My hips are definitely looking forward to not hiking for a few weeks, that’s for sure.  Which is one of the reasons I’m back in Boston right now, visiting friends and family until Oct 12th.  Then it’s back to SF where I will finish some modifications on the reaching struts on the Mini, and then get it back in the water.

I really need to sort out some new sails, and really really wish I could just go straight to Europe rather than hanging around CA for another winter, but c’est la vie right now…

Now we’ve all had a day off, a massive party, and Worlds start today. It’ll probably be a bit windier this week than it was for BBS, I think we’re all pretty excited for that.

Gotta run to get breakfast and lunches, I’ll come back with more later…….

The mini’s on hold, sort of, right now… I didn’t want to put it together and be paying high storage fees for the next month when I won’t be sailing it at all, so it’s in pieces still at RYC.   Post 32 Worlds, I go back to the east coast for 10 days, then it’s ON again.    I’m thinking of doing my 1000 SH qualifier miles down to Cabo or something this winter, Christmas in Mexico?   Why not?

OH and I just received my first major chunk of financial support from a foundation- so that feels pretty awesome… just when I was starting to feel pretty dismal about the financial state of things…

And I’ve been climbing a bunch, and am late to meeting someone at the gym right now, so more later!

I’ve been sailing most of the days since I got back, which is nice, and this weekend I”m headed up to the Gorge for the Double Damned regatta -  Should be totally awesome.  I’ll try to have pics and maybe some video up next week.

I’ll also try to have video up from PacCup- I’m working on editing some stuff together- I’m not a rockstar video editor, but hey, it might turn out ok.

Also, I’ll be giving a talk on Sept. 1st at one of the StFYC Luncheons, please come by if you can- I’ll try to think of something to talk about for an hour (“well, then we were on port…. and I eased the kite sheet…. and then I trimmed it back in… and then I ate some dried mango, and skipped a song on my iPod…”)

I’ve done some 18 sailing with Skip and Jody (Of Trunk Monkey) and my friend Dan Brandt…  they’re all going to be sailing the 18 event here in the bay in a week or two.  I’m not hardcore enough for those boats yet I think…

and I’m trying to find a ride for Big Boat Series cause now it looks like I”ll be here… so if you know anyone that needs someone small, yet fierce… I’m there.   Finding a Melges 32 would be awesome… not sure if that can happen, but hey, there’s always a chance…

Pocket Rocket gets here today- I managed to shrug off some responsibility and find someone who was already driving north from San Diego, and they’re towing my boat back for me. It’s amazing.  I thought I was going to be doing the 8 hours each way to SD and then driving 14 hours to the Gorge and back.   This is way better….   someday I’ll have a shorecrew…. and a nav station….    a girl’s gotta dream…

I already knew a few, but I hadn’t met many of them pre-start and finally putting faces on Nozomi and Tule Fog and Stretch and others was really fun.    I don’t think I am alone in feeling this way, espicially as every party I walked into seemed to have two parts-  a lot of people, including the crewed boats, and then over there would usually be a group of 20 or so people who doublehanded.   Cliquey?  Not really, it just seemed we had more to talk about.    There are a lot of shared experiences out there, and it was nice to hear about everyone else’s lows and highs and realize they were a lot like mine.

Also, I feel like I haven’t said enough about my amazing sponsors.    Chafe happens, but after a few days of anxiously checking my tack line and halyards, I realized that I could worry about other, more pressing things (eating, sleeping, driving) because the Samson line held up amazingly.   And what chafe did happen was mostly due to my own poor choices about leads, so the fact that all of their lines are so strong gave me the chance to have some leeway in terms of trial and error.

All the Ronstan blocks that should hold up did- there were a few places where I should have lashed them on in the first place, and a shackle let go, but again- trial and error and the blocks themselves were pretty bomb proof.   Also- since all of my winches gave up at one point or another (they were bone bone bone dry when I opened them up after 5 days of blast reaching…  nothing a little dr bromers soap and sunscreen couldn’t temporarily fix, but wow.. guess I need more grease next time around- and really?  of all the extra crap I brought along, I forgot winch grease?????), I was relying HEAVILY on the cam cleats around the cockpit, and they never even blinked at the extra loads.

