Aloha from VALIS!
It is Wednesday evening, and we have just had a great dinner of Macaroni and Cheese (Thank you, Noelle!) This pre-cooked meal plan is very nice indeed! Michael has prepared a per-day meal plan, and we are (mostly) sticking to it.
In the morning we have a “buffet-style” breakfast (grab whatever you can find), which can include cereal, coffee, hot chocolate, leftovers, or anything else in the cupboards. Yesterday Michael revealed a box of doughnuts as a special treat.
Lunch today was grilled-cheese sandwiches and steaming tomato soup, prepared with style by Rich.
Dinner was followed by chocolate-chip cookies. So much for the Pacific Cup Diet!
The wind has been much better today, and we have been sailing southwest at 7+ knots with building seas. Very comfortable sailing, and certainly more encouraging conditions than we had the first 24 hours of the race. We are currently about 300 miles west of Pt. Conception.
At 9:00AM (PDT) Michael runs the Pacific Cup radio net from the VALIS radio. This where all boats must report their current position. This is also an opportunity for emergency radio traffic (none so far). Michael records the fleet’s position data, crunched the numbers on his computer, then via radio email sends the data and the results to Pac Cup HQ.
At 5:00PM there is another radio net, run by Michael. Dubbed “The Children’s Hour”, this is an optional and informal chat-session, where the fleet’s current standings are announced. This is also where we all trade fish-stories, gossip, and jokes. This evening we discussed the joys of head repair, how to shred two(!) spinnakers, what’s for dinner, and the like. Any “information” given during the Children’s Hour may not be completely true and accurate. Caveat Emptor!
I am about to start up the engine (out of gear, of course) to charge the batteries. Since there has been heavy cloud-cover, our solar panels have not been giving us much juice. This means we have to run the engine to charge them a little more often.
-Paul
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