Saturday July 21st, 20:00 utc – lat 25 20 N, lon 138 59 W

This has been a busy day for us on board the mighty Pegasus. Our crew of two has had to rebuild pad eyes, trouble shoot electrical problems (corrosion caused by sea-salt had jammed an electrical switch open) and go through a complete sheet and mechanical check.

There is a boat to our port quarter. We think that it may be Hugo Boss, the Volvo 60, but we are not sure. Roll-call in the morning will tell us.

We are getting ready for our twilight sights. It’s like a routine now. That’s when we have dinner too, a meal that we share. Then I will take the first long night watch while Richard gets some well deserved sleep.

Our ICOM M-802 single side band receiver has become a most useful tool. We just raised Mark Rudiger on Holua, the Santa Cruz 70. Mark is sailing with two good friends: Dave Ullman and Brent Ruhne. David and Brent just won the Melges 24 World Championships with our team. They are a bit North of us and as we talked they seemed to have their hands full with a squall. The M-802 is a great OceanGizmo. I actually have one setup at my house as a HAM radio, they are great. If you couple it with a Pactor modem, you can do email, and weather charts over-the-air without any infrastructure support anywhere in the world. No Internet needed. The ultimate survivalist’s global communications tools. With HAM radio licenses not requiring Morse code anymore, it’s one of the coolest gadgets that you can setup for yourself – on water and on anything.

Our boat has an escape hatch so that if we flip over and can’t right the boat, we can get out through that hatch. The hatch is on the stern, almost at water level and when you look through it, you can see the tracks that we leave on the ocean. Here is a picture of the view from our escape hatch.

rom the escape hatch, the tracks that we leave behind us on the Ocean