And then on to Silicon Solar- I only took one of the 80 watt panels they gave me, as Andy and I knew we wouldn’t be relying on the pilot much, and it was perfect.  The charge controller just magically makes it all happen and even though we only saw the sun once or twice in 2000 miles, we were able to charge up the SSB, handhelds, ipods, computer and still run instruments and running lights without worrying.

And I would be remiss for not thanking my dad, who flew all the way to Hawaii, missed being there for my finish (I can’t say I’m too sorry about beating him there, but still, I know he would have liked to have been there) and still put in a very long day of cleaning the boat (he actually wiped the boat down inside for me.   The whole thing.   All the scuzzwater and nastiness… amazing) and then two VERY long days at the yard taking it all apart, helping to organize the yard crew to get the rig out without the mast crane, getting the keel out, etc.

Of course that doesn’t come anywhere near to thanking everyone that’s helped me out so far, the list is way too long for this page right now, but I’ll try to give some more props where they are due in the future.

I’m back in SF and sifting through the list of things I didn’t get done in the last month and a half, and paying bills, and now it’s off to RYC to find something to sail on for the Beercan tonight…

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.

SO, pre start, the weather was definitely weird.   All my friends who had done multiple PacCups before were starting to freak out.   Nothing was normal, there was this strange low hanging off the coast, and we’d be starting in a Southerly.  Nothing like the average upwind for the first 18 hours, start to crack off, set a kite and sail to Hawaii.   Routing software was telling us to go out the Gate and turn Right.   This was definitely uncharted territory…   Drakes Bay on the first night?   Weird.   So Andy and I talked about it and decided we didn’t want to commit to following any routing software word for word, especially since the polars we were using were sketchy to say the least.   Basically, we decided that the first leg would just be a race to the wind on the other side of the low, and we would just have to sail the boat as fast as possible in a generally north-west direction and who knew where that would put us.

So prestart, I’ve never felt so sick in my entire life.  I could have puked on the dock that morning.   I was so nervous, and scared about being in charge and responsible for a boat and someone else…  It was ugly.   But we got out there, had enough time for me to throw my halfway present to Skip and Jody and started thinking about the start.  I was about a minute late, there was no need to be anywhere near the line and all those bigger boats that go upwind so much better than us.   I made some comment about how if we lost by a minute it would be my fault and Andy said something about how many more thousands of chances we’d have to lose by a minute and off we went.

As soon as we were out the gate the breeze started to die and we started to take out reefs and off we went on port, up the coast.  That first night we passed the N Farralones to port and kept going N…  it was light but we had the 3 up and were moving… lots and lots of phosphorescence and dolphins.   The next day was brutally light…   We ended up with the zero up just to slat along…   I was psyched to keep the boat moving 2-3 knots, and it was just absolutely glassy all day.    One of the things I’ve been most worried about is how I’ll deal mentally with light wind offshore, and this was a pretty positive experience.   I found that if I sailed from bucket to bucket, I was able to stay pretty happy… passing things made it all seem a lot better.   There were tons of teeny tiny man o war jellyfish, and I startled a sea lion and I could see him diving down under the boat soooooo deep…

The next few nights and days all blur together…  light wind, just trying to keep the boat moving, watching Trunk Monkey.  They were ahead, but not uncatchable, and we weren’t getting passed up yet, so things were looking good.   The nights were unbelievably dark.   There was a solid marine layer and no moon and we couldn’t see anything.  At all.   Then one afternoon I woke up from a nap and the sun was out.  I came up and Andy announced that we’d gotten to the trades, and were in Squall Commander land and off we went.     That first night of breeze we kept the 3 up, thinking, well, this is fast, and slightly scary, but working…    It was noon the next day before we started crashing.   We were totally spent from driving like fools all night in the pitch black going 14 knots, totally underwater the entire time.    We couldn’t figure out what had changed, why we were suddenly pitchpoling left and right, but I guess it’s time to put up the 5.    We felt like total fools.    The 5 meant that we were maintaining faster speeds, were no longer totally under water and it was about 50,000 times easier to drive.  Lesson learned.

