Customer Reviews

Washed Up: The Curious Journeys of Flotsam and Jetsam

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author has travelled all over the world and beachcombed. She uses humor to teach us about ocean currents that take items from say Japan to the Washington state coast. I was expecting a book about beachcombing, another quick read about glass floats and driftwood. But this book is so much more than that. Skye explains currents. She explains about sperm whales that regurgitate a product that can be found on some beaches, then warns us about buying this products on the internet. (It's illegal in the states to purchase products from sperm whales because they are an endangered species.)
She also writes about the problem of dumping wastes in our oceans, and how that affects the food chain.
All of this is done in a highly readable writing style, laced with a sharp humor. Weaving through the book is a tale about an item she found at Alkai Beach in Seattle, but she discarded thinking she couldn't possibly carry one more item. She regrets having tossed it.
I'm glad I purchased and read this book. Now, I must go...beachcombing!

I've read amusing tales of flotsam before, such as the rubber ducks that spilled into the sea and were used to track currents, so I picked up this book.

I must say, I found it tremendously frustrating to read. Ms. Moody's writing style in this book is irksome at best, juvenile at worst. She employs phrases like "hella-bad ugly" and uses bizarre interludes with a (presumably imaginary) psychiatrist, and I found none of this enjoyable.

Further, the book lacked any sort of organization. The major sections are stretched to their limits (and beyond), such that they become meaningless. Each section then has shorter sub-sections, but these too seem to be scattered. Repeatedly, I found myself reading a tidbit and feeling it had been cut very short. I'd finish a paragraph, and expect to read on and get more information, but instead an entirely different topic would come up. I don't think I've ever failed to finish a book I've started, but I was sorely tempted with this one.

If you're a die-hard beachcomber, perhaps this book is worthwhile. Otherwise, I'd absolutely advise steering clear.

This is a book for filling your head with amazing facts to regurgitate when walking on the beach with friends or children. I can attest to the latter's fascination with tales of astronaut poop, and the origins of ambergris, the fragrant sea-borne product of whale regurgitation.

The book collects together stories from across the globe and over the centuries, in styles reminiscent of People Magazine (with photographs), Tattler and National Geographic. Moody has a journalist's eye for detail, and a storyteller's ability to inject dry facts with human interest. Her name-dropping is both cheeky and fun. She covers whimsical topics (floating phalluses) and serious ones (the proliferation of plastic garbage in the tidal gyres of the Pacific), but it's a quick read, ideal for say, a flight to Melanesia (home of the cargo cultists).

The book could do with an index, to allow the reader to locate and re-read some of the more interesting tales. And, there was an unfortunate bobble in the explanation of why driftwood floats. But neither criticism detracts from what is an entertaining and informative read. I recommend it.

Skye Moody has been a journalist covering Ukrainian coal mining and Siberian reindeer herding, a bush guide in East Africa, a literature teacher, a poet, and a novelist. She has also written nonfiction books before, but has now written one about a subject in which what she is really interested. Moody is a flotsamist, which is a fancy way of saying she is a beachcomber. In _Washed Up: The Curious Journeys of Flotsam and Jetsam_ (Sasquatch Books), she has described her passion with all the enthusiasm of the most devoted hobbyist. There's always a danger that someone writing about a hobby will be unable to communicate the hobby's fascination to those who don't share the passion, but there is no such problem in Moody's book. For one thing, the subject is inherently fascinating; no one who has ever walked on a beach has failed to pay attention to shells, driftwood, seaweed, or bottles that have washed up on the sand. For another, Moody is a funny writer, amused by her own obsession and by those who share it. For yet another, studying what travels around the ocean can be scientific evidence of how currents work, so tracking flotsam is not a trivial folly.

In 1990, Nike shoes began washing up on the beaches of the Pacific northwest. Six months before, a huge container ship had lost twenty-one shipping containers in a severe storm, including five containers holding 80,000 Nike shoes. This was bad news for Nike, but good news for oceanographers who could track the shoes and improve their models of ocean currents. The flotsamists who collected the shoes realized that there were few matches; the laces of the shoes had not been tied together, so shortly after being dunked, the right shoes parted ways from the left shoes. The parting was not random. The slight change in curvature between left and right shoes caused the righties to follow the northward Alaska current and show up around Queen Charlotte Sound, while the lefties tended to follow the southward California current and wound up in Oregon. The most romantic of all flotsam is the message in a bottle; even if you have never found one, you know how eager you would be to open a washed-up bottle containing a message. Some bottles are literally vectors of romance. In 1956, a Swedish sailor jettisoned a bottled note overboard, asking for a reply from any pretty girl who found it. A Sicilian fisherman eventually found the bottle, and gave it to his daughter as a joke. Some joke: two years later, the couple were married.

