(Editor’s Note: The following report comes from 5 Gyres Ambassador, Carolyn Box, who we refer to affectionately as CBOX or SEABOX, due to her love for the open ocean and the 5 Gyres mission. So, what is a trawl? Well, it’s simple. Our Executive Director, Marcus Eriksen, has invented a trawl device for gathering samples at high speed, i.e. the speed of the boat, which we call ‘The Flying Dutchman’ as it was invented on a Dutch tall ship with a welding studio somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Though we don’t use The Flying Dutchman to quantify density of plastic, it allows us to constantly gather samples without slowing down the boat, and provide samples for education and to share with all our ocean conservation partners and allows the public to see first hand what oceanic plastic pollution looks like.