As I write, Megan is cooking a hot dinner. She tells me it is easier to cook when the boat is flat. Over the past few days, cooking was almost impossible, althought she did make us a hot dinner last night as well. Hot food in the tummy feels so good, and confirms that we are living the old saying, “sail, eat sleep.”
Today has been warm enough to shake the wet foulies, take towel-showers and put on clean dry clothes. The sun came out for awhile, and dried out the boat. I cooked bacon and eggs for my crew. Clouds filled in during the afternoon, but it stayed warm and windy, in the 18 to 24 knot range. We have been sailing with the A7, the small, heavy weather blue asymmetrical sail, and hitting speeds over ground on steady 9 knots, and when the ocean swells round underneath the boat and pushes her on the hip, she surges up to 10 to 12 knots. It gets quite exciting when there is a sudden gust of wind, and a big wave surges and lifts the aft up and the rudder looses it’s bite, and we with a lot of sudden pressure on the helm, she will round-up. Avion is resilient and always recovers, with lots of pumping of the tiller by the driver, and perhaps a release of the spinnaker sheet. It is exciting sailing, with every moment being unique.
We are dialing in the boat systems and routines. She was kind of wet, and we had to dry out clothes and various wet spots, but now she is dry again and feels good. I rand the batteries down too low yesterday, and at some point, the instruments start displaying wierdly inaccurate numbers. I had seem this once before, so I knew the cause and the solution. Fired up the engines and ran the alternator for 2 hours to resolve it.
We have decided to switch back to the #4 jib around 8pm, and then next question is do we gybe tonight or tomorrow morning. Such important decision deserve lots of discussion. We all like to go fast, but it would also feel good to get back on a course heading in the general direction of Hawaii. This is where the finish line awaits us. But I must say, in some ways, this kind of amazing ocean sailing is the real finish line. Stay tuned.
We are less the 50 miles from the 130W line, which is a major reference point for our navigation decisions. The weather is rough, we are pushing the boat and getting 7 to 8 knots, with 20 to 24 knot winds. Yesterday the sea surface smoothed out and we had nice big rollers coming through that gave us a nice push forward. In the first 48 hours, we have come about 333 miles so far, or about 160 miles per day. We are sending in our 8:00 am position report, but we are not yet making the 9:30 roll-call over the SSB radio, as it is still too rough and wet to leave a hatch open for the SSB antenna.
I am getting GRIB files over Iridium, and analyzing them twice a day. David and I have consensus on our course heading, which has been to stay around 240; but this afternoon around 5, we will change that and head more south.
Crew are all working smoothly together and getting enough sleep, for now. We are each rather wet, but the foul weather gear with Gortext is magically able to keep the water on he surface, so we are mostly dry on the skin. A crew of three needs to talk a lot, as we make adjustments to the watch schedule on the fly, and we are doing that as needed. The boat has one wet spot around the hatch, which I was new to me, but now I understand the pattern; it is only wet when a big wave splashes up and over the boat.
Well, enough for now. Stay tuned. We are only just beginning. Tom
We will set sail soon. One of my last tests is the ability to post to the blog with the boat’s email. So. this is just a quick test, that will show-up on the blog as a posting. This method is how I will update the blog during the race. Stay tuned.
We did an excellent blog and made a video of the Pacific Cup race in 2014. If you want to get a good understand of what it is like to sail with a crew of 6, in moderate conditions, then take a look. It was shot on a GoPro and edited by John DIllow, who has sailed in 8 Pac Cup races, and is sailing again this year on another boat.
To see where Avion is during the race, the Pacific Cup race committee has provided a GPS tracker called YBTracking. The locations and tacks are delayed 6 hours, so the sailors can’t look and see where the competition is, but is good enough for people on land to watch the race.
We are finally ready to sail. What an incredible adventure just to get here. There was some unique event specific to the boat or crew. The most recent critical path event was installing a gyro-pilot.
