Ocean Clean Up Project, Almost Home!

First, a correction on our last blog, it takes 25 days to go home from Hawaii, not 256. Sorry for the typo!

We will arrive in Bellingham this afternoon and stay at the guest dock until we have a slip assignment.  Our intentions are to live on board and enjoy town life for awhile while we look to see how we will get involved in the solutions. Passing out of Port Angeles this morning, we were reminded that we live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.  Hawai has nothing on us, (except, maybe the weather if you like it always 85). 

But we are also surrounded by sea traffic. Each triangle is a commercial ship. And we are a black boat shape near the bottom of the screen, just out of Port Angeles.

In Port Angeles, we met John and Catherine and their daughters who also just arrived from Hawaii on their trawler.  It's basically a motor yacht with a sail assist to improve mileage. They took one day less than we to make the passage, and used 1000 gallons of diesel whereas we used about 31 gallons for the three week journey. They joined many of the TransPac race boats in the OceanCleanUp Project and had been provided with a trawler net to skim and measure pastic density en route.  They would trawl with the net for one hour at a time and generally collect about three cups of plastic, mostly granular, that floated on the surface. When you think of the very few decades that plastic has been in use, it is amazing there is so much. It is estimated that approximately 1/3 of the ocean's plastic is in the North Pacific Gyre, or the Great Garbage Patch.  

We are excited to be returning to our local Transition group, it's great to have such a supportive network. Check out Transition Whatcom to learn more. We are especially glad to be back in time to go to the Whatcom SkillShare Faire at the end of the month in Fairhaven this year. I want to learn more about keeping chickens and seed saving. Jerry plans to learn a thing or two from one of the the wood workers and more about mason bees. Very land based projects coming up, for which we are very grateful to be coming HOME!

Ships Passing in the Night, Storms and Going up the Mast ... Again

August 6, 2015

44d 10' 35" N, 150d 55' 43" W

Aside from all the plastic, the International Space Station has been the only sign of other people for eleven days.  That changed this evening, seeing four freighters and a jet contrail in the course of three hours.  We have entered the shipping lanes and must be especially watchful. We got into a delightful radio discussion with an East Indian watch commander on the "Cetus Leader" from Japan that had just delivered a cargo of new cars to Long Beach and San Francisco and was headed home empty. I was struck with the imbalance of trade on that.  He was fascinated how such a little boat could be out here in the middle of the ocean and we got to comparing our ships. They are 635 feet long to our 40'.  Their life boat is longer than Heron Reach! Their beam is 105', ours is 12.5. They sit 25 feet deep into the water, our draft is 6.5.  While it will take us about 25 days from Hawaii to Washington, they go from California to Japan in 12.  Our deck is 3 feet off the water, sometimes actually under water when we are heeled over hard, whereas their deck is 115 feet off the water.  Our crew of two is matched by theirs of 21.  They never go outside as their boat is totally enclosed.  We must have someone outside, on deck, 24/7.  I was just fine with our end of the comparison, until he said they have a laundry room with machines.  I have the galley sink.  It took an hour of hard work this morning to make up for not having done any laundry in two days.  I have a new appreciation for the strength of the old time washer woman.  We spent about a half hour chatting with him and enjoying talking to another human being.

August 7, 2015

42d 49' 43" N, 147d 52' 56" W

1200 miles due west of southern Oregon with a heading of 61d directly towards Neah Bay, WA

Two more boats appeared the next night.  We spoke briefly to one as our course was set to intersect.  They politely changed course on our behalf.  It seems strange that a huge, 1206 foot container ship would give way to a little sailboat, but there are "rules of the road" at sea, and a boat under sail has the right over one under power.  They crossed about a mile in front of us, all lit up like a Christmas tree.  Their draft was 40.4', a little deeper than we are long.

The morning broke gray and windy, with rain expected.  With not a speck of blue in 360 degrees, the clouds over the whole of the sky run from almost black to pure white, while the seas are a jumbled mix of black, slate, silver, with much white. After five days of negligible winds and flat seas, winds now push 20 kts. and swells are 6 - 8  feet high, coming from the rear and tossing into corkscrews as they overwhelm the stern.  Simple chores like cooking will be hard and laundry will be postponed.  The winds come from behind and there is no protection even under the dodger.  The temperature is mild, but when the rains come, we will be wet,

August 10, 2015

45d 11

Due west of northern Oregon, 697 miles to Neah Bay (but who's counting?)