And that was the next 4 days.   Mostly one reef, 5 and blasting along at 14 knots.   I wished I had a mask and snorkel most of the time, but somehow the boat was pretty dry down below.   We got in a good rhythm of go down below, head to the low side, take off your gear, leave it in the puddle, climb to the high side and snuggle in.   We were doing 3 on 3 off and it worked out really well.   I was eating tons, the Mountain House freeze dried food we had was totally awesome.   The lasagna with meat sauce, oh wow, I would eat that at home.  My hands really hurt a lot, the joints were totally painful and even though I was soaking them in fresh water, they weren’t getting much better.   I got into the push-me-pull-you routine of driving- one hand pushing, one hand looped onto the extension doing the pulling.    Driving at night was like going down one of those pitch black tube slides at the water park, with someone spraying a firehose up at you, while doing pull ups.   It was very full on, and very, very awesome.    I tried to keep listening to music or books on tape or whatever, but if I put the iPod on shuffle, I definitely never had an extra hand to change tracks.   I ended up listening to an hour of french verb conjugations, and Andy got stuck with an hour and a half of Hawaiian steel guitar at one point…    And I will never go offshore on that boat again without one of those camel pack water backpack thingies.    Sitting there looking at a water bottle on a sheet bag, just wishing I could get to it….

We decided to never hook up the auto pilot unless we had to.   I wanted to be able to feel the boat more and really get it dialed.    Now of course I wish that I knew that the pilot worked, but at the same time, I have a much better idea of what works in terms of sail plans, and it was really really exciting to find that once we’d get it dialed, that boat just wanted to go in one direction at top speed and as long as you steered 140 true, or whatever it happened to be, you’d be going 15 knots. If you went 139, you’d fall off, 141, no go.   So now I know that a pilot should be able to drive the thing as long as I can get it set up right…

One of the other amazing things about this boat was that we weren’t surfing.   We were just planing.  Down one wave, up the next charging without looking back.    Over, under, through waves without any hesitation.   This boat WANTED to get to Hawaii as soon as possible.    And suddenly we were the boat closest to Hawaii.   A little mini was leading the whole fleet.     It’s funny how quickly expectations can change…   We went into the race thinking that it’d be cool to finish and learn about the boat and get things going.   Then suddenly we were leading the fleet and we were all excited about winning.   We put in a 274 mile day and we got so driven to just keep pushing and get there first…

Anyway, gotta go lie on a couch and watch some TV but I’ll get back to the computer tomorrow and try to cover the rest of the race..  today we sailed 420s to the sand bar and got to see the Black Pearl sail in (they’re filming a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie here) and just played in the water  all day with some of the other double handers and it was wonderful.  But now it’s couch time.

Posted by Bill…  one inordinately proud father!

We’re here!   No, not Hawaii, Better!  The Tradewinds!   Yesterday PM I woke up at 5 and it was sunny and little puffer clouds were overhead and since then we’ve had 20ish knots of breeze and clear skies.

Last night was full on so I’m going to keep this short cause I really really need a nap, but I put the boat about 4 feet underwater twice, all the way under water from the bow to the stern, dumped the main, hung on and somehow it just hangs there for a second, shakes it off and pops up, still going 10 knots.   after my recent experience in the Mumm 30, this is a totally different breed…

The GPS says high speed from last night was 19 something… I saw 16 a few times and it was interesting… there’s lots of questions in my mind going 16 knots in pitch blackness…   mostly, ‘hmmm… how is this going to end..?”

Lots of stars, now it’s sunny, have the big kite and a reef in the main.  We had a 214 mile day yesterday, the longest run of anyone (besides a few of the big boats..) and took some miles to the south of Skip and Jody.  We’re hoping that the expected backing of the wind will come and we’ll get some moremiles outof being on the right side of it.

Lots of love to everyone back home, it’s pretty cool when the transponder thing starts lighting up in the middle of the night and I know that 4 hours from now you’ll all be seeing where we are and how fast we’re going…    I was going solid 14s a few times last night when it was recording… wonder how fast it had us clocked on the webpage…

Time for some dry socks!