  We created sodium Bose-Einstein condensates in an optically plugged
quadrupole magnetic trap (OPT). A focused, 532nm laser beam repelled atoms from
the coil center where Majorana loss is significant. We produced condensates of
up to $3 \times 10^7$ atoms, a factor of 60 improvement over previous work [1],
a number comparable to the best all-magnetic traps, and transferred up to $9
\times 10^6$ atoms into a purely optical trap. Due to the tight axial
confinement and azimuthal symmetry of the quadrupole coils, the OPT shows
promise for creating Bose-Einstein condensates in a ring geometry.
