Happy weekend everyone. We’ve gone sailing seeing as how it’s Saturday and everything, Tegan suggested we head out for Hawaii, so that’s our weekend plans. What’s yours? It occurred to me this morning that this is kinda like we are driving our house to Hawaii.
A little bit like the movie Up,Which is funny because we have a Kevin as well! As much as this is an adventure a great sail, and a fun little jaunt into the Pacific driving our house, we are acutely aware that this is also a race. As the miles melt away and we close in on Oahu it is becoming more and more important for us to be focused and racing 100% of the time.
While we haven’t been slacking off at all we are certainly now working as hard as ever for every little bit of boat speed and angle, every bit of advantage we can leverage out of the northerly and westerly position we’ve put ourselves in. The Pac Cup race tracker is now live and we know where we are and where our competition is. What we also know is how fragile any of the top four spots in our race are. It seems crazy to break down our speed gains by tenths or hundredths of a knot, but when you consider we are within minutes of almost all our fleet with 600 miles to go, a tenth of a knot more boat speed for a few hours can make the difference. Game on!
I don’t think I’ve written about food yet. On board we have one celiac vegetarian, one dairy free gluten free, and one vegan. We also iac vegetarian, one dairy free gluten free, and one vegan. We also have four eat everything~arians. So within that combination of food specifications, our menu plan is complex to say the least. We could have gone freeze dried or really simple and boring like some crews, but our first priority here is to have fun, so we didn’t want to not have good and varied meals the whole trip.So what do we eat, and how much of it do we have? In our list of meals we have fajitas, coconut curry, vegetable soups, pastas and stews.
We are getting into some of our stronger spiced foods now, as we started out with really basic, not so tasty, but easy to digest rice meals so that it wouldn’t trigger seasickness. All bets are off at this point in the game and the meals are frankly delicious. So that’s what we eat. How much did we bring you ask? Well, check this out. We wanted four complete meals per day for 18 days NOT including breakfast.
So, we have 504 lunch and dinner type meals on board. On top of that we have porridge, eggs, bacon and hash browns for our breakfasts. And finally we naturally have snacks galore, ranging from trail mix to chocolate to granola bars, and up until today we still had fresh fruit in the form of oranges and lemons. I have to give Alie and Kevin full props for organizing the food, and for the two of them and Lee for cooking it all.
In San Francisco we rented an air bnb with a good kitchen and the three of them cooked for two days straight with some chopping help from the rest of us. Our intention was to freeze everything in zip locks and pack the freezer fridge and coolers well to extend the frozen factor. Unfortunately only about 2/3 of our stuff got frozen before we had to leave so some food came on board with a little more urgency to eat. We have to jettison some of our less successfully frozen meals as they simply went bad.
Now, with three days left in our race, looking at what food is left, we are going to likely cross the finish line with very few actual meals left. All things considered a pretty successful program. I’ve sent two pictures. One is of Dave Ben and Ian lathering up in a downpour near sunset last night. The other is of Tegan,s back after a couple days of tanning with his PFD on. It’s 28C, with 23C water temp and time for me to get a couple hours sleep before my 6 to 10pm shift. Happy weekend!
A little bit like the movie Up,Which is funny because we have a Kevin as well! As much as this is an adventure a great sail, and a fun little jaunt into the Pacific driving our house, we are acutely aware that this is also a race. As the miles melt away and we close in on Oahu it is becoming more and more important for us to be focused and racing 100% of the time.
While we haven’t been slacking off at all we are certainly now working as hard as ever for every little bit of boat speed and angle, every bit of advantage we can leverage out of the northerly and westerly position we’ve put ourselves in. The Pac Cup race tracker is now live and we know where we are and where our competition is. What we also know is how fragile any of the top four spots in our race are. It seems crazy to break down our speed gains by tenths or hundredths of a knot, but when you consider we are within minutes of almost all our fleet with 600 miles to go, a tenth of a knot more boat speed for a few hours can make the difference. Game on!
I don’t think I’ve written about food yet. On board we have one celiac vegetarian, one dairy free gluten free, and one vegan. We also iac vegetarian, one dairy free gluten free, and one vegan. We also have four eat everything~arians. So within that combination of food specifications, our menu plan is complex to say the least. We could have gone freeze dried or really simple and boring like some crews, but our first priority here is to have fun, so we didn’t want to not have good and varied meals the whole trip.So what do we eat, and how much of it do we have? In our list of meals we have fajitas, coconut curry, vegetable soups, pastas and stews.
We are getting into some of our stronger spiced foods now, as we started out with really basic, not so tasty, but easy to digest rice meals so that it wouldn’t trigger seasickness. All bets are off at this point in the game and the meals are frankly delicious. So that’s what we eat. How much did we bring you ask? Well, check this out. We wanted four complete meals per day for 18 days NOT including breakfast.
So, we have 504 lunch and dinner type meals on board. On top of that we have porridge, eggs, bacon and hash browns for our breakfasts. And finally we naturally have snacks galore, ranging from trail mix to chocolate to granola bars, and up until today we still had fresh fruit in the form of oranges and lemons. I have to give Alie and Kevin full props for organizing the food, and for the two of them and Lee for cooking it all.
In San Francisco we rented an air bnb with a good kitchen and the three of them cooked for two days straight with some chopping help from the rest of us. Our intention was to freeze everything in zip locks and pack the freezer fridge and coolers well to extend the frozen factor. Unfortunately only about 2/3 of our stuff got frozen before we had to leave so some food came on board with a little more urgency to eat. We have to jettison some of our less successfully frozen meals as they simply went bad.
Now, with three days left in our race, looking at what food is left, we are going to likely cross the finish line with very few actual meals left. All things considered a pretty successful program. I’ve sent two pictures. One is of Dave Ben and Ian lathering up in a downpour near sunset last night. The other is of Tegan,s back after a couple days of tanning with his PFD on. It’s 28C, with 23C water temp and time for me to get a couple hours sleep before my 6 to 10pm shift. Happy weekend!
