Day 2: May 31

Jing Chen writes:

While everyone was having their holiday, we went on a test tow today. John, a wind surfing instructor and commercial model, had kindly offered to tow us with his power boat. Lorraine showed us the Hobbie Cat built to collect plastics on the surface layer of the water.

Currently it still takes quite some work to launch the collection device, but we are working on improving it. The collection device is made of two 1.5 meter by 1.5 meters frames with three nets of different sizes on that. When launched into the water, current pushes through the nets to form a rectangular shape. Plastics of different sizes will be trapped at different layers. The net with the largest holes traps objects the size of tennis balls. The boat was pulling us at 3 knots/hr so that the current was not too strong for fish to swim out of the net. If they do accidentally enter the net, we would take them out.

The purpose of this tow was to show us how the Hobbie Cat plastic collection device works. We took turn to get on the Hobbie Cat with Lorraine.

Me and Pin on the Hobie Cat with Lorraine:

Kelli and Genea:

This is Alex and Lorraine getting the nets up:

Since Alex was the last one to get on the Hobbie Cat, she had some extra fun. With perfect cooperation between Lorraine and John, Alex got totally soaked on the way back to land.