Ocean Gybe: A Closer Look at Our Polluted Oceans

Youthink talks with Ryan Robertson about how Ocean Gybe started, plastic pollution and how youth can make a difference.

What started out as a dream to circumnavigate the globe and surf the world’s best breaks became a reality in 2007 for three Vancouverites. Brothers Ryan & Bryson Robertson and their good friend Hugh Patterson set sail on an adventure which became much more than just a search for adventure and surf.

The three Victoria University graduates named their expedition Ocean Gybe, which means a movement that brings about change. They visited remote beaches throughout the world, from Indonesia to the Pacific Islands, collected garbage and documented the pollution they saw.

Now back from their three-year adventure they’ve toured schools in BC and Alberta to spread the message to youth about the plastic pollution in our oceans, and encourage young people to create change. Youthink got a chance to speak with Ryan Robertson for a first-hand account of the Ocean Gybe adventure and what's really in our oceans.

YT: Where did the idea to sail around the globe inspecting remote beaches come from?
RR: All three of us at university had an adventurous spirit. Hugh knew how to sail and Bryson and I knew how to surf, so he [Bryson] taught us how to sail and we taught him how to surf. We just came to a conclusion that the best – the most awesome way – to see the world would be to actually buy our own sailboat and sail to all these remote islands.

Then once we had made our pact on that, we thought, “Well, you know we’re going to go and do this; going to go see all these remote beaches around the world, you know we should tie it in with seeing what’s on these beaches." Everyone had heard about The Great Pacific Gyre and so we thought, “Not all plastic ends up in The Gyre, so the rest of its got to go somewhere.” We were going anyway so we thought, “Perfect! We’ll go take a look.”

YT: How did you prepare for the trip?
RR: Two years before our leave date we thought, “We better start finding a boat,” so we started looking for that and we started taking meteorology courses; we took a short-wave radio course that took a better part of the year and we all became hand-certified; learned Morse code and we started taking medical courses because obviously when you’re out there all by yourself you got to be your own doctors.

YT: What surprised you about your trip?
RR: On average, there was much, much, much more trash on the beaches than we thought we were going to find and that’s why – one of the many reasons – we’ve come home and thought we’ve got to pass this message on because we’ve had this unique experience of being there and we’re trying to tell people how bad it is out there. The bigger problem, in our mind, is the thing that people don’t know about it.

YT: Which were some of the most polluted beaches that you saw?
RR: In general, the beaches in the Third-World countries are the worst just because they’ve got all this packaging - plastic packaging and that sort of thing and they haven’t had the awareness or the education and they don’t know to dispose of this plastic properly. Large corporations sending all these highly packaged products to these countries and they end up on beaches. But the entire world needs to just start stepping away from single-use plastics; plastics are fine, plastics are a miracle, plastics are everywhere… but why would we create a product that will last potentially forever and that we use for five minutes? It just doesn’t make any sense.

YT: How bad are Canadian beaches?
RR: The West Coast beaches, which we have looked at, down at Vancouver Island are pretty bad as well. Not in the small items... lots and lots of large items that have come across a current. Basically all the fishing debris from the North Pacific ends up on our beaches. As well, lots of terrific pop/water bottles like these 500 mL ones and these 330 mL pop bottles that have come across from Japan.

YT: Were there times when you felt discouraged by all the garbage?
RR: Yes. Particularly when we entered places such as Indonesia. It is very easy to get discouraged. What you’ve got to focus on is that if you change, you affect 10, 30, 100 other people and before you know it, boom! Problem solved. We’ve spoken to over 10,000 kids - that was before the school tour. What if every one of those kids takes that message and passes it on?

YT: At your talk at EP!C, you said that “we are all connected by our oceans.” Can you elaborate on that?
RR: The fact is that on the West Coast of BC, we’re connected to China and Japan and the Philippines and to Australia and everywhere. We’re all connected by our oceans; it’s almost as if there’s this epic highway that can transit anything anywhere.

YT: So, if we dropped trash here in Canada, where might it end up?
RR: The trash from Canada is going down the Coast, west across the Pacific. Some of it might loop around North again and end up in the gyre, others are just going to keep heading west in trade wind belts... but it might end up south of the equator and get into the Southern hemisphere system and then it can go anywhere.

YT: You also mentioned that plastic breaks down to form nano-sized bits. Would you mind explaining what you mean?
RR: Plastic never biodegrades, it photo degrades, which means that when plastics get baked in the sun they get more and more brittle and they break into smaller and smaller pieces. On all these beaches where there’s this plastic sitting on the beach, baking in the sun, it just takes a wave to come up and smash them into the reef and all of a sudden you’ve got hundreds and thousands of little, tiny pieces of plastic… and then fish eat them.

YT: The media often describes the ocean gyre as a “big floating pile of garbage.” Is this a myth?
RR: Yes. It is definitely not a “floating pile of garbage.” It’s more like a swill of plastic. The huge impact is when you look down into the ocean and you just see all this colourful plastic and all different sizes right down to tiny, tiny pieces in every single level of the water column down to the bottom of the Pacific. It’s way worse because it’s through the entire depth of the ocean. So no island of floating plastic - that was created by the media. It would be easier to clean it up like that.

YT: What goal do you have with your school tours?
RR: Our goal in the school tour is to talk to as many kids as we can and inspire as many kids as we can. We want to plant a seed in all the young minds that single-use plastics are not what we need in our culture.

YT: What would you say to kids who are inspired by your adventure?
RR: I would say that depending on what they want to do, don’t focus on the enormity of the problem. Don’t look at all the hurdles and barriers to be successful; take one at a time. Don’t focus on the problems, focus on the benefits.