30,000 Miles

May 17, 2019

Day 224

Noon Position: 29 50N  59 43W

Course(t)/Speed(kts): ExN 5.5

Wind(t/tws): N 10

Sea(t/ft): N 2

Sky: Altostratus

10ths Cloud Cover: 7

Bar(mb): 1019+

Cabin Temp(f): 82

Water Temp(f): 74

Relative Humidity(%): 67

Sail: Working jib and main, close hauled, starboard

Noon-to-Noon Miles Made Good (nm): 51

Miles since departure: 30,025

Avg. Miles/Day: 132

Leg North Miles: 7,097

Leg North Days: 58

Avg. Miles/Day: 122

I had wanted to achieve the 30,000 mile mark in style, Mo bombing along directly at her target in the vigorous lows of the North Atlantic. Instead, for this milestone we were under auxiliary power, making four knots to the NW, pounding into a light chop beneath an oppressively windless deck of cloud.

All evening the zephyrs teased us, for a time achieving just enough velocity to quiet the sails and raise the hopes of the crew before vanishing, only to return and vanish again. Around midnight there was no return. In the small swell, the main groaned, asking to be put out of its misery, which I obliged, and we drifted until dawn.

In the morning, the water was gently rolling glass, so we motored north and west until nearly noon. About then we passed under a dark wall of cloud that snaked from horizon to horizon, looking for all the world like a long inverted river.

On the other side, a brisk wind from the north, on which we’ve been close hauled to the west, working jib and a reef in the main.

—

Tim Henry, Editor at Latitude 38, recently asked if we’ve encountered much ocean plastic in the Atlantic.

The answer, surprisingly, is no. And this should be the place, too. As I type, Mo is sailing over an area on which the paper chart has printed “Sargasso Sea.” This is the accumulation zone; concentrations of everything floating should be higher here. Yet even the weed is less dense than I would have guessed.

It is problematic, mind you. I have essentially become a slave to the hydrogenerator, raising it and cleaning it of weed as much as four or five times an hour. But the concentrations are not that thick. In Arctic surface ice measurement terms, we’re seeing 1/10th to 2/10ths weed.

Typically it is free-floating, Seussian pompoms. Often it is organized into long weed streams running parallel to the wind and perpendicular to the wave train. Rarely it clumps together in large, heaving carpets, and when it does, the aggregation is usually caused by the coming together of opposing currents. The weed gets stuck at the boarder.

Sometimes in these weed clumps, a plastic bottle or other fragment can be seen. Yesterday, I spied a fish float, a plastic engine oil bottle, a toothbrush, and several other unidentifiable pieces, the most sightings in one day so far. In the calms, the occasional tiny fragment can be seen.

But that’s it.

It could be we aren’t quite north enough yet, or that the gyre migrates with the season. Beyond that I have no explanation for fewer plastics sightings here then in my home ocean on the other side of the American continent.