Beautiful 20 knot trades blowing, 8 to 10 ft waves, sailing in paradise

Date: Friday, July 11th
Time: 08:00 HST
Lat: 21 North
Lon: 140 West

Sunrise Friday. The little dome is a gyroscop-stabalized satellite communications system. On board Pegasus 77 we have three satellite communications systems that we use in parallel to extract weather information from Internet public sites and build this log (As well as cheer for Lance Armstrong, Hassk returning to the Wings and Klitchsco getting his chance at a fairer rematch with out of shape Lewis)

And three cheers on board the mighty Pegasus, because there are three good reasons to do so:

1. Pegasus stretched again on Pyewacket: They are now bearing 050 degrees @ 63 nm with Honolulu bearing 261. That’s a gain of 17 degrees of bearing and 8 miles of gauge. More than we ever expected.

2. For the 5th consecutive day we sailed more miles than Pyewacket. In the last 24 hours we sailed 302 nm to the mark to their 295 nm (Pegasus actually sailed 334 nm through the water)

3. We are now almost positioned where leverage on one side or the other for Pyewacket is non-effective. We’re almost there.

That’s great tribute to the hard work of this team, gybing the shifts through the night and pushing hard 24 by 7. We’ll rest on-shore.

Yet we are worried.

That’s because several things can happen:

1. We have a major breakdown/accident
2. We get trapped in the backside of a squall
3. They bang the left corner as we expect them to and a huge shift materializes that is outside of the parameters

We are working on addressing those three threats as best we can.

First, are doing preventive maintenance all around the boat. Then, we are rehearsing our squall techniques for the night and finally we are working at positioning ourselves so that we shut down any potential passing lanes.

Still, our Lady Hawaiian Luck will need to kindly smile on us.

We will dance with the wind: Makani Hula!

There are three distinct phases in this Transpac 2003:

Phase one: Invest in the future even if it is painful. That’s what we did for the first two days when Pyewacket looked in the lead while we were soundly investing in the Southern route.

Phase two: Reap the benefits of out early investments and turn them into valuable assets: That is what we did for the last three days.

Phase three: Protect our valuable assets using conservative practices. This phase started this morning and will continue to the finish.

Because we are now in phase three, we need to manage, execute and hope for a little bit of luck.

Lets Dance with wind. Makani Hula!

Today's weather map

Beautiful trade wind sailing half way between California and Honolulu, the best in the world!