Blog from Family Affair

by Paul Michael, July 15th, 2012

Both watch shifts did an incredible job last night of helming with 100% concentration.  We feel we couldn't have sailed any faster with our current sails.  We went through a series of small weather disturbances with increased winds and drizzle.  With our sail set already pushing the boat to its fullest, gusts very much wanted to round us up.  Our winds are from the northeast and are slowly clocking around to the east.  With our asymmetric spinnaker, our boat sails the strongest at around 120 degrees off the wind.  Holding this wind angle is slowly increasing our compass heading and you can see this in our track.  Late in the afternoon, our heading became greater than 270 degrees and we needed to jibe to make better progress towards Maui.   We jibed at dusk and I was at the helm.  After being on a starboard tack for nearly a week, helming on a different tack was like trying to ride a bicycle backwards.  The muscle memory was just too well established.  But I soon got the hang of it and we were once again blazing away towards the south southwest.

Since we left, every 8 hours I've been taking weather observations.  When we left, the water temperature was 48 degrees.  It's now increased to 70 degrees!   Sailors in the Pacific Northwest who get tired of the gray and rain say they want to sail south until the butter melts.  Well, ours just did at latitude 32 deg, 46 min N.

At last night's roll call, a lot of debris in the water was reported by the sailboats ahead of us.  One reported a cement dock, 30x60 feet and just 12" out of the water at 34 31N x 136 38W.  We had something similar to this wash ashore in Washington State last month.  It was Japanese tsunami debris.  Another boat last night reported two debris fields of plastic junk including a fishing net.  Twice they had to stop sailing and clear debris off their rudder. We headed just north of this region in the night and kept a close look-out ahead with our handheld forward looking infrared (FLIR) night vision.

One of our secondary missions out here has been to gather debris data for Mary Crowley of Project Kaisei and the Ocean Voyages Institute. Both of these projects have a goal of cleaning up the plastics mess in our oceans and educating the public about plastics and ocean sciences.  We record lat/long, date/time, and sea state of the man-made debris that we encounter. Mary sails out to the northern pacific gyre garbage patch aboard the s/v Kaisei, a 151-foot steel hulled tall ship.  They collect up junk and take samples of the microplastics in the water and its impact on marine life. Mary relies in part on data gathered from volunteer sailboats out there crossing the Pacific to determine where they focus their cleanup and research efforts aboard the Kaisei. 

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