The expedition has started!

Fair winds and an excited crew, Baltic Sea Expedition has finally started. Sea Dragon and her crew is on their way to Simrishamn. Here are two messages from the crew:

We have now done 2 sampling stops, the trawling and pumping yesterday (Monday) was very rough as it was in the midst of a torrential downpour with 30+ knots of wind - the pump ended up not pumping a whole lot of liquid as it kept bouncing out of the waves and sucking air, but did get some stuff on the filters still.  Just passing Malmo tonight. -Captain Eric Loss

My first impression is that the journey is exciting, fun, instructive, demanding and fair. No matter your previous experience everyone helps each other with the work on the boat. There is a shift schedule that rotates. Even though I have never set foot on a sailboat, I got to take the helm, hoist the sails, perform routine checks, cook, and work the night shift. The same rules apply to everyone on the boat. At first glance, there is not so much trash in the sea, one of the crew saw a shoe floating by, but at the first trawling we got quite a lot of plastic and at the second we got about a third of the first trawling. So there is plastic in the sea that you can not see from the surface. -Louise Hedenskog, Örebro