It's the kind of day where sailors work on their knots, play Go, or idly dream as the glassy waters slide by. We're motoring again, and are likely to do this for a couple more days. Oh, well, we knew this could happen.

The trash is thinning out where we are, but it's still out there behind us, I am pretty sure. It prompted one of those daydreams that might actually be practical. Someone needs to propose this to the Gates Foundation, if they haven't already. Here's the idea in a nutshell: a solar powered garbage-sweeping barge to circle the gyre, picking up the trash as it goes. It would be kind of expensive - a thousand horsepower of solar cells might cost upward of a couple million dollars. But low maintenance - you could probably run it with a crew of 2 and a couple of volunteers. One engineer/mate and a licensed skipper. It would be useful if these were also writers, since it wouldn't be exactly exciting duty. But you could have a tennis court and a hot tub (solar, of course) and a big library. So it would sweep back and forth across the trash zone at some stately pace, compacting plastic as it went like a mighty trash truck. It would probably only run during the day to avoid having a huge battery bank. Every time it got close to a port, a tug would tow it in to be emptied of trash and for a crew rotation. The only downside I see to the plan is the expected crash in glass-net-float prices, but that is a small slice of the global economy. I dunno, maybe the sun has baked our brains, but this wacky idea seems viable.

A few other things have happened. We had a cameo appearance of a small school of dolphins, and we still have flying fish and the occasional tropicbird. We're also seeing quite a few black-footed albatrosses, the common one of the north Pacific. That puts us in an curious mix of southern and northern species.