Pacific Cup Day 5 Recap – Slow Going

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 given the wind and our boat speed. Yesterday a carpet of breeze finally filled in over the ocean, and we were able to enjoy our shifts more. For the past few days, we’ve each gone up and chased breeze using the autopilot to steer straight towards our waypoint when their was enough breeze to hold steerage, and when there wasn’t, handsteering to keep the sails filled. I’m sure the fully-crewed boats are full of pity for our grumblings at having to handsteer, but hat’s off to them for doing it (and cycling through the more than 2 drivers that they have :))…but for us, it’s a huge help not to be steering 24/7 (and we did this last July for 4 days when we had an autopilot issue). Last night, we had the gennaker up with the #4 as a staysail – it’s a new configuration for us to experiment with, and if we’d had a bit more breeze, it probably would have helped boatspeed more. As it was, the “staysail” did not hurt, and when the breeze was a bit higher, it helped keep the bow down so that the autopilot had an easy time steering.

The highlight last night was the sunset and moonrise. The clouds cleared in the afternoon, so we saw the sun – it was fantastic. Because of the clear sky with cumulus clouds, the sunset to the west was spectacular…only to be followed by an amazing moonrise to the east. The sun went down, and like a counterweight, the moon rose out of the water nearly immediately…completely round, bright orange, and very unnatural-looking emerging from the waves. We were awestruck and took pictures which won’t give the spectacle we saw any credit.

My watch from 6am to 9am has been lovely. We’ve had really good breeze – up to 20 kts, with the #2 up reaching straight towards Hawaii. The breeze is starting to lift more, so we’re talking about possibly getting a spinnaker up today. We’ve seen another boat just to the south since early this morning. They may have an A3 spinnaker up, which allows them to go fast, but not point as high as us. They’ve definitely had boatspeed on us, but since our sail inventory and budget did not allow for an A3, we’re telling ourselves that we’re happy to make nearly perfect VMG towards Hawaii.

The food situation onboard has been pretty simple, especially when I think of what the guys on Thirsty have probably been eating (duck confit – really???). Breakfast is hot oatmeal, then for lunch, we’re working through the last few bagels of 12 that I pre-spread with cream cheese on Tuesday before we started, and dinner has been a freeze-dried entree. We’re trying to be really good about eating the fresh fruit and other food we have, as we don’t want to waste anything (and we don’t want to have anything left for Hawaiian officials to confiscate – they’re trying to keep diseases from coming into the islands). We are definitely not starving, especially as I’d put together day bags of snacks for each of us for each day – so there is plenty to eat. In fact, I am barely eating anything out of my day bag…except for goldfish crackers which I have discovered makes my freeze-dried dinner taste much more palatable. We’re almost through with Wayne and Linda’s cookies, though, so we’ll have to figure out some other sweet fix from the stores after we’re done with those.

I remembered yesterday that I picked up some data sheets to log debris for the US EPA, so I’ve been on the lookout for trash floating in the Pacific. Some of the debris is certainly from the Japanese tsunami/earthquake in 2011 – I’ve seen several large black balls that I can’t decide if they are more Japanese fishing balls that don’t look green (I don’t think so) or something else. This morning, Justin spotted a loose buoy structure that we need to alert folks to as a navigation hazard.

It’s been a little quiet on the critter front – hopefully we’ll start seeing flying fish and other indicators of warmer waters very soon. A bucket list item for me would be to see a giant sunfish – probably a stretch, but you never know.

Again, thanks for the comments! One thing to note – we should not receive any outside assistance, per race rules, so any information on positions, weather, etc. would not be allowable by the race committee. The last Pac Cup saw the first overall finisher relegated to second place for looking online at information that violated this rule.

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