Early this morning, we unreefed the main, furled the jib and rehoisted 'Spirit of 83'. We are making 7.0+ down the great circle on port pole. So far, the angles look good, and should get better... we are now in 5th - 3 out of 54th, 4 hours out of third, and 6 out of 2nd. It was a strange night. The crew is more rested and focused on getting enough sleep today for a big night tonight.
We have also reached a point in every race that is sort of a watershed. Prior to this point, you focus on the day, and setting up the race, after, the focus becomes the end game. What is that point? we started calculating ETA. The goal in any race, is for that race to be over - as soon as possible. We sail 2000nm races, because we don't want them to be over so fast! None-the-less, our current ETA is approx 4.2 days from now, so midday of Sunday the 29th. Internally, we will now say to ourselves "if we go X speed we can be there as early as Y" about a billion times. We will also presumably start making wagers - the mai-tai's at Kaneohe Yacht Club are really good, (once rated second greatest in HI, (so as not to compete with mai-tai's from San Diego). They are also great wager payment. We'll update the ETA as we get closer, hopefully it moves to the left!
Last night, while not fast, was a beautiful night occasionally, with a plethora of shooting stars and a planet rise that somehow was neat. The waves are very mixed, 5-10 ft from 2-3 directions resulting in strange interference patterns and amazing poles and zeros, sorry, peaks and valleys. It is not uncommon to look at the helmsperson and see a wave fifteen feet back and two feet over his/her head. Today the weather is getting warm, a blue of ocean that I've only seen here, and an infinite sky and majestic cloud structures.
Today we sort of continued our celebration of half-way with a bottle of champagne believed to be from the 2010 race. (broken gear forced a return before half-way). It was Yummy or should I say Mummy!
Two crew sleep, two drive, and one has yet to decide which...
-Beqwee!
p.s. I did that on purpose, you may be a programmer and not know it if you noticed. ")"
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At 7/14/2012 12:11 AM (utc) our position was 38°06.27'N 122°16.02'W
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