Category: Underway

The last 24 hours have been an experience I hope to never repeat. Just unbelievably challenging and yet we are still trucking. This mornings daily position report that we normally receive at 11am hasn’t come in yet as of 12:45pm. Not sure why, but it is sure missed we tried really, really hard overnight and

Ha, whoever hoped for 20-30 knots for us please stop! We have plenty of breeze now, thank you very much. Haven’t seen less than 20 knots for about 27 hours. The thing is Shearwater doesn’t really go any faster above 20 knots, but the loads get higher, the waves get bigger and it just gets

We’ve been out here a week already, and it’s hard to believe. It looks like the past 24 hours saw us put another 192 miles behind us – by my calculations, sometime tomorrow we’ll rollover 1000 miles into the race and a good mileage halfway point for us to celebrate. Life onboard is fine, and

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

Today has been so much fun I had to write about it. Early this morning we were bombing along with the #2 sheeted to rail for the first time, actually doing that windy reach thing the “Pacific Cup brochure” talks about, then we switched to the gennaker and staysail and as the breeze built to

10:00am PDT Justin has punted the daily update to me today. We’ve had a great 24 hours, although we just did a quick check on our 24-hour mileage, and it seems low to us. We’re checking to see what might be off, because I think we both expected to be in the 160-180 mile range

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,

Yesterday was so much better. We clicked off 180 miles in 24 hours and 103 in the first 12 hours. That’s plenty good. The day was completely uneventful too. We started out blasting south with the gennaker in 15-20 knots. Max speed 11.70 knots. Then in the early afternoon we got headed and switched the

Day 2 Wind, finally! Wow, yesterday was memorable. I have never seen the ocean so still for so long. We barely moved for 24 hours between Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening. When the wind finally did come up we could still see 10 other boats. California Condor (for most of the evening, though they started

Aloha! Well, an “interesting” first day for sure. Not typical, but not surprising, given the forecast. The start wasn’t quite what we hoped for, but I don’t think it really mattered. By the time we set off the breeze in the Bay was blowing 25-30. We knew it would be lighter out in the ocean