Today we were lucky to get the following update from John Lee and a picture... from the middle of the Pacific ocean!?! Isn't technology amazing? The race continues and its still anyone's game...
Around 1am today we hit our half way point. This isn’t the point exactly between San Francisco and Oahu, or the point where there are 7days down, 7 to go. This is the point where there is as much distance behind us as there is in front of us. In this case it was 1052 nautical miles in each direction. This is definitely the point in the trip where feel the most isolated.
We haven’t seen another boat for three days now. In fact nothing has even registered on our AIS tracker for almost as long. An emergency here, or a breakage or otherwise would have massive consequences as far as assistance goes. Something that is always on our minds as we negotiate our days.
We celebrated our midway point by eating ice cream with granola and mangoes. So great!!The sailing has been generally fantastic and the crew work really hard to keep our speeds up. While it’s great to get personal speed records as we surf down the rollers, our real goal is good averages in the right direction. As the wind bends it’s the direction part that is challenging.
We went over 7 days without a gybe, and now we are plotting several gybes ahead as we hone in on our destination. We joked about forgetting how to gybe by the time we had to but we are on it and our sail changes and so on have so far gone off without a hitch often in very strong wind and pitch black. Sea temperature now is 20.2 Celsius, and the air temp is 21.2C. Napping for the off shift during the day is getting hard with the heat.
Believe it or not where we sleep on the boat is important as weight distribution makes a difference to our speed. Kevin and I have switched bunks so that my more rotund weight is further aft and to the high side. I am certainly not the biggest or heaviest person on the crew, but I’d like to think I have the most, er, versatile weight.
Developing story: our head (bathroom) door has a latch on both the inside and outside so that at no time the door will swing open. We were all well aware that mathematically speaking there was a slim chance that the inside latch could close without someone in there. Well....more to come...
Around 1am today we hit our half way point. This isn’t the point exactly between San Francisco and Oahu, or the point where there are 7days down, 7 to go. This is the point where there is as much distance behind us as there is in front of us. In this case it was 1052 nautical miles in each direction. This is definitely the point in the trip where feel the most isolated.
We haven’t seen another boat for three days now. In fact nothing has even registered on our AIS tracker for almost as long. An emergency here, or a breakage or otherwise would have massive consequences as far as assistance goes. Something that is always on our minds as we negotiate our days.
We celebrated our midway point by eating ice cream with granola and mangoes. So great!!The sailing has been generally fantastic and the crew work really hard to keep our speeds up. While it’s great to get personal speed records as we surf down the rollers, our real goal is good averages in the right direction. As the wind bends it’s the direction part that is challenging.
We went over 7 days without a gybe, and now we are plotting several gybes ahead as we hone in on our destination. We joked about forgetting how to gybe by the time we had to but we are on it and our sail changes and so on have so far gone off without a hitch often in very strong wind and pitch black. Sea temperature now is 20.2 Celsius, and the air temp is 21.2C. Napping for the off shift during the day is getting hard with the heat.
Believe it or not where we sleep on the boat is important as weight distribution makes a difference to our speed. Kevin and I have switched bunks so that my more rotund weight is further aft and to the high side. I am certainly not the biggest or heaviest person on the crew, but I’d like to think I have the most, er, versatile weight.
Developing story: our head (bathroom) door has a latch on both the inside and outside so that at no time the door will swing open. We were all well aware that mathematically speaking there was a slim chance that the inside latch could close without someone in there. Well....more to come...
