Wednesday 13 Jul 2011

Wednesday 13 Jul 2011
0600 PDT Position: 27 52 N, 140 06 W

09:15 AM
Last night we had some very good conditions with warm steady winds and relatively calm seas. One problem is that the three watches are not on the same page in terms of our strategy. Randy, Graham, and I have been trying to sail as fast as we can on the rhumb line to Diamond Head. Doing so means that we have to sacrifice some speed for better velocity made good (VMG) and constantly adjust the sails. Randy is a great sail trimmer so this works well for us. One of the other watches seems to be heading much higher up to maximize the boat speed and minimize the sail trimming. And the other watch seems to be splitting the difference. Up to now it hasn't been too much of a problem since the long distance to our destination allows for much adjustment. Unfortunately, now that we're getting closer to our destination, deviating from a course requires more adjustment for the other watches and we can only head so far down wind before we'll have to jibe. For example, the rhumb line has been 248-249 degrees for most of the trip but now it's 234 degrees. Unless Hawaii moved South overnight, we sailed much higher than planned. This inconsistent approach has probably hurt our overall progress. It will be interesting to see our course on the YellowBrick transponder map. We'll need to have a team meeting today to get us on the same page. One of the fast boats with a huge red asym spinnaker just past us [turned out to be the Disney boat, Pyewacket].

~11:00 AM
The big race boat with the red spinnaker quickly overtook us and dropped below the horizon jibing as needed to maximize their speed. It's amazing how fast those race sleds can go in relatively light wind. According to the daily position report we moved up to 5th place ahead of Hassle and Traveler based on corrected time. This morning we pulled another GRIB (weather forecast) and got agreement on our strategy based on the forecast. We think we have a good chance of gaining on the other boats based on our interpretation of the GRIB. We'll maximize our VMG for the next few days and probably need to jibe as we approach Hawaii. The seas have increased slightly and we had good wind up to about 12:30 PM. Randy, Graham, and I made 19 nm towards our the finish during our 10:00-1:00 PM watch. At 1:00 PM we only had 1001 nm to go! It's getting considerably warmer and we need to drink more fluids. Yesterday we ran out of beer so now we're just drinking water from the water maker (sometimes cut with Gatoraide powder). 3:41 PM We still don't have real navigation lights (just a couple of flashlights taped to the pulpits) so we need to keep a close lookout at night. We had a crew meeting, gained agreement on our strategy, and seem to be following it well. The "trades" are not as consistent or as strong as I expected them to be. I don't know if this typical or not. An hour ago we hit some very light air... but it looks like the others in our fleet have it as bad, if not worse. We're now at 989 nm from the barn and traveling west at 5.5 kts. It's a long race and a lot can change in the remaining days. 10:00 PM
We encountered lots of light air in the afternoon. Curt, Mary, and Ed were poking along listening to Ed's cowboy music and enjoying the warm weather. We changed the music to Tom's Rolling Stones and Jazz mix during my 7:00 PM watch and the winds almost immediately picked up a couple of knots. We continued sailing the .5 oz spinnaker towards the West at 6.5-7.5 kts and made 16 nm progress towards Diamond Head during our watch (now only 955 miles away). We had an amazing sail into the sunset with an almost full moon over our shoulders. The sky above was clear but there were clouds all around us for an amazing sunset. We had a great dinner of chicken vegetable stir fry with rice.