The second half…

Of course the wheels had to come off a bit at some point, and about 4 (? Correct me if I’m wrong Andy) days out the sat phone connector cable stopped working so we weren’t getting any more weather.   Not the end of the world, except that we were so far north, we kind of wanted some advance warning if the high decided to move back to a more normal southerly location.    My GPS has a barometer in it, but sometimes it seemed to be right on and other times it looked more like a random number generator, so trust was low.

The position reporting looked like this: Every morning at 8AM PST everyone logged their lat and long.   Us doublehanders weren’t required to have an SSB transceiver on board, we had the sat phone option.  So between 8 and 8:30 we called in and told the RC where we had been at 8.    Then at 10AM, Valis (the comms boat) got on the SSB and did a rollcall.    We had an SSB receiver on board (the coolest thing ever, this little iComm handheld with recording capabilities) so we’d sit there and listen in.   They would read off the Doublehanders positions, and then go through the other divisions calling a boat, they’d respond with their position, it would be repeated back, etc.     Andy made this cool excel spreadsheet so we could enter in everyone’s lat and long and it would tell us how far away from us they were, what their last 24 hour run had been, distance to finish, etc.

Of course one of the mornings after the weather stopped working, I was listening to the rollcall and everything was clear and dandy, except suddenly when they got to DH 2 (our division) the radio went all garbled and I couldn’t hear a thing.   If this happened in any other divisions, they could call in and ask for a repeat.   I couldn’t do anything without the transceiver.  I got on the VHF but no one was nearby…   Crap.     So now we have no idea where the high is, and perhaps more importantly, we have no idea where Trunk Monkey is.   We’re not quite to where we had wanted to jibe, but suddenly our tactics had to change to a hedge-your-bets, eliminate the worst case scenario type thing…  It sucked.   So we jibed.

The second part to this problem was that when we jibed, we were 800 miles from Hawaii, and pointing straight at it.    So every time we got lifted, we were only pointing about 15 degrees high, and jibing would have pointed us at a much less favored angle….  And we didn’t know anymore if there was still more wind to the north, OR if the weirdness down by Hawaii itself was still creating less wind to the south.     Plus, it took us a day or so to switch into downwind mode.  After 4 days of blast reaching, it was REALLY hard mentally to get ourselves to sail lower than 140 true, and it just felt slow and awful.      In addition, our bodies had definitely taken a beating in the constantly wet, fast conditions.    I was feeling mentally ok, cause I was still eating and drinking and sleeping really well, but my shoulders and hands were pretty sore, and I was liberally applying hydrocordizone cream to larger and larger portions of my body.    My face was coming off in sheets from pulling my smock top on and off (I’ve got a really big head and it’s a tight fit..) and I was feeling pretty bipolar.

Fortunately for us, I’m pretty sure Andy and I were on exactly opposite tacks when it came to the bipolarness.   I was up, he was down, he was up, I was crashing.  It worked out pretty well.

It was somewhere in here where I had my lowest point of the entire trip:  It was early morning, starting to get a bit brighter, and I could see a tanker off to port.    I hadn’t seen anybody else out there since the second night and had my hands full with the 3.  I couldn’t focus on the tankers lights long enough to see what their heading was, and if we were going to have to do anything about them, and we were converging at a rate that felt REALLY REALLY fast.    I got Andy up and was trying to explain that I just needed him to look at the stupid thing and tell me if I was going to have to do anything, and in the middle of it all, I crashed the boat.   And of course the pole went to leeward.     Ok, so time to pull the kite down, which was a total mess.  Andy didn’t have his contacts in, so he sat down to drive and I was completely wiped by the time I got the thing down.    All of our headlamps had died for good the night before (they just couldn’t take the wetness, were all corroded…) and I couldn’t manage to get all the lines sorted back out for some reason.   (at the time I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t do it, imagine that, I might have been a bit tired….)   So Andy gave me back the tiller and we decided to leave the kite down until the sun came up and we could get everything sorted.

That’s the only time I cried the whole trip.  I sat there and felt like a total failure.  Like I could never pull off sailing offshore if I had to take the kite down.  like I should give up there and then, sell the boat, get married and start having kids cause I clearly was not cut out for ocean racing.

The kite was back up 45 minutes later and off we went, but wow, it was a big eye opener in hindsight to see just how far I could beat myself down mentally over a pretty minor hiccup.

The rest of the trip was a very stressfull one for me.  As I mentioned, we were always heading about 10 degrees away from Hawaii and were resisting jibing on every shift.   Trunk Monkey had continued on beyond our line when we jibed early, so we did take a hitch out to cover and get a bit closer to them, hoping that we’d get headed, they’d overstand and we’d get there first.    But we felt like we’d given them the race, and they were sitting there making their tactical decisions ahead of time, executing them perfectly, feeling relaxed and in control of the entire situation.    (Of course when we got here and told them that, they laughed and said they’d had the same thoughts about us!)

