badly we're destroying our oceans. I'll never look at the castoff remains in my recycle bin the same way ever again.
The craft "Plastiki" and its six-man crew captured worldwide attention when it left San Francisco on March 20. The 60-foot (18-metre) catamaran was greeted by a flotilla of boats as it sailed through Sydney Heads, the gateway to Sydney Harbour.
"The crew are really very happy because everyone said they'd never be able to do it, you know a boat made of plastic bottles, held together with glue made from cashew nuts and sugar cane, and they did it spectacularly well," said Kim McKay, a spokeswoman for the "Plastiki".
The project was the idea of skipper David de Rothschild after he read a United Nations environment report on the state of the world's oceans. De Rothchild, an adventurer and ecologist who founded climate awareness group Adventure Ecology, is a descendant of the Rothschild banking family. De Rothchild named the craft "Plastiki" in honour of the original Kon-Tiki voyage in 1947 by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed 4,300 miles on a raft made from balsa wood and other materials from South America to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean.
The glue for the boat was made from cashews and sugar cane? Screw boating food, I know what I'm eating! I just hope the entertainment for the four-month journey wasn't trash as well, because the only fun things derived from that have to do with throwing bottles at cats and VH1 reality shows. On the bright side, the inhabitants on the trip would at least have a never before compendium of knowledge about the nutritional facts for every beverage in a plastic bottle known to man. The other thing the project wanted to prove was that it was possible to turn bona fide garbage into something useful through hard work and creativity. If that's the case, I think they should focus their next efforts on the beaches of New Jersey.
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Plastic bottle catamaran crosses Australian finish line [Yahoo News]
