Pointing at Hawaii Now

After our brief tour of Southern California the winds have conspired to allow us to point towards Hawaii now. We received position reports this morning and it was mostly good news. First, Mirador, the Antrim 27 in our class did start. They must have started a few hours late? Great to have them out here. Now we aren’t the smallest boat in the Tuesday start. As expected we are the southern most boat. That wasn’t the plan, but it was the right thing to do for us. The good news is that our daily runs, especially yesterday, were quite good compared to the boats in our division. It seems we can go fast, now we just need to keep going fast in the right direction. Currently we are beam reaching with jib top and full main. The seas are much, much smaller than yesterday and wind, as expected, has shifted right, both allowing to aim at Hawaii now. With luck, we’ll get a little more shift throughout today and put up the Code 0 soon.

Since the firt evening we’ve doing 1 hour on / 1 hour off. In these reaching conditions with big waves that is as long as a one of us can steer. It’s been working okay. Lots of little naps, but rarely more than 45 minutes at a time. Here’s hoping when we start running with the spinnaker the driving will be easier and we can extend the watches to 2 hours.

It’s been very, very wet. Constant water across the deck, mostly from waves hitting the side of the boat. Even with our dodger, there is a lot of water down below. I think a lot is coming down the mast, but I’m not sure how. The last few hours have been drier. Not too cold, even at night, but we are both wearing lots of layers and haven’t taken off our foulies, or anything else since the start. It’s too rough down below to do much, so we only spend a few minutes on something (cooking, weather, blogs, pumping bilge, etc., before catching some shut eye to let our stomach settle. Up on deck is fine for our stomachs and driving keeps us warm.

And with that, I need to get my snooze on…