May 3, 2023 — Growing up in Long Beach California, Captain Charles Moore quickly developed a love for the ocean.
Moore’s father was a chemist and sailor who frequently took him and his siblings out on the Pacific. Moore fondly recalls their long conversations about science while they stared out into the water.
“When you get out there and jump in and just see that deep blue going on forever,” he says. “The biggest kind of surprise that you can get as a human being, in terms of knowing the planet that you occupy.”
In 1997, Moore was on a sailing trip from Honolulu to Santa Barbara when hurricane winds blew him way off course. He started noticing objects bobbing in the water, like coming across a plastic soup.
Moore started to play a game: Every 10 minutes, he’d come up to the deck to see if he could get a clear view of the ocean without any trash. Unfortunately, he never won.
“So I said, you know what, this has got to be more than just Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of crumbs just for me to follow home. This is not what it is,” Moore recalls. “This is gotta be a bigger phenomenon.”