Pacific Cup Day 4 Recap – Slow Going

11:30am PDT

I’m waiting each day for the Daily Position Report that we receive via email before writing up the blog post. That way I have the latest race information to ruminate about. We can’t see the Yellowbrick Tracker, so the once a day 8am position reports are all we have to go by. Unfortunately, today the news wasn’t so great. We had one of the shortest daily runs (70 miles) of the Tuesday starters. The good news is that nobody in our division had a great day so the difference was small. It is not surprising as we went between 0.00 and 1.0 knots for 12 hours yesterday without so much as a ripple on the ocean. Late last evening the breeze finally filled in with a gentle 5 knots or so and we got moving. Right about the time the breeze filled in we saw another boat a few miles to our east. Not close enough to identify, but I suspect it was Thirsty again given the color of the sails and the fact there were nearby the day before. Looking at the position reports I can’t reconcile how the boats to the north of us have sailed faster straight into the new high. Our weather gribs today seem spot on for the current conditions, so a bit of a mystery why staying north is working. Maybe they will park up later as the high slides north. I still can’t see how that strategy will work in the long run. We might have sailed a little too low and slow overnight. We’ve heated it up this morning and the speed is up. I can’t see trying to get south anymore as it looks like the high will move north out of way faster than we can run into it now. The good news is we’ve been averaging at least 5 knots for the past few hours, pointing straight at Hawaii, almost close-hauled. Day 4 and we are closed-hauled in 5-6 knots of breeze. Who would have thunk it? It looks like the Monday starters had a worse day yesterday than us. I can’t imagine going half the distance we went, because honestly we weren’t moving much. It was so calm yesterday I did dishes sitting on the swim step and dipping the dishes into the water. Wasn’t worried about falling overboard, because if I did I would have just climbed back on. The boat wasn’t going anywhere without me.

It’s been pretty quiet onboard. Not much to do in 5 knots or less close-hauled or close-reaching. I think we are both just patiently waiting to get moving for real. Spinnaker tomorrow? That would be nice. We are getting plenty of rest and ready to rumble when it’s time. For the first time in my life I had to call a ship last night and ask them if they saw us and if they would please not run us over. And then I had to do it again about an hour later for another ship. I guess that is the difference between racing and cruising. If we were cruising we would have just turned on the engine or changed course radically to stay out of their way. As it was they both saw our tri-color and were happy to adjust course slightly to go around us. AIS sure was nice to be able call them up directly with their ship name. Both responded almost immediately.

Given our pace, I’m feeling pretty good about the extra 3 gallons of water we added the day before we left. We shouldn’t have any issues. I can’t imagine what some of the boats with 5 or 6 people are doing though. Did they really bring 40-60 extra meals (2 days worth)? The sun still has not shown itself since we left. Cloud cover has been 99-100%, so not much from the solar panel. We’ve been running the engine more than normal. Probably 1.5 hours a day on average. That’s fine though. At that rate we have enough fuel for 25 days or so.

Tuna are jumping around the boat today. That’s our nature sighting for the day. No pole, no line, so we just watch.

Thanks everyone for the blog comments. We can’t reply to them directly, but we do we receive an email with the comments. That’s our only social interaction outside the two us and after 19 years there is only so much you can talk about when not much is going on.

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