The saga of flotsam isn't all trivial fun. There are important issues mentioned here having to do with the modern ways we use the seas. Loose cargo used not to be a big problem; below decks, it only went down if the ship went down. Modern container ships, however, stow many of their big boxes in the open, where they are liable to be washed over in a storm. The boxes can float at least temporarily, and are a significant traffic hazard on the sea, especially at night. The other great problem is that most flotsam is not a curious message in a bottle or a pretty glass float. Most flotsam is garbage, and just as seaweed accumulates in the Sargasso Sea, garbage accumulates in what are now called "garbage patches". The name is official enough that even the North Pacific's Great Garbage Patch has two components, the Eastern and the Western Garbage Patches, each with tons of garbage. The floating garbage displaces plankton, and since it is mostly plastic, it stays and stays until it eventually degrades into nasty stuff that poisons the creatures that eat it. Some of the garbage skims off at times, and hits the beaches, where flotsamists might welcome it while bemoaning it. This cannot go on forever, but looking for the novelties from the sea will go on as long as the seas roll. Moody's is not a downbeat book, however; it is jovial and light, and covers a subject of irresistible interest.

I feel compelled to write this review for those of you who, like me, thought this would be a sort of beachcomber's approach to oceanography. It isn't, or at least not primarily. The idea of patterns of ocean currents predictably guiding flotsam to certain shores, or into perpetual circulation in huge stagnant seas of trash is of obvious interest to environmentalists or even those with just a casual curiosity about the origins of unexpected objects encountered on the seashore. I was originally attracted to these ideas by Ebbesmeyer's Flotsametrics, but was steered to Washed Up by its higher reviewer ratings. These subjects are indeed covered in the fourth chapter. Like all the others, it is well written, testimony to the author's writing experience, mostly in fiction. But this is a personal narrative, rather than a journalistic exploration. The tale begins and ends with an exotic piece of flotsam the author found and discarded from the shores of Washington. In between is a meandering collection of interesting facts and experiences, not all necessarily related to the sea. It becomes clear that this is more a book about the author herself, complete with imagined psychoanalytic sessions and tongue-in-cheek reminiscences of her many travels. In fairness, she does a masterful job of conveying how her fascination with flotsam is both literal and metaphorical: how fate and circumstance guide floating objects as well as our own lives. For those of you who enjoy witty autobiography for its own sake, you may be as interested as she is in the details of how she got drunk in Finland or the life stories of people obsessed with collecting flotsam in their yards. I suspect it is less so for those who choose this book based simply on its title.

"Washed Up" is a beautifully written collage about the tangled, tide-driven world of flotsam and jetsam. Reminiscent of Kurlanski's "History of Salt," the book is well-researched--chock full of history, science, flotsamist characters, and legends of the sea. Sometimes exotic, sometimes quirky, sometimes amazing, "Washed Up" is a marvelous voyage. Author Skye Moody clearly loves the sea, adding her own flotsamist obsessions to carry the reader on a tour both informative and funny. By the time I was done, I understood terms like lagan, wrack, spermacetti, and gyre, but even more, I felt so much the richer and wiser about our indelible human impact on Earth's oceans.

This is a very informative, enjoyable book. This short volume covers the full range of things that the sea gives up to the land. Exploring everything from seaweed to missives in bottles this is a wonderful book on a little known subject, little known to most of us landlubbers at least. Ms. Moody is a long time lover of the sea and the descendent of seafarers who writes with an easy chatty style.

The volume is very loosely tied together by her search for the identity of a mysterious item that she failed to pick up on a beachcombing expedition. This recurring theme proves to be, in my eyes at least, to give the only weakness in the book. There is a recurring dialog with a psychiatrist throughout the book that I found confusing. I was unable to decide if this was an actual problem the author had or a reflection on society's viewpoint toward people with non mainstream hobbies.

However, this was a very enjoyable book that I would recommend to anyone. My one tiny quibble may well reflect my weakness as a reader as opposed to any fault Ms Moody has as an author.

Rambling writing. Some interesting data about flotsam and jetsam, but too much work to read through attempted cuteness to make it worth reading

Fascinating account of the author Skye Moody's own beachcombining discoveries and the stories of other beachcombers (treasure hunters) she's met around the world. She combines science, history, lore & legends. It's easy to read and understand. Loved it!