Second Verse

Today was a good day. It started our pretty bad and ended up great. I had a rough night last night, I just couldn�'t figure out how to get my boat pointed in the right direction with top speed. I jibed 5 times during the night (give me a break!). This morning I was resolved to just head DDW for Hanalei. I prevented the main very deep and pointed the bow to 245 true. It worked! We made around 6.1 during the entire day and she was pointed in the right direction! That is the trick. It is easy to get the boat to 7.5 or even greater, but if she�'s pointed to Japan, who cares! I think I got the hang of the different techniques regarding wind speed, direction, and sea state. Sailing in the Bay and sailing on the ocean are two entirely different games!

One funny story from today:

A few hours ago I happened to fire up the laptop to take a look at my AIS. Oh shit, a cargo ship was headed right at me and its CPA (closest point of approach) was only 50 yards! You got to be kidding me, we are in the middle of the ocean and its CPA is only 50 yards! Also, it�'s TCPA (time to closest point of approach) is in 15 minutes. Not good. My AIS takes a few minutes to give me the name of the vessel, but I couldn�'t wait for the name, so I started hailing the vessel with the Lat/Lon coordinates. No response. So I tried again, no response. Now our TCPA is down to about 10 min. Stress! Finally, I hear a voice on VHF 16, �"This is the cargo ship Triple Seven calling sailing vessel�". �"Yes, this is sailing vessel, go ahead.�" �"Sailing vessel, what is your problem, we see you on radar, and you don�'t need to keep calling us.�" I haven�'t laughed so loud in a long time! We ended up talking for 20 minutes and had a great time. He passed me to starboard pretty dam clos e! I�'ll remember this one.