Skimmers Move at Slow Pace Taking Oil from Gulf

In the Gulf of Mexico, the massive effort to contain the oil spill continued, including thousands of ships skimming oil from the water.

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Six miles off Florida's shore a Coast Guard ship has hit a field of oil. Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Swanson and his crew are new to this, based in the much colder northeast and now cleaning the sea in 100-degree heat, CBS News Correspondent Kelly Cobiella.

"The biggest challenge, really, is finding and locating these ribbons of oil," said Swanson. "They're very difficult to see."

And they're almost as tough to catch, made up of thousands of hamburger-sized pieces and moving with the current.

It is slow work, moving at about 2 miles per hour. Any faster and the oil sloshes over the boom.

Once a line of boom is full of oil, Coast Guard sailors turn on the pump moving it through a hose, onto the ship and into holding tanks.

Swanson's ship collected nearly 12,000 gallons of oil in three days, a small dent in a massive spill. Gerry Matherne, a ship captain turned BP contractor, thinks he's found a way to pick up the pace.

As he watched skimming boats struggle to keep up with the oil, he dreamt up a cage with a lining inside. It's like a trash bag, "a massive trash bag with a filtration system," as Matherne describes it.

Matherne built a prototype from PVC pipe and door screens he bought at a hardware store. On its first run, Matherne's invention picked up one ton of weathered oil in less than two hours. Unlike boom, it can skim in high seas.

"I had to find a solution, and we found one of the solutions, and we're constantly looking for more," Matherne said.

Matherne's invention is now in mass production and could be on more skimming boats as soon as next week.