N. Pacific Garbage Patch - Update 16
print this page

Date/Time: 15th JULY 2011/ 1000hrs(local time)
Position: North 31degrees 27. 299 West 159degrees 57.618

Ni Sa Bula Viti,
The last two days have been filled with good spirits all are happy and well and are looking forward to the next part of this long sail up to San Fransico. We have been blessed with good winds up to 20knots sometimes blowing in an Easterly / South easterly direction, clear skies and moderate seas and hope it will stay this way for the next couple of days before we reach latitude 40 or 42 where the weather and the cold will not be so kind.

However, everyone seems to be taking it all in their stride. The rather sad part of this leg of the voyage hasn’t been the friends that we’ve left behind in Hawaii but the alarming amount of rubbish that has been spotted on a daily basis since we left Kauai. Right now we are approx 1807nm west of the US west coast, 1372nm south of Alaska, 2948nm East of Japan and 565nm North of Hawaii.

I believe we are on the outskirts of the Northern Pacific Gyre (Northern Pacific Garbage Patch), where most of this rubbish is floating. I fear that it will only get worse and we will see even more rubbish as we etch our way closer to North America. The sightings have been more frequent with crew members spotting rubbish every 30 – 40 minutes throughout the day which is way more frequent than when we sailed from Fiji to Hawaii. We’ve seen bottles, coils of rope, fishing buoys and all this kind of stuff. We are moving at 7 – 8 kts under sail and we try to pick up what we can with the gaff hook but it is impossible for us to load all of it on our small vaka. We don’t have space and we are already heavy. Not only that, if we stopped for every bit of rubbish we would never make it to San Francisco because it would take years to clean up our beautiful ocean, which has been polluted by us. We are logging every piece of rubbish we are passing or picking up and it looks like the pages in our vaka environment monitoring log book is not enough. The only way we can control this is through education and we hope that all of you reading this will pass on the message just as we are giving you the facts live from out here in the North Pacific Ocean, our home.

The aphorism of “seeing is believing” crosses everyones’ mind and has kind of regenerated our feelings towards what we are trying to achieve on this voyage, that its not only about sailing on a canoe the way our ancestors did but the sustainability of the ocean we are using to sail.

We trust that all is well back home and thank you all for your wonderful support and prayers through this voyage. There have been changes in the crew list but the mission still remains the same. A big Mahalo Nui goes out to the Polynesian Voyaging Society especially to Nainoa Thompson and his group of hard working colleagues.

For now MOCE MADA - Agnes Sokosoko, Kelekele Lausi, Mausio Mario, Angelo Smith and Setareki Ledua, Johnathan Smith (Skipper)