The last 24 hours has been frustrating, not that we’re complaining…
Current position as of July 11, 2:58PM: Latitude 27deg 46min N, Longitude 140deg 50min W.
Sailing at 5 knots, southwest towards Hawaii (you were expecting somewhere else?)
During our 9:00AM rollcall, our reported position gave us a day’s run of 110 miles, our worst to date. The good news is that we are still ahead of four boats in the standings (please don’t forget our day-late start). Most everyone around us did pretty badly speed-wise as well. The weather forecasts are now predicting 10-knot tradewinds, rather than the 15-knot speeds that had been shown earlier. This may be a very slow race, or the predictions could be wrong (they usually are, we just don’t know in which direction). Yesterday we jibed the spinnaker several times to keep going in a useful direction. We are definitely getting better at spinnaker technique, although no one would mistake us for racing pros.
At 3:00AM this morning we were equally close (or far) from the race starting line and the finish line, at 1053 nautical miles from both points. Having passed this halfway-point, we are still in the light airs of the Pacific High’s southeast corner. Winds have been less than 10 knots, but how much less is hard to say, since the anemometer at the top of the mast spins as much from the boat motion as it does from the wind itself. As I type, we have just had a small squall give us a little much-appreciated wind and rain, but it seems to have passed us by now.
Back to the halfway point: Ville and Paul were on watch, so we took a crowbar, broke into the medical locker, and toasted ourselves with the “medicinal” scotch (Bowmore 17-year) on this momentus event. We did not forget to give a little to King Neptune as well. We also lit some left-over fireworks.
Yesterday’s dinner was salad, rice pilaf, and mahi-mahi steaks. Very nice!
See the attached google-earth trackfile to see our wanderings.
Aloha,
The Crew of S/V VALIS

valis-jul11.kmz