Pacific Cup Day 11 – Aloha!

We made it!  11 days, 8 hours, and 25 minutes.  A full 2 days faster than 2014 on a boat that should have been 1 day slower.

The last day wasn’t, of course, without a little drama.  We started by putting up the A0 and the storm jib as a staysail.  This was a combination we hadn’t tried, but it seemed to be working well and we started chasing another boat we could see.  Seems like more boats around as we were all converging on the same spot now.  Unfortunately, by going fast in big waves we were driving a bunch of water over the bow and down the hole in the foredeck.  We could feel the boat getting a bit heavier in the bow as it just doesn’t steer the same with a lot of water up there.  Just as we started talking about that, click, everything electronic on the boat turned off.  No wind instruments, no speed, no power to charge devices, nothing.  It seems water finally found its way to the battery switch, and we are guessing created a short circuit that blew one or all the fuses.

The good news is that we were only 60nm from the finish and it would all be in daylight.  Our GPS had batteries, our sat phone was charged, and our phones with nav apps on them were also charged.  So, we just carried on and started trying to really dry out the boat.

The finish was a bit tense because we now needed to navigate around a virtual finish line approach buoy and then through a fairly small finish line, while the photo boat was circling around us, and we are trying not to gybe will surfing dead downwind on big rollers.  But we made it!

It felt so good to get inside the reef into flat water so the boat would stop moving.  A big relief that we arrived when we did too as we were one of the last boats to arrive before TS Darby started impacting the finish area.  By Sunday morning some boats still on the course were having to slow down to let Darby pass between them and the finish line.

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