Pacific Cup Day 11 – Big Blue Ocean

The last 24 hours have been so nice. Bright blue sky, sunshine, white puffy clouds, beautiful blue water, organized swells, and mostly 15-20 knots. We’ve been able to fly the A2 spinnaker and for the most part we’ve been moving well, except the early morning yesterday when we were parked behind a squall, then early this morning we thought a squall was approaching so we doused the spinnaker and waited. The breeze only went up to 20 knots, so we put the spinnaker up again, but now the wind had shifted almost 90 degrees and we spent the rest of the early morning first heading west instead of south on port tack, then finally taking the spinnaker down and jib reaching straight towards Hawaii. That lasted about 1.5 hours and now we are back to the A2, winds around 12-15 knots, pointing a little to the east of Hawaii. Plenty of rest though and yesterday was shower day which is always nice out here. Despite the challenges of sailing double-handed we have it pretty comfy. Hot water, shower, refrigeration, dodger, autopilot, and sport-a-seats. We are hardly suffering. Most of the boats around us don’t have any of those things. It feels like we are on a hard core adventure until you compare our transportation to most of the other racers.

We passed under 500 miles to go. It looks like the first boats are starting to finish now and it should get pretty busy at the finish line on Monday. We are hoping, hoping, hoping we can make the finish in the daylight hours on Monday. It would be extra nice to see the island rise up ahead of sunset and get to the dock before dark. With the predicted winds ahead we might can do it, but if we keep parking up for an hour a two a day we won’t. The weather does look a little less tricky from here on out. Fingers crossed.

A really neat tropic bird of some sort paid us a visit this morning. It was bright white with a long tail. It circled around us a few times, maybe looking for a nice place to land, but it confirmed for us that we are far too bouncy a place to spend the day.

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