This has been a wild night. Our dice are cast and we are betting on a Northerly route, close to our rumbline. For the next couple of days we will make losses and then our bet is that we will get both a big right shift, and more wind than the Southerly competitors. The night…
Kite is up and wind is down! We’re both catching up on sleep. After roll call this morning (the mandatory HF Radio check-in with the race committee), Richard told me that I fell asleep with the mike in my hand, only to wake up 2 hours later. That felt great. We’ve accumulated total sleep deficit…
Licking our wounds, getting some sleep, and still trying to make headway. We’ve made several sail changes along the way to a giant Code 3 that is flying from our bowsprit. It’s a beautiful sail, with 8 knots of wind we’re doing 9 knots of boatspeed. The waves are still significant. The barometer made a…
This boat is awesome. Our Team is doing a stellar job. Everything is PERFECT! And it needed to be… Last night we saw over 40 in the puffs with very fast side waves breaking… Very dangerous. I would have been worried in any other boat with only two team members! Now it’s moderated down to…
At 5am PST we are right where that little box says ‘gale’…. No wonder the waves are like buildings and the boat is acting like a submarine. It’s so rough that typing is just about impossible. Just two of us is a challenge; no sleep, all sailing, all survival. Pegasus is flying and swimming deep.…
This is definitely a cold, wet, windy, wild, extreme night. The wind is gusting at 37 knots and we’re showing 23-25 knots of boat speed. The waves are very fast and feel like buildings are crashing on us. What are two perfectly reasonable human beings doing here…? Feeling alive at the edge.
Gale warnings are up still with very big fast waves. There are puffs over 35 knots. The south bar may be breaking and we need sea-room. This is when double handed racing becomes a challenge. It would be nice to be fully crewed tonight! This boat is a handful! Fly Pegasus Fly!
Pacific Cup 2008 Double-Handed San Francisco to Hawaii record attempt Here is our first weather chart. It’s going to be a wild, wet, and fast ride for the first 48 hours. We have a gale warning for our start and a dissipating tropical storm to the South, in between lots of wind and big waves.…
Rudi, Mark Rudiger, passed away today. We sailed over 10,000 miles together. Rudi always knows the best and fastest way to sail “all the way”. Many of us learned most of what we know, from Rudi. I learned celestial navigation, current, waves from Rudi and just the simple magic of being out there, offshore. Rudi,…
The final finishing touches before the great race: Project management: David Giles, Bruce Mahoney, Joe Dolister, Faye Lin Onshore Pegasus Racing team: Zan Dredjes, Mark Golsh, Jana Madrigali, Paul Allen, Seth Larkin Communications: Caleb Dolister, Arthur Kinsolving Sailor’s food: Bonnie Willis
Philippe Kahn, Richard Clarke – Transpac Double Handed Open 50
For the final hours of the race we saw up to 36 knots of wind and sustained 20 knots of boat-speed easily. The speed potential of these boats is huge as they plane so easily. In displacement mode, a boat’s speed is limited by its ‘hull-speed’. A rule of thumb is that that hull speed…
Wild night. We hooked onto a massive squall monster, saw 32 knots of wind and sustained 18 knots of boat speed for the longest time. That coupled with a massive header completely changed our finish plans. The breeze has eased to 22-25 knots and we are sailing fast to the finish line. We are fully…
Last night at Sea This is our last night at Sea. We are entering the Molokai channel. We’re seeing 15 to 20 knots, 5 to 8 knots less than usual. The wind and the weather are strange this year. The sailing is stunning: bright moon with Jupiter right at its side and massive Pacific Ocean…
The night was very different. The wind filled in from the back and our squall monsters seemed harder to find. Then we found ourselves surrounded by dolphins in the bright moonlight. Magical. The position reports in the morning give us the thumbs up: 7 jibes through the night, very few glitches and we held our…
I am switching all my blogging to Hawaii Standard Time (HST) in order for everything to make sense for the finish. That’s because there are diurnal effects, building sea breeze influences etc.. that are easily visualized when one thinks in local time. This morning at 3 am hst, the Diamond Head Lighthouse bore 242 degrees…
We sailed all day trying to stay centered on the race course in order to have options as the weather patterns have been too unpredictable. So we jibed about 5 times, I can’t quite remember how many. One thing that is clear is that we are getting much better at jibing this boat. We’re having…
Start with the end in mind, but the journey has to be the reward. In our case, the end is the finish line by Diamond Head lighthouse. The Journey, well that’s some of the best sailing that I have ever done. Squalls are building quickly this afternoon. The fleet is really spread around the race course.…
We rode squalls all night and that worked well for us. This morning is bright. Richard and I worked hard all night. We jibed 5 times in front of squalls to stay in the big breeze. We can now jibe this huge ‘OceanGizmo’ Melges-style, just the two of us, and do it quickly in up…
The Squalls are monsters. They just swallow you up if you are on the wrong board. If you are on the right board, you can ride them for hours and make great progress. The thing about them is that they grow and grow throughout the evening and the night, and then in the morning the…
I realize that my last few updates have been short, at best. That’s because things have been full on. No relief. Now we’ve got a breather. The ‘drenched by the cold rain fingers’ (yes, there is a cold front around here coming through) can start typing again after some weather crunching. I figure I would…
We’ve been ‘hunted down’ by a squall all day. Just like a giant Pac-Man trying to eat us up… The bad news is that we just noticed that there is still a big mangle of stuff at the bottom of our keel. We were not feeling that our boat was making her usual speed and…
It was big, mangled, and tangled. It was a big fish, a net, or a combination of both. We had to back the boat. That was a major undertaking. This boat isn’t meant to go backwards. Now we’re back, sailing under the rain. Today we will be “squall-busting.”
Yes now there is enough light. We use our endoscope to look at the keel… There is a large object wedged on the keel. We’ve got to get it off. We knew that we were going much slower. Now we know why! More later.