Day 7 Transpac 2017
09 July 2017 | Pacific Ocean
Rodney
We are 1200 miles from Honolulu and holding on to first place by a slim margin. Sequoia has started to come up to our heading and had a big night. We are hoping to stay ahead and the crew is driving as hard as we can. According to our weather downloads the winds will be light by the time we get to Hawaii so that has a big impact on our routing. We recalculate our course twice a day, and try to anticipate our best course given the location of our competition. We download digital weather files called grib files created by saildocs. Our weather routing software then calculates the best route....in theory.
Tomorrow we will be halfway to Hawaii so we are looking forward to our party. We are especially looking forward to initiating Jim into the club. It should be fun! We are all sleeping really hard at this point. I shook Ted for his watch this morning - he thinks its a dream and yells "groundhog day!". Jim tried to wake up Tony at 4am while I was driving, and came back and said he is not moving. He tries again and shakes his leg pretty hard, and comes back to confirm that he is not dead - relief!.
Jim handed me a butterfly cut out of a Svendsen's tide chart today. I said thank you but my birthday is not until next week. Jim said this is our secret to winning - ok he had me. He explained this is a two dimensional representation of our polar diagram we need to win. The vertical axis is the wind speed and the shapes of the wings vary with the optimum boat speed and true wind angle. Thanks - now I have to figure out how to get it into expedition. We had chicken curry over fresh rice with rum and orange juice for dinner.