San Francisco, Friday July, 9th 2010

This is the start of this Skipper’s Log for the 2010 passage between San Francisco and Hawaii. We start Saturday July 10th at 2 PM right by the Golden Gate in an ebb tide.

This year things are unusual. The weather is unsettled and it won’t be a record pace year. However, in my 12 trans-Pacific crossings, this will be the more interesting year. This is truly a Navigator’s race this year. It’s really confused and complicated. There are large areas of no wind to the South, a gale developing North of our anticipated trajectory and we can expect everything to change very rapidly.  We are also competing with much larger boats and in principle we have no chance. But this is sailboat racing, “It’s never like this!”

Our three last crossings were double-handed. Just the two of us Crusty and I last year for Transpac, from Los Angeles to Honolulu. We were fortunate enough to obliterate the record, completing the passage in less than 8 days.  We also hold the record from San Francisco to Oahu.

For the last 5 years,  two of our team members, Zan Drejes and David Giles,  have been performing miracles in preparing preparing the Pegasus 50 for our races.  Crusty and I work 24 by 7 at Fullpower/MotionX, designing, architecting and developing the MotionX solutions. These guys make it possible for us to go racing. This year, given the weather pattern and the opportunity, we decided to take Zan and David with us. We will sail with a team of four. This will be different and a lot of fun. It’s small boat for us and not much room for all of us, yet we will be very busy.  For perspective, the other competitors in this race are sailing with team of 10 to 15 sailors. We have our work cut-out for us: Small boat, and a team a third of the size. We love the challenge.

Welcome aboard Zan and David an let the fun begin.