WATER SAMPLING

clammering for their gear. They surfed the channel, cut during World War 1 almost until it was dark.

The next day we went ashore to clear customs, since we were now technically in the Kiribati Republic, and explore the island’s colourful shores.

During the war, Fanning had been home to a British cable relay station and its dredged entrance was a popular safe harbour for visiting warships. Today, Fanning looks like a shell of its one-time splendour, the overgrown landscape littered with abandoned buildings and deteriorating infrastructure. The USA’S Passenger Services Act of 1886 prohibited foreign ships from travelling between United States ports unless they stopped in a foreign country in between, so any foreign-flagged cruise ship leaving Hawaii used to stop at Fanning Island – the closest foreign port – and Fanning became accustomed to more than 200,000 day-trippers a year. That Act has been relaxed and those ships no longer stop at Fanning, so the atoll has since receded into relative poverty. We partnered with Adventure Scientists, a grassroots nonprofit organisation that uses athletes and contributors already in the field to collect new environmental data, to aid in their study of ocean microplastics.

As civilian scientists, the Falcor crew saved a canteen of sea water every 100 miles, 22 samples in all, across a stretch of ocean never surveyed before. The results showed that 73% of samples collected contained plastic contamination.