In other news:
The most important item is, with help from Philip on Carina, we've learned a new way to distribute the blog reports directly to our loyal readers. So if you're tired of pulling up the blog daily only to find there's been no new updates in a week, send us an email (trusted friends and family will have our Sailmail address already) and let us know if you want to receive everything that's posted, or only the particularly interesting reports (author's choice). We blog our passage reports daily (these are usually short) and our cruising reports are written a few times a week depending on what we're doing. We can always start you out with everything and if you get tired of too much email from us, you can request the more infrequent reports or be removed entirely. But we won't add you to the distribution list until we hear from you first!
We're seeing a surprising amount of garbage on this passage, although according to Ralph on Our Country Home, Google Earth indicates that we're passing through the area of the floating plastics raft (which by the way, is a bit of an urban legend - it's not actually a raft you can see on the surface, and it's definitely not the size of Texas). Considering we rarely, if ever, saw plastic on the runs between French Polynesia and Hawaii, it's a bit of a shock to see bits and pieces on a fairly regular basis. Especially when you take into account how little time we spend up on deck. This morning while John did email over the HF radio I hand steered for about 20 minutes and saw a water-logged plastic pearl farm type buoy, a bottle, misc. plastic pieces, and we actually crossed a thin current line of small plastics and natural debris running off either side of the boat.
John is letting his beard grow and probably won't shave until we get somewhere warm! He hasn't been getting in much time on his uke. It's been too bouncy to do any serious practicing.
This morning we're motoring under cold and cloudy skies. The sea surface temperature has occasionally dipped below 70 degrees these past few days!
{GMST}27|54|N|142|33|W|Hawaii to Mexico Day 12|Day 12{GEND}