avionbianca   Blog for s/v Avion

Hello:

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.

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

Avion is a Bianca 414, built by the Bianca boatyard in Denmark in 1980.  Thus, the name of this blog is “avionbianca.”  The motivation for starting this blog is the Pacific Cup 2014, and we start on Tuesday, July 8, 2104 at 11:30 AM, in front of the St. Francis Yacht Club.

The crew consists of 6 in total. In no particular sequence, we are as follows: David Lyon, Nico Columb, Jon/Juan Fowkes, Kent Bliven, Jon Dillow, navigator, and Tom Abbott, skipper. Jon/Juan has been keeping a journal during the past 18 months as we have been sailing as a team, and will be one of the primary contributors to this blog.  Between the two of us, we will post something everyday during the race to give family and friends some idea of what it is like to sail from San Francisco to Hawaii, over 2000 miles in a race.

You are welcome to check the blog anytime, as we will be starting this week to build it out, with posting, pages for pictures, and links to the Pacific CUp 2014 race.  If you would like to get an email with the latest post to the blog, we will be setting up a subscription process for family and friends to register with this blog service.  So, stay tuned.