There is a big lumbering squall over there. I hope it comes over us and washes off the boat. Last evening one of my favorite birds, (a Masked Booby) landed on Endless Summer. He has been sitting on the side of the boat all night. Hence the need for the wash.

We are half way between New Caledonia and Australia. We have been at sea for three days and three nights so far. The first day was beautiful sailing with wind on the stern quarter to 20 knots and calm seas. We surfed to 19 knots on one wave with our yellow spinnaker up. By evening the wind was decreasing and on through the night until for the last 48 hours we have been sailing and sometimes motoring in less than 10 knots of wind. The seas have been so calm that it feels like we are in a protected anchorage, not 350 miles off the coast of Australia.

Manjula woke me at 2:30 AM. She had tried to wake me at 12:30, but said she couldn't, so she let me sleep. But when the boat speed dropped to below 3 knots and our course went too far south, she woke me to take down our spinnaker. Now we are motoring under a full moon. I am drinking coffee and looking at the large lumbering clouds floating across the pre dawn sky.

I am reflecting on our imminent arrival in Australia. And the ocean we have crossed to get here. Thinking about this voyage and making this voyage of course have proved to be two different things. As I try to organize my thoughts on the trip, here is a list of some of the impressions I have.

1. It's big out here. We have already sailed the equivalent of Los Angeles to New York, back to Los Angeles, back to New York, and are now on our way back to Los Angeles. The Pacific is big...and empty. Preparing for this trip we read blogs, looked at maps, read magazine articles and books, and talked with people that had traveled through the Pacific. Intellectually I knew that this was a large area, but maps and pictures really can't communicate the scale of the seascape. Google Earth puts the entire globe on my computer screen. This picture of the world is amazing, but different then the reality. At ground level crawling along at 5 or 10 miles per hour it just seems bigger...a lot bigger. We never see anyone out at sea. We saw one ship so far on this passage. One ship on the way to Tonga. One ship on the way to the Cooks, and two ships between Los Angeles and the Marquesas. That's it. In 50 days and 50 nights at sea, 7,000 miles...5 ships is all we have seen. One every 10 days on average.

2. No one lives here. Manjula and I have repeatedly been amazed by how few people there are in the many islands we have visited. There are large areas of hundreds of miles of open sea between island groups and within the groups there are many islands that have no one living on them. Tens and Hundreds of miles of beaches, reefs, lagoons, and coastline that is just wilderness. The people are so few that they seem to be insignificant in the scope of the natural world around them. There are cities, but even they seem quite small compared to US towns and cities. In Suva, Fiji, there are 400,000 people, but you can drive from one end of town to the next in a half an hour. Once outside of the city the forest engulfs the land. The rest of the coastline is wild country sprinkled with small villages with people living a pretty basic lifestyle. In Vanuatu, the villages themselves are almost 100% biodegradable. The houses, furniture, cups, bowls, and plates, and in some places the clothing, are all made from plants and trees. If a village suddenly moved to another spot, within a few years there would be almost no trace that it had ever been there.

3. The natural world is in trouble do to the way we live. Papeete in Tahiti, Noumea in New Caledonia, Suva in Fiji, are all somewhat large cities and boast smoke belching buses, fast food, destruction of the environment, and pollution of all kinds. The tuna fleet parked in Pago Pago harbor is a vision similar to the war machines in the movie Avatar on a mission to destroy the life giving people tree, or whatever it was called. These 150 foot steel killing machines are not fishing for fun. They have helicopters on the deck that spot the big tuna schools and huge nets to drag every last fish out of the water to be cooked, canned, stamped, stocked, bought, and crapped out the other end of a population too busy watching TV to notice that the forest is gone and we are now burning the furniture. City life seems to be a powerful deterrent from awareness of our place in and connection to the natural world.

4. We have to find an alternative to single use plastic containers. Everywhere we have gone, no matter how remote, we have found plastic water bottles, coke bottles, and other plastic garbage. Without exception every atoll we have visited has plastic garbage washed up on the side facing the prevailing winds and tides. Even on our crossing 2,000 miles from anywhere, we saw plastic garbage floating in the ocean.

So now with 350 miles to go on this leg of our trip I feel a sense of accomplishment. I feel happy to be completing a huge undertaking. It feels like the conclusion of a chapter that started long before we left San Francisco. It is the conclusion of something that I have been preparing for for years. All the reading, and learning, and research, and work to get ready and get the boat ready has delivered us here. It feels great, and worth it!