"At this point, we're looking for additional ships of opportunity that would be willing to take one of our buoys, or a couple of our buoys, and if they come across a ghostnet they'll attach the buoy," Veenstra said.

Ghostnet is lost or discarded driftnet that for years can continue catching fish, birds and marine mammals. Until it is sunk by the weight of the creatures they trap, they ride the ocean currents, and can rise to kill again as the carcasses decompose.

Ghostnet sometimes tangles on coral reefs of the Hawaiian archipelago, threatening the already endangered Hawaiian monk seals. To safeguard the seal habitat, the netting has been cut from the reef, "literally handful by handful," according to James Churnside, a researcher at NOAA's Environmental Technology Lab in Boulder, Colo., who is coordinating the project with Veenstra.

Searching for a cheaper way to eliminate ghostnet, Churnside focused on the convergence areas of the Pacific. These areas are created during the northern hemisphere winters by seasonal impacts on the surface ocean currents, gathering fishing gear and any floating debris until they dissipate with warming temperatures.

Satellite photographs were used to identify debris masses in the subtropical convergence zone, located above of the Hawaiian Islands at 30-degrees north latitude, and a zone created by the Alaska coastal currents that roughly follow the southern edge of the Gulf of Alaska. Overflights by a long-distance aircraft confirmed Churnside's hunch that convergence zones also become fishing gear junkyards.

"We know that (ghostnet) accumulates there. We can pull a lot of it out of there in a fairly cost-effective manner by sending out a ship with a hook," Churnside said.

In 2003, a dozen flights over a two-week period from Astoria to Kodiak to Cold Bay confirmed that floating trash was present in quantities large enough to justify dispatching a ship. Among more than 2,000 sightings of man-made trash, the observers saw abandoned netballs 10 meters across, and 100-meter lengths of driftnet.

"We saw a fair amount of debris, for example, in the eddy behind Kayak Island," Churnside said of a Prince William Sound flight.

NOAA techies are working on better identification from the satellite imagery so that overflights can be replaced by vessels of opportunity that can be directed to fishing debris during their normal passages near convergence areas and attach marker buoys.

"If there's absolute perfect correlation between where we found stuff and the oceanographic features then we can send a ship to those places just based on the satellite data," Churnside said.

Currently the original satellite imagery marks anything that isn't water as an anomaly and a computer sends a signal to another high-resolution satellite monitor that takes a photograph of the anomaly when it passes over the location. NOAA analysts in Maryland evaluate the more detailed images to determine if they are nets, logs or something else.

"We can differentiate between a cork and a buoy, but not a cork and a gallon milk jug. When we get into bigger stuff, cork line is easier to identify. We assume there's a net associated with it," Churnside said.

Taking the marker buoys imposes no obligation on a skipper except to activate and deploy them if a net-mess is found. "It needs about three seconds to unscrew a plug, light blinks to show it's turned on, then attach it to the net," said Veenstra, a former fish-spotter for Ocean Beauty Seafoods.

Veenstra managed the company's tender fleet before moving into research and technology development. "The bottom line is we've been very successful. The outcome is (that) we're ready to go forward with cleanup efforts."

Veenstra's Ocean Trek Research, a subsidiary of Airborne Technologies, builds the marker buoys - marketed for about $2,000 each - that commercial harvesters attach to "fish attraction devices."

With a share of a $250,000 federal grant that is funding the larger project, his company has already built more than 20 buoys for deployment in NOAA's program. He is waiting for the response to a second grant application that would fund 100 more.

Using a solar panel and rechargeable batteries the roughly 18-inch by 12-inch buoys can survive on the high seas up to five years, Veenstra said.

Depending on how soon a comprehensive plan can be put together, including vessel recruitment, the cleanup program could be launched as soon as next spring.

"The convergence is kind of over the winter, so the best time to do it is early spring when the weather has had time to sweep stuff together," Churnside noted.