Perfect Sailing Conditions for the Manta Trawl in the North Sea

We managed to do quite a bit of science en route from Edinburgh - having the best sailing weather of the trip, sunny with a good wind.

The photos show the manta trawl, and some of the contents, bits of plastic.  We also saw a lot of helium balloons - managed to rescue a few.  Remember we are only deploying the trawl for 30 minutes and it only skims a small area of water - multiply what we find as if we'd done a 24 hour trawl of the whole ocean.....And what we see is only the 'micro' plastic, visible pieces up to about 5mm - we do other samples for the 'nano' plastics, the minute fibres etc that we can't see.

The newspaper article describes some of our concerns about plastic pollution - these chemicals which are washed into the sea via sewage plants and manufacturing, are attracted to plastic particles, creating highly toxic particles which are ingested by fish and ultimately by us - good reason to go vegan!

What's in the trawl net???

Micro plastics attract these chemicals

Bits of visible plastic