We start on Tuesday at 11:00. The predicted weather is heavy winds of 20-25 knots for the first three days at least. The Pacific High is finally moving into position so the gradients will compress and generate 15 knot trade winds for us to ride to Hawaii.
We are sailing as a crew of three, Megan Laney and David Bennett and myself. We have worked hard over the past 10 weeks to prepare. We sailed in 4 races, and got some results. Sailing with a crew of four, including Kent, Jon, Megan and myself, we came in 3rd in the Spinnaker Cup, about 100 miles from SF to Monterey. We did 3 weekend practices sailing to Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. We sailed in combinations of 2, three and four so we could learn how the tasks are organized by the number of available crew. I have finally been going to the bow to learn to do the wet job of working the head sails, the jibs and spinnakers and all the lines needed to fly them, the halyards, sheets, guys, fore-guys and topping lift. the interesting manuvers are turns, the upwind tack and the downwind gybe. The gybe is easy in light winds, and can challenging in heavy winds. We have completed a number of drills, for Man Over Board, installed the Scanmar SOS emergency rudder, and had a new emergency tiller made by Jimmy.
Lots of people emerged along the way, right when we needed them. Kent repaired the fuel tank, and came over to launch sails at the dock. Another was our coach and teammate, David Bennett. I met him in the parking lot, talking to a common friend. We immediately started sailing and practicing spinnakers, symmetrical and asymmetrical. Another was Peter King, a marine electrician with exceptional skills who installed the gyro-pilot, and a new drive arm, installed last Saturday afternoon. He helped me configure a LAN on a Pcio Station network to run Remote Desktop on my new Surface Pro4 as a display machine in the cockpit, running the routing program that lives in the boat computer in the nav station. Kame, Sally and Don at Pineapple repaired a bunch of sails; we either punched new small holes and added some rips, or we found existing ones that need to be repaired on a timely basis, for the next race. Jon Fowkes came over to test the SSB, but the transceiver had failed, so I bought a new unit and several people helped install it over the past several nights. And Neil and Shawn at Grand Marina were always encouraging with stories of their two double-handed Pac Cups in the early 2000s, as they did major projects like install new rudder bearings, new shaft and convert the old ice box to a refrigerated unit
Over the past few days, we bought about $800 on food, broke down the packaging, grouped it with zip-lock bags, and stored it in the pantry, and on the two shelves over the aft berth. We have a big Igloo cooler full of proteins and breads frozen by dry ice, an refrigerator for cold waters, and an external cooler to keep vegetables and fruits cool. We have 20 apples and 10 onions hanging in a net bag on the lower part of the mast in the cabin. So, we have plenty of food.
The race should take between 12 and 14 days. It is a little over 2,100 miles, and if we can maintain an average boat speed of 7 knots, we would need 300 hours, or 12.5 days to finish. We are in Division B, and start on Tuesday with about 10 boats. Avion is not the fastest boat, and we will be sailing short-handed with a crew of three, against fully crewed boats of 5 and 6. We will sail our own race, and have fun. It is a first time for Megan to sail in an ocean race, and David has done a bunch of Transpacs to HA out of LA, but this will be his first PacCup. This will be my third race. We will compete.
I will have the ability to post to this blog from the ocean by sending an email over the Iridium satellite network, but since we are short-handed, I might not do it every day. Still, if you subscribe to this blog, when I do post and update, you can get an email with the posting pushed to you. Do not expect pictures, as they will not upload over limited satellite bandwidth, but email, test and compressed weather data can flow.
Okay, enough for now. We need to get some sleep and get up at 6:00 am, shower and take the BMW over to long-term parking at German Auto. In the morning, we will to the fuel dock to top-off the tank, and then head out to the start line in front of the St. Francis. I am getting excited. Once we shove off, nothing more can be done to prepare. It will be the real deal, finally. Nothing more can be done. At the moment we shove off the dock, we live with what we’ve got on board. Exciting. Love the adventure. Stay tuned. Tom
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