Our goal was to finish this race in a respectable position without anyone getting seriously hurt or any equipment breaking. If any of you are familiar with this race, that's not always easy. Well, we might be in good position, and no one is seriously hurt, but we certainly have had some gear issues. So far we have only torn one spinnaker but we were just about to take it down and change to another one anyhow. More about the gear issues in the full write up this weekend.

We managed to get out the gate neck and neck with Red Head, trading leads several times until the got ahead of us on the last few tacks out to the turning mark in the shipping channel. They stayed ahead until after dark, but from what we could see, through the first half of the night their navigation lights seemed to drop slowly behind us. We changed from our 3/4 oz kite to our 1.5 oz one in the evening in anticipation of the 30kt winds we had forecast and were looking for. Well, we never got those winds, but we did see a lot of low 20s and some in the upper 20s.

In the wee hours of the morning, we had something give and our spinnaker got a bit out of control. We got it down and decided to hoist the shy kite instead. It was pitch black with no reference to drive from other than the compass and wind instruments. After day break, we woke everyone to prepare for a gybe and to re-hoist the big 1.5 oz kite. The seas were really confused and as we prepared, your's truely spun out. It was my first for the race, and as we were getting the boat back up, the shy kite tore. We dropped it and gybed.

During the gybe we had some serious gear issues so as we made "repairs" we poled out a jib. This lasted for an hour or two then we hoisted again. We have been on port pole since then and we just checked in with the committee via sat phone. Our rental phone came with 3 batteries which each only hold a 1 minute charge so the check-ins are fairly quick. We are heading into the corner but just got lifted so it looks like we'll have to gybe to get down into the Santa Barbara Channel.

If the weather forecasts are right, we should be ghosting in to the finish in the morning hours tomorrow. After some much needed sleep and celebration (we hope) I'll do a complete write up. So far spirits are high and we've has some good fun. Now for the tedious part.