avionbianca   Blog for s/v Avion

Day 2

The Doldrums

Day 2 8:00 A.M. (2020 Miles to Hawaii)

Every morning at 8:00 A.M. we are required to provide our position to the race committee. They have accurate transponder information off of Yellow Brick Road which isn’t delayed the 6 hours everyone else sees, so the check in is to verify that position. The boats can provide the information one of four ways; call in on a Sat Phone, Email via Sat Phone, SSB Email or provided it at the Roll Call over SSB at 9:30 A.M. I was on watch but Tom got up and sent it via email on his Sat Phone then I verified it during the Roll Call on the new SSB that works so well! So now we are officially legal by following the rules and regulations set forth by the Pacific Cup Race Committee. The cool thing about the roll call is that the provide all of the positions so having an SSB is helpful so we can determine exactly where the competition is.

Last night was brutal; no #@$% wind. The only wind we seemed to generate was the flogging of the sails as the mast swung back and forth every time a wave passed. The only good news out of all of that was that everyone else was in the same position. This morning at sunrise we had 4 boats all in a row spread out over less than a mile. Our fellow Encinal Yacht Club member boat Red Cloud and Avion must have passed each other a half a dozen times during the night. You have to stay at least 3 boat lengths clear of a boat while overtaking at night and there were times it was difficult to do that because of the lack of steerage due to no boat speed as the result of no wind. Though this is very frustrating it really fine tunes your ability to sail, the adjustments of the sails and at the helm has to be smooth and slight or you easily stall the boat.
We are settling into our watch schedule. The first day is tough because everyone is up for the start and stays up for a while because all the boats are close and the competition is exciting. We had to force the rotation to start around 1 P.M. yesterday The way it works is that we always have 3 crew members awake at all times. Depending on the conditions usually 2 can handle the boat, one at the helm and one controlling the sails. That gives an extra hand to help out with trimming sails, cooking, cleaning, navigating or working the radio. We have 3 comfortable berths on Avion and 2 not so comfortable pipe berths. With all of the practice sailing and the longer offshore races we figured the best option is to use the 2 pipe berths for storage and then we would have 2 crew share one bed call Hot Bunking. Just before it is time for you to be off watch after 4 hours you wake your Hot Bunk mate and once he is out and dressed the nice warm bunk is yours to sleep in; thus the reason it is called Hot Bunking. I share the aft bunk with Tom, Nico is sharing the port bunk with Kent and David and John have the starboard bunk. We started out with 2 teams changing watches at the same time and we felt that got a little crowded so we have adjusted 2 teams an hour and now we only have one watch set coming up at a time.

So after the Roll Call at 9:30 I woke Tom up at 10:00 A.M and he will be on watch until 2:00 P.M. (giving me time now to write this post). Tom is working on downloading grib files that show weather patterns now and in predictions. He put those into a software package that takes the statistics for Avion and plots a suggested course. This should only be used as a guide because we see exact conditions that the forecast only predicted so we will adjust accordingly. He just mentioned that the wind should increase later this afternoon at @ 5:00 P.M. This is good news because right now we are only seeing @ 3.5 knots of wind and less than 2 knots of boat speed. At this rate it will take us a month to arrive in Hawaii. The pressure differences out here right now are not favorable for a fast ride to Hawaii. Hopefully this will change.

Currently on watch are John and Nico. Nico came on at 6 am and is taking an extra hour to get our watch rotation in sync, so Kent will relieve him at 11 A.M. John came on at 9 A.M. and will be relieved by Dave at 1 P.M. and then I will relieve Tom at 2 P.M. and the cycle starts all over.
Last night we had a fabulous casserole prepared by Kent and his wife Joann. They cooked up about 8 dinners for us, froze them and then placed them on dry ice. We have no refrigeration but do have a propane oven. This morning Nico fixed us all hot oatmeal. We plan to have 2 hot meals per day, once the casseroles run out we will be fixing freeze dried meals that Nico has assembled. We will be eating well. As a matter of fact after the Coastal Cup Race from San Francisco to LA last summer we had the reputation of the boat that ate best, unfortunately not for sailing the fastest, those guys seem to only eat freeze dried because casseroles and dry ice weighs too much!
All for now, I need to get some shut-eye; a tired crew is an ineffective crew! Hopefully by the time my watch starts we will have a little more wind.

Day 2 6:00 P.M. (2002 Miles from Hawaii)

Still no wind, currently we have around 2.5 knots of wind and less than 1 knot of boat speed, oh we there are at least 4 other boats still in site that are in the same situation. For the last 10 hours we have only made 18 knots, which is averaging about the same as a really slow walk. We need to get west of longitude 124, and currently we are at 123.56, we are only 4 miles away at which time we should be getting into wind. I’ve got my fingers crossed (makes it hard to type) that we will be in the wind by the start of my next watch at 10 P.M. We did have some excitement today, we saw a few whales, one within 10 meters of the boat, awesome but also scary. John said that he was on a boat racing to Hawaii that actually got hit by a whale. I subscribe to the big mammal rule; if the mammal is larger than your boat stay clear!

There is a radio happy hour every day at 5 they call the Children’s Hour. Today we talked about food and broken heads (not human but toilets) strange combination but in a way they are related. I told the group that we some beef stew from a fancy restaurant in Palo Alto defrosting in the cockpit, so we are maintaining our reputation of eating well and about mid-stream in the competition, after the first day we are in 4th place in our fleet. We reported the exact same position as Red Cloud but because of the handicap they are in 1st and we are in 4th. Oh well, hopefully when the wind picks up we can take advantage of our superior speed.