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!