Passage from Honolulu to Port Angeles on Laysan

Last month, I joined our friends John, Kathleen and Sarah on MY Laysan on their passage from Honolulu, HA to Port Angeles, WA. John and I helped deliver their boat to Hawaii from the Marshall Islands in 2012 and now was time for Laysan to explore the Pacific Northwest.

Laysan's crew leaving Honolulu, with Diamond Head in the background.

The trip was "near ideal". Or depending on your perspective, that might be better phrased as "as good as it gets". The motion was rolly and mostly uncomfortable, but always safe and interesting. The highlight was our participation in a research study called the Mega Expedition 2015. It was organized by Boyen Sladt's Ocean Cleanup organization. You may have seen his TED talk sharing how he plans to passively clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Well, step one is determining the density of plastic to be found in the Pacific Gyre. We were happy to be one of 30 boats that would drag a trawl to sample the amount of plastics in the areas that we traveled.

Kathleen, Sarah and I hoist the MEGA back into the water for another hour of sampling.

Here's the tracker that shows each of the boats that was participating in the research expedition. Can you guess which of these tracks belongs to MY Laysan? We sampled 3 times per day, for an hour each, for the entire period that we were inside the research area - the yellow square on the map below.

Most of the fleet were sailboats returning to the mainland after the Transpac race.

Here's our route, showing our daily noon position.

You can read more on Laysan's blog: www.roundtopdr.wordpress.com.

The 2370 nautical mile journey took us 20 days at an average speed of 5.2 knots. We used about 1032 gallons of diesel.

Our first delivery of Laysan in 2012 was recorded on this blog. You can find the posts by searching for the posts labelled "Laysan".