July 26, 22:30 PST, One hundred miles out

Sunset 100 miles from Honolulu

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 course record. That’s a huge achievement.

Now we have some tough choices to make: One option is to sail our line into the Molokai channel, gybe on a lee-shore at Kalaupapa and take advantage of the shift and the compression. Another is to take a couple of unfavorable shifts and finish safely. If we were fully crewed we’d head straight for the high speed gybe. If only we knew where the big boats are. Their last known position is from 9am this morning; they could have gained on us.

Tonight is going to be darker than last night. The moon rises 30 minutes later and is smaller. We haven’t seen big squalls forming yet and the trades seem to have moderated to 20 knots.

Beautiful sunset and interesting choices. Apparently our opposition is reading this blog, so I can’t share our decision quite yet. We used MotionX to roll the decision. Apparently we are also where no iPhone has gone before!

If you are wondering about the soundtrack for our adventure: The stereo system failed on the second day. So the iPhone and a pair of Plantronics headsets gave us individual soundtracks. We have the best water-proof case for the iPhone: It’s called a ziplock bag! We each have our own, use them in Airplane mode (after all we are a flying horse) and charge them using iTunes running on the Toughbook. Of course, we roll MotionX to decide who takes which watch, which shift we will take and all other activities familiar to offshore sailors. After all we are very superstitious. Seriously.

Time to get ready for the last night of racing. In sailing, anything can happen. We will fight to make sure that only good things happen and hope to see Lady-Luck smiling again upon us.

Safe and Fast, Pegasus, Safe and Fast!