I had the incredible opportunity to spend 10 jam-packed days with the guys from OceanGybe, Bryson Robertson and Hugh Patterson, while they worked their way up the coast in Costa Rica. Beginning in Dominical and ending in Playa Herradura the days were filled with early rising, lots of coffee, killing cockroaches (in bed), baking cookies (aka paying my dues) swimming through surf to shoot the surf, underwater shoots, beach cleanups, presentations, interviews, hanging with the locals and of course lots of fun in the sun!

Besides learning more about their friendly competition they have going of  who-can-make-the-best-lure-out-of-trash (Bryson is in the lead with Hugh owing him a 3 course meal) I was able to get to know more about the message they are trying to get across. Here is what they had to say:

“The same winds that take us around in our sail boat are the same winds that transport plastic in the ocean around the world. We think someone needs to bring attention to the amount of garbage and plastics in the ocean and we are lucky to be able to spend 3 years sailing around the world looking at beaches so we can get a global picture of the amount of plastic in the ocean.

We think the kids are the next generation, they are the ones that can really make a change. The kids, their excited and it is good for us because if you just go to children and say ‘You mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that’ they don’t listen. If we can tell them ‘We are sailing around the world, were surfers, this is what we are doing…AND don’t through your garbage in the ocean!’ then we can have fun and also try to have a small impact.

We’ve definitely been to some of the most beautiful, isolated beaches in the world, islands where no one lives and no one has been for maybe 10 years. Islands where it is just white sandy beaches and palm trees, but on every one of those beaches, when you look closer there’s soccer balls, there’s plastic pop bottles, there’s syringes, there’s lighters…our garbage has got there before we’ve got there. We haven’t been to a beach anywhere in the world yet where we haven’t found garbage.

We visited an island called Cocos Keeling, a very tiny island and found that there was so much garbage we couldn’t collect our usual 100 meters so we narrowed it down to 10 meters. We still couldn’t collect all the garbage because there was too much so we only collected sandals and water bottles. We found 333 sandals and 226 water bottles. The worst part was, as we would collect it more would keep coming onto the beach. It wasn’t their garbage, it was all from Indonesia brought by the wind and currents. Locals said they often find Hermit crabs now with pieces of plastic as their shells because there is more plastic then there are  natural shells.

We must change, we must reduce the amount we consume and we must deal with our pollution in a better way than we are now. It’s difficult to make a radical change from today to tomorrow but you can make small changes everyday. Maybe it’s a little more work than you did before, like separating your garbage for recycling, but its something we’ve got to do. We ‘ve got to realize we are fortunate in this world, we have a lot of resources, we are very blessed but we need to be responsible as well. We can see the changes in ourselves on this 3 year trip and its been small, but it’s not hard, you can do it, you can still live a good life and have less of an impact on the environment.” – OceanGybe

For more information and to see their movie trailer go to www.oceangybe.com

To view more photos of Ocean Gybe click here!
OceanGybe – Costa Rica – Images by Jen Edney