The hard storm came on quickly and left us exhausted but too full of adrenalin to sleep.  It built during the night, rained hard and blew 25 kts through the day.  Winds kept shifting, making it hard to maintain a set course and a hard jibe caused us to lost the back stay support and tear the boom preventer.  We pulled the main and flew a partially furled jib until the next day when it acted like nothing had happened.  It was as though a child were having a major meltdown tantrum and you say, "Would you like some ice cream?" and they smile and cheerfully say "OK", like nothing has been going on.  Fickle seas.  As they calmed, I put on the climbing harness and Jerry hoisted me up the mast.  Sorry there are no pics in radio transmissions, it was a sight! I reattached the back stay support. It was my first time having to go up the mast at sea - not fun - but I feel proud to have done it.

Today we passed the 45th parallel, half way between the equator and the North Pole.  Ocean temperature has dropped 20 degrees since we left the South Pacific!  We are now back to both sails and the next weather is upon us.  Winds are 19 kts and building and we are flying towards Neah Bay.  We are soooo looking forward to sleeping through an entire night.  These long sea passages are just what they say, days and days of lazy boredom, mixed in with moments of fear and very hard work.

On the Edge of the North Pacific High, aka The Great Garbage Patch

1579 nautical miles due west of Santa Cruz, CA

Typically, summer brings a large stable high pressure zone to the Eastern North Pacific Ocean.  Currents and winds swirl clockwise, circling up past Japan, eastward across the Aleutians, down the North American coast, and back along the equator.  At longitude 155 W, we are sailing the western edge of this high at a snail's pace of 3.2 kts. (3.7 mph).  We could walk that fast!  It isn't speedy, but as we go 24/7, we will make around 75 miles today.  It will be several days before we are back in the wind, but we hope not to use the motor.

This is the edge of the area known as The Great Garbage Patch.  When we traveled the South Pacific, we saw some bit of trash such as a grocery bag or a plastic bottle, almost daily and plastics were splattered on atoll beaches.  Here in the North Pacific, we see plastic almost at any time, even though we are only on the edge of the patch.  We look out and see fishing buoys, bottles, bags, pieces of rope (we had to pull one out of the water generator blades), packing peanuts, and smaller unidentifiable pieces floating just under the surface.  Very few people have actually traveled through the center of the patch, as there is almost never any wind there.  Motoring through an area that large and polluted would be problematic.  Catching a line in the prop could be a nightmare.  Imagine having to dive under the boat mid-ocean to cut lines!  With six five gallon fuel cans strapped to the side of the boat and a 35 gallon tank, we have a 65 gallon fuel capacity.  Motoring would cost precious fuel and possibly cause prop trouble, so, we sail ever so slowly as we edge by this high.  We are led by our parasailor spinnaker which billows gracefully before us.

Research tells us that China is the greatest contributor to the patch.  Americans produce far more trash per person than any nationality but we also have the best recycling and trash disposal system in the world.  However, we saw scant evidence of recycling in the towns and cities of the west coast as we traveled down it and almost none in Hawaii.  Most places had residential recycling, but opportunities for recycling for businesses and public areas was non-existent.  It reminds me to be more diligent about reduce, reuse, and recycle.

It is getting cooler as we travel north.  Ocean temperature was 86 in the Tuamotus, but is 76 here and getting cooler by the day.  We have started adding layers of clothing to night watch, but day is still hot.  Aside from the plastic, the sea is also scattered with thousands of small man of wars, their bulbous bodies blown along by their tiny sails with stinging tendrils trailing below.  A large school of fish are feeding on the surface.  We can't tell if they are striking the man of wars, the packing peanuts, or something unseen.

We drift quietly on at our snail's pace, saddened by the state of the sea.

 Portugese Man-o-War:

 The Portuguese Man o’ War, also known as the Bluebottle, is a jellyfish-like marine invertebrate of the family Physaliidae. Despite its outward appearance, the Man o’ War is not a jellyfish, but a siphonophore. Siphonophorae differ from jellyfish in that they are not actually single creatures, but colonial organisms made up of many minute individuals called zooids. Each of these zooids is highly specialized, and, although structurally similar to other solitary animals, they are attached to one another and physiologically integrated to the extent that they are incapable of independent survival.