Below is the update of the first 3 days of the Pacific Cup. Day 1 – 110714 The red boat went under the red Gate and is now on her way across the Pacific to home in Australia. Along the way to our Hawaiian pitstop we are racing four other fast machines (plus 50-something boats that all had a head start of up to five days and probably have much more wind than we do right now). It is strange for us to be the smallest boat in the fleet. At 52-feet we usually dominate local competitions and are up there with the big boys in other regattas. Not today. We are beating upwind into 5 knots of breeze at the back of the five boat fleet in the Latitude 38 division. When the wind swings around we’ll pick up pace, but for now we are the smallest boat and last. The iconic red bridge of San Francisco looks more and more like an actual gate as we sail away from it. Like a swinging red boom along a solid fence of land. Fog-bound and cloud-locked land. We leave the gate and sail into sunshine. If the sunshine wasnt sea-breeze subsidence before a coastal trough and then a weak high – all those light wind things – then we could enjoy it. For now we hoist the J1, hover our weight windward and leeward as needed and wait to punch out to (or be punched by) the north-westerlies that we seek. The full moon is rising and the water is glassy. Day 2 – 120714 Our second scrambled Children’s Hour is upon us. The radio scratches and hisses and we can’t hear the stories that are shared between racers at this time. Children’s Hour seems to be a quaint American name for the swapping of gossip and poems and tall tales. In the Cape to Rio Race we had ‘Storytime with Charlie’ which was much more entertaining than these garbled murmurs from the double-handers. Naturally, like an ancient tribe with an internal clock, the crew would gather on deck near sunset. Then the quiet moment would soon be broken by hysterical laughter at Charlie’s latest story of shenanigans. Unfortunately, in this race Charlie is asleep at 1700 PDT or 0000 UTC each day, so we will have to have our own storytime later in the day. As for our own stories in the first 27 hours of the race: we have few. The conditions have been eerily beautiful. Last night the water was glassy like a satin sheet, yet the wind dial read up to 15 kts. All the wind was at the top of the sail, and none at the surface of the chilly 15-degree Celsius water. Steering was difficult as each puff mixed down to the surface a little and completely changed the wind direction on the sail. This means lots of vertical shear. Beautiful to look at, difficult to sail in. Our mast is at 25.5 m above the water, but we could have done with a taller mast last night to get a bit more of the wind that was up there! Today we have been attacked by an armada of Portuguese Man-of-War. They have been coming from all directions, millions of them. One landed right on the bow. Another flew up and over the boat like a flying ninja jellyfish. All their little transparent sails can be seen dotting each wave around us and stretching out to the horizon. In Australia we call them Bluebottle jellyfish and then run the other way. Our resident marine scientist Tim says that the shape of their sails means they are juveniles. It is even worse than we thought: we are surrounded by an armada of poisonous teenagers. Meanwhile the freeze-dried food tastes as gourmet as it did in January across the South Atlantic. Which is to say, not very much. Ben is loving his bear suit as his cosy pyjamas. And when we turned the engine off briefly BA’s snoring was so loud that we thought the engine was still on. Day 3 – 140714 The winches grind and grind above my head and the engine revs in turn. It is noisy down here now that we have the big sails up and it will be like this until the finish. Someone clever in the crew has distributed ear plugs so that we can get some sleep, but that doesn’t help me trying to listen in to the HF radio. Children’s Hour today seems to be about what people are having for dinner, and it all sounds a lot nicer than our freeze-dried food. But I’ll give up the salmon and the pizza and the quiet lapping of the waves for our great boatspeed any day. Our competition seems to have got a jump on us. We have been doing our best in the fast reaching conditions but an extra 14 feet of boat length would be handy to keep up with the others. Perhaps we can extend Scarlet Runner with some debris we can pick up out of the ocean here. Just today we have seen five buoys, two nets, one box, one piece of plastic. We are trying to write them down in the Ocean Debris Survey form, but if we wrote every one of them down I’d never get any sleep. In January across 3300 nm of the South Atlantic we saw precisely three bits of rubbish: a pizza box, a jerry can, and a piece of stickyback. Pristine. Compared to this littered NE Pacific. The main incident of the day was an unexpected embrace between Snoady and Rob. Snoady got out of his bunk and stood up holding onto the rail above when the boat bounced on a wave. Snoady’s foot slipped and released the rope that levered Rob’s pipe cot upwards, promptly discharging the fast-asleep Rob out into the air. Snoady had slipped too, and seeing Rob flying, held out his arms to catch him. They landed on the floor in a beautiful hug. Update written by Jessica Sweeney.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 15:08:02 +0000
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