Hey, welcome to 59 degrees north with Andy Schell. Enjoy the show. Hello again, Andy Shell here. Thanks for listening to 59 degrees north. This week we've got Matt Rutherford on.

Matt became famous last year for becoming the first person ever to sail solo and nonstop around North and South America.

And you can check out some episodes about that on my two

inspired guys podcast with ryan briggs but uh recently matt just got back from a

different sort of expedition he when he got back from the america's trip he founded a

nonprofit organization called the ocean research project and it's designed with

research in mind they're going to do sort of serious science stuff and

hopefully contribute to the health of the oceans that Matt has become so close to. Their first

expedition was to the Atlantic Garbage Patch or the Atlantic Jire. Everyone's heard of the Pacific

garbage patch. This is sort of the Atlantic cousin of it that is a little less reported on, but sort of

the same idea where these ocean currents come together and collect all the plastic waste

in the ocean.

Anyway, Matt's on to talk about that trip and how that all came about and what the trip

itself was like.

Thanks for listening.

Again, find us at 59 North sailing on Twitter, Andy Shell,

or 59 North on Facebook, and at 59-north.com. I'd love to hear from everybody, so thanks for

listening. We were out to sea, at one point for 73 days without stepping foot on land, but about 80 days total at sea covered about 6,800 miles, and we were collecting microplastic samples to try to determine just how much of this plastic is located

in the eastern half of the North Atlantic gyre.

So everybody knows the Pacific gyre, right?

That's the big congregation of current in the Pacific and the garbage patch, the Great Pacific

garbage patch.

...