Samoa was not an original stopover point for a 60-foot catamaran on its journey from San Francisco to Sydney, but it is an unusual and interesting sight.
Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles (17,700 km) through treacherous seas.
David de Rothschild was trying to make a point and hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic, except for the masts which are metal.
"The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish." said de Rothschild.
The vessel is called the Plastiki. Its name is an homage of sorts to Thor Heyerdahl, the fabled Norwegian explorer who in 1947 sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific on the Kon-Tiki, a raft made from balsa wood.
De Rothschild is something of an adventurer himself. The scion of a wealthy British banking family, he is one of only several dozen people to traverse both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. In 2005 he founded Adventure Ecology, an organization that uses field expeditions to call attention to environmental issues
The vessel's twin hulls are filled with 12,000 to 16,000 bottles. Skin-like panels made from recycled PET, a woven plastic fabric, covers the hulls and a watertight cabin, which sleeps four.
Two wind turbines and an array of solar panels charge a bank of 12-volt batteries, which power several onboard laptop computers, a GPS and SAT phone.
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