We did it. We shattered the double handed record from San Francisco by over one day and a half. We also were the fastest boat to Hawaii out of all the Pacific Cup boats. That in itself is a remarkable achievement: Two in a fifty footer took on and prevailed over fully crewed racing yachts…
Roll call is the only time that we get to find out how the fleet is positioned each morning. We check in with the fleet’s relative positions and their performance. This morning we are pleased. Our tactics, strategy and hard work seem to have netted a good report: The closest fully crewed race boat is…
Last night was a tough night. It was pitch-black, with massive squalls packing cold and dry 28 knot gusts. There was no horizon, with boat-speeds sustained in the high teens. The waves were still there, but you couldn’t see them. I took the first watch, Richard is passed out recuperating. There’s a huge bang like…
It’s time to report our position to the Race Committee on our HF Radio. We’re nervous. Yes we were ahead this morning, but what if the opposition has been sailing 3 knots faster all the time? Nobody will tell us anything until we cross the finish line. What we know is that we are inside…
The waves are massive and the surfs sometime last over a minute as we connect multiple waves. That’s why we do this. It’s like surfing Maverick’s except there are two of us keeping the boat perfectly balanced as we sustain boat-speeds of over 21 knots for minutes at a time. The boat just hums and…
Beautiful Kaneohe Bay (the finish line) is about 500 nautical miles away on a magnetic bearing of 222. We’re getting closer. The morning roll call yielded some interesting surprises: We are in the upper right corner of the course, with a lot of leverage. That’s what we wanted. There is a persistent right shift when…
This morning the sunrise was spectacular, right above the deflated Squalls of last night. The wind maxed out at 28 knots last night so things were relatively mild throughout. It was very dark and we sailed conservatively yet fast. Roll call will be interesting. We assume that we got passed by the big crewed boats.
“Turn on the radio quick…Channel 16…There’s a sailboat to Starboard flashing lights.” I emerge. Not my watch time quite yet, but on our boat it doesn’t matter because we’re both always on watch. A few switches flicked, “This is vessel Pegasus Whisky Delta Delta niner one seven eight hailing sailing vessel at 27:13 North by…
By now we are totally desensitized. Thirty knot puffs, bring it on! 25 knots of boat-speed, while taking a bite out of an apple. 3 days ago we would have been terrorized and shaking in our boots. Yes if we crash, that Navy Blackhawk chopper better come and get us because there won’t be much…
Today we got lucky, in a strange way. Luck is everything. You do all you can to prepare, you work twice as hard as anyone, but without luck you are nobody, nowhere, nothing. Luck is everything. You don’t make your own luck; it’s in the stars, in the waves, in the wind and in the…
Never, ever give up. It took 11 tries and then we were able to get free of this mess. We’re wet, yet warm from the pulling, pushing, grinding, cutting, name-calling, yanking, hosting, winching, towing, moving and finally succeeding. Almost, but not quite. We feel that we have a piece of the kite wrapped at the…
It’s now pitch dark and the moon hasn’t risen yet. We were lucky that that huge net didn’t rip our keel off. Or we’d be in the life-raft right now. We’re still trying to sort this out. We may end-up with a piece of the spinnaker around the keel. At night we can’t see well…
25 knots, we’re heaving to in big waves… We ran over a net, it wrapped around the keel at high speed, Wooosh……. In stopping the boat and trying to back down, the kite went in the water and wrapped around the keel. Now we are trying to get things figured out. With just two on…
Motion is life and everything is in motion. The wind, the clouds, the waves, the swells, the squalls, everything moves. Everything is in motion all the time – always – whether we look, notice, or not. Everything is moving and there is no better place to realize that than here, where our motion needs to…
We are now half way. The GPS range reads 999 Nautical Miles, and we are happy. Almost all of our systems are back to working normally after the first wild and wet 36 hours and it seems that the open ocean makes wounds and bruises heal faster. So on-board the good ship Pegasus, despite chronic…
We limped along all night. That piece of kite still wrapped around the top of the keel interferes with the carefully architected flow of the water under the hull. You can feel it at the helm and at high speeds it’s unstable making it even tougher to control our high speed ride. Richard took the…
It’s night, and a very dark night because the moon hasn’t risen yet. Around midnight we’ll get to see. With the clouds, the waves and the squalls, it looks like one of those paintings sold at tourist galleries in Waikiki. If you want to see the real thing, you’ve got to sail a thousand miles…
Squall, after squall, after hole, after squall, after….. And every time there is pretty much a gybe. Now we feel like two silly humans gybing this 50 foot powerful machine, just the two of us. No crew. 20+ knots and trying to get the performance of a fully crewed boat. They have us racing fully…
This has been a wild night. Our dice are cast and we are betting on a Northerly route, close to our rumbline. For the next couple of days we will make losses and then our bet is that we will get both a big right shift, and more wind than the Southerly competitors. The night…
Kite is up and wind is down! We’re both catching up on sleep. After roll call this morning (the mandatory HF Radio check-in with the race committee), Richard told me that I fell asleep with the mike in my hand, only to wake up 2 hours later. That felt great. We’ve accumulated total sleep deficit…
Licking our wounds, getting some sleep, and still trying to make headway. We’ve made several sail changes along the way to a giant Code 3 that is flying from our bowsprit. It’s a beautiful sail, with 8 knots of wind we’re doing 9 knots of boatspeed. The waves are still significant. The barometer made a…
This boat is awesome. Our Team is doing a stellar job. Everything is PERFECT! And it needed to be… Last night we saw over 40 in the puffs with very fast side waves breaking… Very dangerous. I would have been worried in any other boat with only two team members! Now it’s moderated down to…
At 5am PST we are right where that little box says ‘gale’…. No wonder the waves are like buildings and the boat is acting like a submarine. It’s so rough that typing is just about impossible. Just two of us is a challenge; no sleep, all sailing, all survival. Pegasus is flying and swimming deep.…
This is definitely a cold, wet, windy, wild, extreme night. The wind is gusting at 37 knots and we’re showing 23-25 knots of boat speed. The waves are very fast and feel like buildings are crashing on us. What are two perfectly reasonable human beings doing here…? Feeling alive at the edge.