Pacific Cup Day 6 Recap – Running With Scissors

The last 24 hours went from fun, to exciting, to white knuckle. The night went really well, without any issues. The autopilot did a fine job of driving and we alternated trimming the kite. The seas remained fairly low, but building. This morning, though, we started getting more breeze in 20-25 knot range and the seas got a little crazy. They were short and steep. So short that we were stabbing our sprit into the back of waves and the boat was rolling all over the place making the apparent wind fluctuate wildly and giving us hell trying to keep the A4 trimmed. Every few minutes it would collapse and we would grab 15 feet of sheet to get it fill without a snap fill that sounds like it will break the boat in half. I started driving and I could do better than autopilot because I could see the waves, but it was just crazy. My heading was all over the place as I tried to keep the kite under control and we were surfing well sometimes, sideways other times. Top speed was 12.6 knots. It times like this when Chris and I get into our serious, get the job done mode and our voices become very level, without emotion, and exacting. Since I was driving Chris derives some of her confidence from my comments, so I’m confidently detailing what I’m doing and how easy the boat is to steer, meanwhile my legs are shaking uncontrollably and I’m running on pure adrenalin. It occurred to us both, that if the rest of the race is like this, we are completely screwed. We’d have to take down the kite at night to manage and rest. And just like that the waves settled down again, the breeze backed off a bit, I turned the autopilot back on and we breathed a huge sigh of relief. It wouldn’t be like that the rest of way, at least it was like that now. Now we need to catch up on our sleep.

It was quite a relief to see our effort overnight paid off in the mileage. 196 miles in 24 hours. The second best run of the Tuesday starters after the anomaly that is California Condor. Super happy with that, but a bit disappointed that almost everyone had the pedal to the metal and are gains were tiny. From the daily position report it looks like Red Cloud came down from the north in front of us, then we sailed over the top of them and Free Bowl of Soup came up from below and crossed our stern sailing just slightly higher. We could see both of their tri-color lights last night. Soup’s tri-color is pretty distinctive because it is really, really bright.

We’ve cracked off a little below the rhumbline to the finish today for our sanity. Hopefully, that doesn’t bite us too much in the mileage made good. Crazy that we are on day 7 now and struggling to lay the finish.

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