Well, the high is upon us now, sure as anything. The wind dropped yesterday evening, and we motored all night. Blessedly, we picked up a nice fair wind this morning, and have sailed for about 5 hours. But it just fizzled and as I write this, Sandra and David are reeling in the headsails in preparation for motoring again. This is all on the plan - we have a lot of diesel, and this is why! Not as pleasant as sailing, but you get used to the drone of it after a while. And it's way better than flopping around without getting anywhere.

We're not in the heart of the trash zone, but it sure is picking up a lot. We see something every few minutes now, compared with maybe a piece every day or two down in the trades. Even less in the farther southern parts of our trip. The trash is a mixed heap. About half of it is fishing gear: floats, scraps of net, and bits of polypropylene line (no sailor would use this horrid stuff!). The rest consists of mixed plastic and foam bits. Bottles, bags and foam coffee cups. It's interesting how things have changed since my last trip across in 1978. I remember then we were pretty focused on finding Japanese glass net floats as we slowly drifted through the high. It gave us something to do. We didn't find any, and pretty much the only trash we saw was the occasional Styrofoam coffee cup. While those remain, there's clearly a lot more out here now. The net floats now are all plastic, and there are lots of them. The lesson for you at home: eschew plastic! Especially the plastic shopping bags. We have seen many of those, and live in fear of one clogging our engine cooling intake. OK, not really deathly fear, pretty slight actually. It would be easy to fix. They come out of parking lots, down storm drains to rivers, and now we know where the rivers go - to the Central Pacific Gyre.