Preparing to Jibe

Ha ha maybe in 24 to 36 hours, currently doing the same thing headed to Hawaii. Off wind sailing what a concept. A couple of squalls where the wind picks up then dies. Every now and then we get some good news. On one of the position reports we gained on the boats in our class. That was until the morning roll call.

The morning roll call had us 4th in class and 32 in fleet with 754 miles to go. We thought we had a good run of 246 miles. It turns out that Horizon who is leading the class went 241 and Allure went 252 and the Mighty T went 246.

We have our work cut out for us with a third of the race left we need to put the hammer down and gain some miles. So out comes the hammer, actually it is our new spinnaker. We affectionately refer to her as Marilyn. She gets to show her stuff as we hoisted her at 9:45 with19 knots of wind from 060 degrees. Now we can make a course 20-30 degrees deeper than we could carry with the A-Kite.

Some other trivia about the race yesterday. We changed out the port spinnaker sheet after 4 days with brand new sheet for the race. We thought we should give the other side some work. We still have another day or so on Starboard before we jibe.

How about sails, the main has been up approaching 200 hours and the � A kite was up for114 hours and looks like it will get another chance later down the track.

The hours on the blue � oz A-Kite are about like 2 years of Wednesday night racing. Probably not quite as tough on the sails as Wednesday sailing as we are not flogging them too much. We have decided she needs a name too. She was our primary offwind sail in Transpac 2007 and has already been up for over twelve hundred miles this time. Name that chute is the contest of the day. Candidates so far are: Dolly, Penelope Cruz, Cindy, Jane Mansfield, Pamela, Tootsie, Raquel, Farrah, and Ann Margaret. Is there a trend here? Your suggestions are invited as are your votes.

Now to the good stuff

From the galley Suzie reports

For lunch we had a flour or whole wheat tortilla wrap stuffed with migas and topped with refried beans and fresh cilantro. This was a special request from Young Will

For dinner I prepared angle hair pasta spaghetti in a spicy marina sauce with venison sausage and sage sausage and a light sprinkling of parmigiano regiano cheese which was imported from Italy especially for the trip.

Ok so we are not losing weight we have our whole life to get fit.

Yesterday was shower day for most of the crew. They were refreshing themselves on the aft deck with the hot water shower. We are now all a good smelling bunch. That was until night time when Jim was the target of the flying fish. His time smelling good was over. Those fish really do stink. I mean stink.

The sun set yesterday was just ok and last night and this morning were once again cloudy so no view of the moon.

Yesterday was one of the first sunny days we have had during the trip. Good news about sun it brings out the bikini. Yep Suzie got out the bikini to do a little sunning and reading on deck.

We spent some time getting ready for the upcoming jibe, you know the one in a day or so. We moved some of the heavier jibs off the rail to down below. This will make the boat more stable as they are now on top of the keel.

The spouses are on their way to Hawaii to sort out the hotels. We found out from the forward team of Tammy, Holly and Cody that the Ili Kai hotel we had booked, right by the boat, is closing today. Cynthia went to work to find new accommodations for us. I am sure by the time we get there in 3 days all will be ok.

Later, signing off from the SV Passion located at 23.57 N and 145 36W only 696 nautical miles from Hawaii (getting closer every day at 10.2 knots)