Pacific Cup Day 12 Recap – Driver’s Ed

The last 24 hours have been interesting. Good, but interesting. Actually, nothing special has happened. No issues. We’ve been focussed more on sailing fast and fast it has been. We started doing some calculations yesterday and realized we had a chance of finishing before nightfall tomorrow. We also did some math and realized we still have a shot at 3rd place in our division. It’s a stretch and everything will have to go perfectly to do it, but we take that as a challenge and are doing what we can. I’ve started handsteering my 3 hour watches. With some practice it turns out I can drive faster than the autopilot, sometimes a lot faster. Yesterday I started driving in the afternoon in 15-20 with the A2 and that was pretty fun. Around midnight we switched down to the A4 in 20-25 and that was pretty similar. More wind, smaller spinnaker, handled about the same. No noticeable drop in speed when the wind is above 20 knots either. The wind is still blowing 20-25 and we just did 29.6 miles in 3 hours. Almost 10 knots average. By far our best sailing of this trip. The waves are much more conducive to surfing than what we had a few days ago. Our only issue is we aren’t quite sailing high enough to reach the finish. Two days ago I had wanted to gybe during the night, but a big squall to our left prevented us from gybing for about 3 hours. I wish I had those 3 hours back because we would be able to crack off a little now and would be 3 hours further down the course as well. The forecast is for stronger breeze that is shifted to the right overnight. Both of those will make us to have sail even lower. We may have to douse the spinnaker and jib reach up higher in the stronger breeze. I don’t think that will be so bad for our speed though.

Yesterday in the lighter winds we decided to do a check under the boat to make sure we weren’t dragging any fishing net, plastic, or kelp. How? Simple. Attach and tape the GoPro to a boat hook. Slide it down the transom into the water. Twist it and move it side to side. Gives a great clear picture of the rudder, prop, and keel. The water is so clear it works really well. No issues down below, except the Max-Prop wasn’t aligned vertically. I had set it vertical before the start, but I suspect the wave action while going zero a few times might have moved it. Something to start checking daily I suppose.

Chris just said a flying fish flew from one side of the boat to the other OVER the cockpit! Definitely a natural wonder those fish.

Our marathon is turning into a sprint now. We can smell the barn.

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