On a Japanese beach on “World Environment Day”, Benôit Lecomte donned a wetsuit, swim fins and a mask and stepped into the water. Accompanied by the solar- and wind-powered yacht “Discoverer” and a team of volunteers, he’s headed across the Pacific Ocean to raise consciousness about marine litter. If successful, the 180-day journey in eight-hour, 50-km swims will take him 9,000 km to San Francisco and by December find him “sittin’ on the dock of the bay.”

The 50-year-old French architect who lives in Texas, won’t be the first to take to the sea to draw attention to pollution, but the first to actually swim through the miniature atolls of discarded plastics and the microplastic “smog” of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He’ll eat and sleep aboard the 20-metre yacht while scientists collect samples for 27 scientific partners and learn more about the concentration of microplastics. “ The Swim”, a documentary series about the journey, will be broadcast on Seeker.com.

Apart from radioactive fallout from the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor and the unappetising plastic “soup,” Lecomte will have to navigate sharks and jellyfish, like the dangerous Portuguese Man o’ War. That filigree transparent creature put an end to Briton Ben Hooper’s plan to swim more than 3,200 km from Senegal to Brazil in 2016 and nearly put an end to Hooper.

The Frenchman says he’s doing it for the future of his children and to “make people aware of the environmental degradation of the ocean as a first step away from consuming single-use plastics.”