We’d broken a reaching strut in the first day of the race becuase one of the stupid clutches slipped when I took the guy off the winch, and I’d just cut down the remainder into a stubby little thing that did the trick, but we were jibing the good one back and forth to keep it on the windward (more loaded) side just to be careful.      It was somewhere in here that we were trying to figure out the best way to jibe the kite and the strut with the least amount of kite-down time, and we botched it all and wrapped the 2 around the headstay.    This resulted in me going up the rig (I was planning on spiking the halyard and coming back down the forestay, unwrapping the kite as I went) but I could only climb to just above the spreaders before I was really getting pretty tired with nothing to hang on to, and Andy was having a hard time driving and grinding me up (plus I can’t remember if the winches had already started free-spinning at whim or not, but that might have been a contributing factor) so in the end I just got beat up, and still didn’t get the sucker down.    We tried jibing and that got a bit more out, but it was on there for life and I had to cut it down.

So now it’s only blowing 15-20ish, we’re sailing 150 or deeper, with just the 3.  Brilliant.   Espically since we know we’re trying to race a Mumm 30 with a big masthead symmetrical squared back and this leads to more images of Skip and Jody sunning themselves in the cockpit on a dry boat going 15 knots straight towards Hawaii.

Finally one day out, Andy tells me that we will for sure have to jibe and spend 25 miles on starboard before we can jibe back and get to hawaii and we will lose and it will suck but it’s what we have to do.    For some reason (dillusional and sleep deprived?) I am still feeling very optimistic that we were get headed and make it.    I have this vague memory of people telling me about the header at the end and Don’t Overstand and Be Forced to Finish with White Sails!! (well all of mine are white anyway, but you get it…)    So it’s midnight, we’re 100 something miles away from the finish, Andy goes to sleep, I turn on some Daft Punk, and a miracle happens.  The breeze shifts to 100, builds to 25 knots, and I am sailing straight towards the finish, or even a bit low of it, at 14 knots.    It’s time to Andy to come up, but I figured I’d just keep going a bit longer, and sure enough, at 4 AM I get the satisfaction of waking him up and telling him to make the 100 mile check-in call.   He looked confused but definitely wasn’t going to question it.

Our tracker had already stopped working (I guess a lot of them had some bug in them that meant they’d just keep firing and use up all the battery too early) and the phone number that we had to call for our check in wasn’t working, so we ended up just calling the normal position report number.   We got the right number the next morning at 8AM or so, which explains why some of you were wondering how we maintained speeds of 20 something knots between our 100 and 25 mile check ins.  Really it ended up being a 50 then a 25.   And then the sun came up, and there was Hawaii.

I’d never been to Hawaii before, ever, and I highly recommend arriving by boat for the first time.    The breeze sort of slowly died and then of course it backed so we were on the verge of having to jibe (oh isn’t it ironic) so the last 5 miles took FOREVER, but then we were there, and even better, my friends Katie and Cruise (fellow Tufts alums) were there and Cruiser was singing “Jumbos! Jumbos jumbos jumbos!” (which has definitely set the bar and I refuse to finish another ocean race without someone there to sing to me, so start booking your flights to Brazil now, hint hint Gretchen, Emily, Jimmy, Justen, etc.etc…)  and we’d finished 2070 miles to Hawaii.

We got the kite down before we hit the reef (success!) and then the escort boat offered us a tow (well, don’t mind if I do, thanks!) and we sailed in the little channel into tropical paradise.   Once in, we dropped the main and they told us Trunk Monkey was already in, but maybe only 3 hours ahead of us!

During the skippers meeting, they’d showed us a picture of the bulkhead, where all the little boats would be tied at the finish.   In the picture, there were no boats on it, and Andy leaned over and said, “see, what’s what it will look like when we get there.” It was even better, because the only boat there was Trunk Monkey and there was Skip to catch our bowline and Jody smiling away and I got yelled at twice for trying to jump off and give them hugs becuase the shore crew hadn’t yet gotten a picture of me and Andy on the boat.    The safety inspection crew came on and asked to see a few things (funny, they didn’t want to go below to look at anything…) and we signed off our agricultural inspection form and they handed us some mai tais and some pineapple and then the real tornado began.

I had felt totally fine on the boat, not too tired, not too weird, but as soon as normal people started trying to talk to me, I realized just how out of it I was.    The only people I could talk to successfully were Skip and Jody and Andy and other people who had just finished as well (4 big boats beat us).   Everyone else just didn’t make any sense.

Highlights from the first few hours:

Finally getting to hug Skip and Jody.

Using a toilet that wasn’t a bucket and didn’t require bracing.

Washing my face in a sink.

Pineapple and watermelon.

Chickenwings.

Not drowning when I jumped in the freshwater pool (I jumped in the deep end and had to rapidly get myself to the shallow part)

Katie’s family’s amazing house.

Realizing that people had actually paid attention to us and our trip across, and that this might do some good things for the Mini Class here in the states.

It’s beach time, but I’ll try to follow up later with what I’ve been up to in the past week.. I swear it hasn’t all been party party.  Here are some pictures: there are more where they came from.

 

 

 

 

 

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