Right before the start, one hour on our way, our hydraulics failed. That’s the system that helps cant the keel. It’s a must have. Our shore team hustled and made miracles happen. They had just 50 minutes because 10 minutes before the start they have to be off the boat with Crusty and I the…
The start is at 1PM PST. We leave the dock at 10:30 AM so that we get there in ample time. Our last moment decisions will be which sails to take or not to take. The rule goes: “If we don’t take them, we’ll need them, if we take them we will not need them”.…
On-board all of our equipment is state of the art. MotionX-GPS will pin-point our position accurately and reliably from the Start to the finish at Diamond Head. Yet one of the most important pieces of equipment on-board is my trusted 1979 Tamaya Sextant. For tradition’s sake (a good thing), the Transpac race organizers wants each boat to…
Pegasus 50 is at the dock right by the gigantic 100 footer Alfa Romeo crewed by over 20 seasoned professionals. We look good right there. Our goal is to get there within 72 hours of Alfa Romeo. Now it is time for the last minute preparations. We’ll take the boat for a quick sail and…
While the North Eastern Pacific weather settles nicely, the team is putting the finishing touches to Pegasus 50. We could have a fast race. The record is a possibility. It may be windy. Preparation is all the more important. Now we must make sure that all systems are a go. This is a very advanced…
Now we are running routes and the different forecasting models are very different as you can see from the chart. Wildly different. In fact I don’t believe any of them. The great news is that the weather on the Pacific is settling. The upper level blockages are dissipating and we may be in for a…
Today for the first time I took a serious look at the weather. What a mess! In 11 crossings I have never seen such messy weather patterns in the usually very predictable Pacific. The weather chart says it all. Instead of one beautiful strong, stable high pressure centered somewhere 800 nautical miles from San Francisco,…
We did it. We shattered the double handed record from San Francisco by over one day and a half. We also were the fastest boat to Hawaii out of all the Pacific Cup boats. That in itself is a remarkable achievement: Two in a fifty footer took on and prevailed over fully crewed racing yachts…
Roll call is the only time that we get to find out how the fleet is positioned each morning. We check in with the fleet’s relative positions and their performance. This morning we are pleased. Our tactics, strategy and hard work seem to have netted a good report: The closest fully crewed race boat is…
Last night was a tough night. It was pitch-black, with massive squalls packing cold and dry 28 knot gusts. There was no horizon, with boat-speeds sustained in the high teens. The waves were still there, but you couldn’t see them. I took the first watch, Richard is passed out recuperating. There’s a huge bang like…
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 waves are massive and the surfs sometime last over a minute as we connect multiple waves. That’s why we do this. It’s like surfing Maverick’s except there are two of us keeping the boat perfectly balanced as we sustain boat-speeds of over 21 knots for minutes at a time. The boat just hums and…
Beautiful Kaneohe Bay (the finish line) is about 500 nautical miles away on a magnetic bearing of 222. We’re getting closer. The morning roll call yielded some interesting surprises: We are in the upper right corner of the course, with a lot of leverage. That’s what we wanted. There is a persistent right shift when…
This morning the sunrise was spectacular, right above the deflated Squalls of last night. The wind maxed out at 28 knots last night so things were relatively mild throughout. It was very dark and we sailed conservatively yet fast. Roll call will be interesting. We assume that we got passed by the big crewed boats.
“Turn on the radio quick…Channel 16…There’s a sailboat to Starboard flashing lights.” I emerge. Not my watch time quite yet, but on our boat it doesn’t matter because we’re both always on watch. A few switches flicked, “This is vessel Pegasus Whisky Delta Delta niner one seven eight hailing sailing vessel at 27:13 North by…
By now we are totally desensitized. Thirty knot puffs, bring it on! 25 knots of boat-speed, while taking a bite out of an apple. 3 days ago we would have been terrorized and shaking in our boots. Yes if we crash, that Navy Blackhawk chopper better come and get us because there won’t be much…
Today we got lucky, in a strange way. Luck is everything. You do all you can to prepare, you work twice as hard as anyone, but without luck you are nobody, nowhere, nothing. Luck is everything. You don’t make your own luck; it’s in the stars, in the waves, in the wind and in the…
Never, ever give up. It took 11 tries and then we were able to get free of this mess. We’re wet, yet warm from the pulling, pushing, grinding, cutting, name-calling, yanking, hosting, winching, towing, moving and finally succeeding. Almost, but not quite. We feel that we have a piece of the kite wrapped at the…
It’s now pitch dark and the moon hasn’t risen yet. We were lucky that that huge net didn’t rip our keel off. Or we’d be in the life-raft right now. We’re still trying to sort this out. We may end-up with a piece of the spinnaker around the keel. At night we can’t see well…
25 knots, we’re heaving to in big waves… We ran over a net, it wrapped around the keel at high speed, Wooosh……. In stopping the boat and trying to back down, the kite went in the water and wrapped around the keel. Now we are trying to get things figured out. With just two on…
Motion is life and everything is in motion. The wind, the clouds, the waves, the swells, the squalls, everything moves. Everything is in motion all the time – always – whether we look, notice, or not. Everything is moving and there is no better place to realize that than here, where our motion needs to…
We are now half way. The GPS range reads 999 Nautical Miles, and we are happy. Almost all of our systems are back to working normally after the first wild and wet 36 hours and it seems that the open ocean makes wounds and bruises heal faster. So on-board the good ship Pegasus, despite chronic…
We limped along all night. That piece of kite still wrapped around the top of the keel interferes with the carefully architected flow of the water under the hull. You can feel it at the helm and at high speeds it’s unstable making it even tougher to control our high speed ride. Richard took the…
It’s night, and a very dark night because the moon hasn’t risen yet. Around midnight we’ll get to see. With the clouds, the waves and the squalls, it looks like one of those paintings sold at tourist galleries in Waikiki. If you want to see the real thing, you’ve got to sail a thousand miles…
Squall, after squall, after hole, after squall, after….. And every time there is pretty much a gybe. Now we feel like two silly humans gybing this 50 foot powerful machine, just the two of us. No crew. 20+ knots and trying to get the performance of a fully crewed boat. They have us racing fully…