By Kate Seamons, Source: USA Today

And that isn’t the low-point of his story. After departing from Osaka, “it felt as if the ocean itself was dead.” What he didn’t see: the birds, sharks, dolphins, and fish that typically studded his voyage.

What he did: an “unbelievable” load of garbage, part of it propelled there by the tsunami that hit Japan. He sailed through oil slicks, broken chairs, toys, wooden power poles, and a factory chimney. There was so much garbage, that “in a lot of places we couldn’t start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That’s an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.”