Here are answers to a few questions from Margo and Patsy…

Q: Do you guys experience boat-lag (like jet-lag)?

A: We don’t have a problem with jet lag for a couple of reasons.  First, we never cross more than one time zone in a day.  In general, timezones are 15 degrees of longitude or approximately 900 miles wide, which is well below our best distance in a day (over 200 nm in one day during our Galapagos-Marquesas crossing).  That means that the time doesn’t change by more than one hour at once for us.  Second, and probably equally important, we don’t have a fixed schedule that starts with an alarm clock going off at a particular time.  We tend to wake up based on the rising sun, and even if we changed our clocks to mark passing into a new timezone, the change in the time of sunrise is pretty small from day-to-day so we adjust slowly.

Q: Dallas wrote about the “signs of mankind” that you all had seen on the water and I wondered about all the plastic we hear so much about. Have you seen any plastic nastiness……water bottles or soda bottle rings etc. floating around?

A: Yes and no.  We saw a lot of floating plastic trash in Panama and haven’t seen much here in the Pacific.  I think there are two reasons for this.  One, there are fewer people out here polluting than there are in North and South America.  Second, the floating plastic trash is carried by ocean currents.  Since we neared the Galapagos, we’ve been in an area where the current is generally flowing east-to-west over a wide area and not allowing trash to collect.  If you Google ocean currents of the world, you’ll see that the large oceans basically have circular current patterns in each hemisphere, with local variations.  Because of the currents, some places collect a lot of floating trash and others collect very little.  Here in French Polynesia, we’re in a part of the ocean that collects
 very little trash, but there are places where the amount of trash is considerable.  You can also see from the ocean current pictures that ocean trash is not a local problem.  It can come from anywhere and end up almost anywhere.  As a side note, ocean currents are also pretty interesting for their extremely important effects on weather and the earth’s overall thermal equilibrium (distributing the energy that comes from the sun).
Q: What does the S/V stand for at the beginning of the name of a boat/ship?

A:  My understanding is the S/V stands for Sailing Vessel.  M/V is for Motor Vessel.