Greetings from VALIS on the high seas!
Our position at 2:37 PM PDT is:
Latitude 29 deg 14 min North, Longitude 136 deg 19 min West.
We are sailing towards Hawaii at about 8 knots in 13 knot winds.
Today after the morning race position reports (a radio schedule where all vessels in the race report their 9:00 AM positions), we discovered that we are no longer in last place, which is pretty good, considering that we started 23 hours, 15 minutes late! We will keep trying to gain on the other boats, but there is still a long way to go, and anything can happen. By the way, placement in the fleet depends on both position, and on the vessel rating, which is a kind of handicap.
Our boat uses a fair amount of electrical power, but we have a large battery bank, and three 100-Watt solar panels. We ran the engine (with the propellor in neutral) for a couple of hours two days ago, and we will probably want to charge for an hour tomorrow. One nice side-effect of running the engine for charging, is that we get hot water for about a day afterwards. We have definitely taken advantage of this.
We had tuna curry over rice for dinner last night, and it was declared “delicious” by all. Breakfast today was cereal, or whatever you could find.
Our first repair at sea: Today, after radio roll call, we discovered a tear in the spinnaker. This was probably caused when the sail collapsed (as it will do if the wind is light and the swells are large enough), andwhen it re-filled, it caught on the tip of the upper spreader (on the mast). We quickly hauled down the sail, and after cleaning the torn edges with acetone, repaired it with sticky-back sail tape. The tear was about 4 feet in length. Attached are photos of the rip, and the repair. The tape is holding well for now…
More postings to follow…
Regards,
Ville, Paul, Daniel, Andrew