(lighthearted music) - [Narrator] Three years ago, I got the opportunity to live on a boat with my family because of my dad's work.

I was only 13 at the time, and I'd never spent more than a day at sea in my life.

Eventually we would spend a year living on the boat, traveling through the Mediterranean before crossing the Atlantic ocean.

Just the thought of being beyond the sight of land and out of contact for 20 days was daunting, and surely, "Titanic" and "Jaws" didn't really help the idea of being at sea.

Needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to spending three weeks in a floating fiberglass box with my family in the middle of nowhere.

On November 19, it was time to say goodbye to land and fresh food and head west across the ocean.

Within a couple hours of leaving port, the Canary Islands had sunk below the horizon.

The two dozen boats we'd began our crossing with had all vanished by the end of the second day.

With weather updates coming in daily from our satellite phone, we got a notice of an approaching squall and within a couple hours it hit us.

The 15 foot swell sent the boat up and down and we quickly had to reef the sail before it tore it to shreds.

After a broken halyard and a torn code zero, the wind disappeared completely.

The waves followed suit until they too could not venture out as far as we did.

It was completely an utterly dead calm.

It went on like this for the next week and so the days blur together.

The nights I had to stand watch were excruciating and dark.

Imagine staring into nothing, looking for nothing.

What could we possibly run into in the middle of the ocean, an iceberg?

Leonardo DiCaprio?

No.

It turns out that the biggest danger we faced was a collision with floating trash.

Our first piece of ocean debris we came across was a styrofoam box floating on the surface and being pecked away by seabirds.

It had been breaking apart and each of the little pellets were floating every which way.

We did our best to scoop the pieces out with a fishing net and that was when we began our collection of ocean trash.

This collection grew every day, with new pieces being scooped out and collected in a corner of the boat.

Water bottles, cans and even a flip-flop were fished out and accumulated on the deck to be thrown away, once we finally got to Barbados.

Day 16, we rescued the largest piece of trash yet.

It was in the middle of a week long calm.

The wind was still MIA and the only thing disturbing the horizon other than our wake, was a bobbing propane tank.

So, we veered off course and passed by the tank to fish it out.

It was covered in rust, barnacles and words in a language I didn't recognize.

Wherever it came from, it probably had a pretty interesting story.

It could have come from a cargo ship, grounding the Cape of Good Hope or maybe debris from a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

Whether the thing tumbled into the ocean by accident or was intentionally thrown away, we didn't know.

Either way it was added to our pile of junk.

A few days later, the tradewinds finally caught up to us and we began sailing again.

A pot of dolphins met up with us later on and surfed the barrel waves.

Then after three weeks at sea, we saw Barbados floating up from the horizon.

Finally, our collection could go into a dumpster on the island.

Hopefully, it wouldn't find its way back to the sea.

For a long time, I had imagined that the ocean was a big empty space, completely untouched by humans and voided everything but seawater.

Living on a boat, you get to see all types of things in the water, fish, dolphins, turtles, corals.

But once you take a closer look, there's usually things that don't belong there.

Things humans have left behind or thrown out and forgotten about, trash.

In every corner of the world's water hides pieces of trash.

Even where humans have not yet explored, trash usually finds a way of getting there first.

Even in the middle of the ocean.

So I ask you, be mindful of your waste, change a few habits and you can be the change our oceans need.

(lighthearted music)