Pacific Cup Day 10 – Brochure Sailing

Day 10 was rather different than the previous days.  The sun came out, the winds eased off to 15-20 and the waves turned into long Pacific Tradewind rollers.  Just like the brochure said it would be.  We put up the A4 and spent the entire day rocketing along in relatively smooth water with relatively little effort.  Spadefoot was sitting on 10’s and 11’s for long periods and higher speeds on the bigger waves.  Just fantastic sailing.

Around nightfall we spotted another boat ahead that we seemed to be rapidly catching, so kept the pedal down into the night.  All was well until the bobstay line for sprit chafed through.  No big deal.  Just kite, relead a new bobstay, and kite back up.  Sounds easy enough and it was.  It just takes 30 minutes or so to do in the dark, on rolling boat, hanging over the bow at times.  Nonetheless, we got the kite back up and took after that little masthead light again.  The winds were now more like 20-25 again, but the seas still reasonable.  We were both fully engaged in keeping the boat moving fast, but starting to struggle as the boat would take off and then with no warning the kite would collapse.  We’d banjo the spin sheet, the kite would fill, and we take off again in the low teens.  This repeated about 10 times over 30 minutes, before we tapped out and took down the kite.  Once down, we looked around and realized we were being run over by a squall.  It got a bit comical at that point.  We had only the main up and kept trying to keep the boat moving towards Hawaii, but we were so tired at that point and a big non-caring now that the spinnaker was down, that neither of us had the focus to keep the boat going in a straight line.  We’d aim towards Hawaii and then over a few minutes the boat would slow round up until we were pointing either southeast or northwest.  This went on for about an hour as we basically wandered around inside the squall.

We talked to other boat and they were in the cruising division and just took down their sails and started motoring.  Seemed like a reasonable idea at the time…