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

The pad eye that exploded had a defect. We took a picture of it. Richard had a better idea to fix this: build a soft pad eye right in place, using spectra line. The only difference is the fact that the new soft pad eye runs athwart ship as opposed to the exploded one that ran fore and aft. Not an issue for our application. We lost some precious time.

On another note, we are astounded at how well we’ve been doing against fully crewed racing machines. We’ve kept pace with Hugo Boss, which is the Assa Abloy entry in the the Volvo Race, as well as Morning Light, our fast TP-52. We really shouldn’t have kept up, but to date it has been a navigator’s, tactical and strategic race. And we’ve more than held our own. In fact, many boats have come down to our approach to Honolulu. Now that it is a drag race, we expect to be passed. There is no way that the two of us on a 50 foot boat can keep up with the pack of TP-52s, Volvo 60s and others behind us for much more than 24 hours. The race now is about how battle that which we can’t win. ‘But that won’t stop us from trying’!

As far as the record is concerned, 10 days would mean crossing the finish line at Diamond Head Wednesday, July the 25th at 1 pm pst. Pretty close to impossible. That word is not in Richard’s or my vocabulary.