Orcas Island Yacht Club | home
Time Bandit - VicMaui Race Log
July 7 Greetings. Today's position is 22-45'N and 151-50'W. It is early morning on the Pacific and we are enjoying a series of small squalls that have a little refreshing rain and some extra breeze. The base line wind is down to about 12 knots generally but when a squall is close the out draft from the rain fall gives the breeze a boost to about 18 knots. If the squall is south of us we get a "headed" jibe which we want and if the squall passes north of us we get a "lifted" jibe which we don't want right now. We are pretty much right on the lay line and we are needing the good wind shifts to take us to Maui with out the need of a jibe north to get there. We are about 290 miles from the finish. Quite a long lay line but that is the nature of this race. Barb, Gregg, Pat and Neil are sleeping as I write this. Terry, Tim and I are on watch. Terry is driving now. We blew up our .6oz wonder sail in a bigger squall yesterday. What a pity. It really handled the rolling of the boat in the swells better than the other sails. We had been pushing it beyond it's limits for days. We got a hard reinflate after a little skidding and it popped. All the pieces were collected. All is well aboard Time Bandit. Bob
July 4 It's a great happening in the cockpit aboard Time Bandit this evening. Our crew are enjoying the dinner hour and the wind is blowing 17 with gusts to 20 knots. This means wave surfing while enjoying taco chips with salsa and wine. Terry Roberson was our driver this evening and he was doing that with one hand while holding his meager wine ration in the other hand. Nice and sunny, with big bright billowy clouds in the sky and the loud sound of surf as the Bandit crashes through the waves. Our speed right now is a steady 9 knots with 12 knot bursts surfing down the waves.
We found a stow away aboard the boat yesterday. Floyd the pink flamingo was found taped to the underside of the soap dish. Fran is living vicariously owing to her inability to come out to Hawaii. She sent her blow-up doll Floyd instead. Coincidentally, while we were setting in the Time Bandit lounge tonight we spotted a pink thing in the water ahead and we passed by an object. Guess what it was? It was a pink flamingo floating in the water. We all suspected it was Floyd's brother from
China. As big and bright as this debris in the water was, we lost sight of it in the wave within 30 seconds of passing. Lesson being, don't fall off the boat.
We also passed very close to a large whale that was spouting. This afternoon we caught a nice Mahi Mahi that is tonight's dinner.
We are 720 miles from Maui and our course as dead on. ETA is 6PM on the 8th of July.
July 3 This is turning out to be a slow race for all the boats in the fleet. The Pacific high did not develop like it should until just recently. The high appeared where it normally should and right on top of our arch-rival VooDoo Child. We were anxiously awaiting to hear today how they did. Some how they matched our 180 mile day. They are a 450 miles NE of us and 130 miles closer to Hawaii. This is after we spent a lot of extra time to go south around a faux-high in the SE corner of the course to insure more wind. Those that cut the corner got too close to the real high when it developed and we were hoping they would park for a while but not so. There was wind right into within 1 mBar of pressure of the high. I guess that's the way the ball bounces. However it's not over until it's over.
Driving at night is a big challenge. The spinnaker needs to have the boat point in a narrow range of heading or the sail deflates. The waves throw the boat around a lot so there is a very small margin of error on the heading. At night there is no horizon for hints so you end up driving to the compass. The wind is very shifty, moving through 50 degrees in minutes. You have to watch the true wind direction meter and use that to determine the correct compass heading on the fly. Some of us have mastered this and some are struggling. Greg says, "It's not that tough."
This morning early we had a couple of squalls blow over us where the winds reached 30 knots. We held our magic .6 oz through the squalls pushing our luck. No problems. If we would have taken the time to change to a heavier spinnaker we would have lost much of the sport of driving the blow. When the wind is up the boat is actually easier to drive because it powers over the backs of the waves rather than being tossed around.
We just cleared a big piece of plastic that had lodged on our rudder. Suddenly the rudder had started shaking. We were all worried that there might be a problem with the rudder like a delamination. I wasn't very interested in testing our emergency rudder. To clear it we took the spinnaker down and sailed head to wind. We flailed at the rudder with the boat hook when it fell of. If it hadn't come off we were ready to send someone into the water to inspect.
We have done a couple of sail changes today going from our light spinnaker to the heavy and then back. A pleasant distraction in good conditions.
At the halfway point last night we opened our big gift box provided for that occasion by friends and family. Thanks to those who participated in putting that together. For reading there was one sailing magazine and a couple of coloring books. Very popular with the off shift crew. It was a wonderful sunny evening to enjoy our surprise package.
Tonight for dinner we are having chicken thighs, mixed vegetable and spinach ravioli. 6:00PM is dinner time.
July 2 It is now day 9 of the Vic Maui Race and all is well aboard Time Bandit. It is warm and sunny (about 80 F) and we all have shorts and lots of sun screen on. We have our spinnaker up with about 16 knots of wind from behind. The ocean is a remarkable azure blue with a few white caps.
We are now 1,154 NM from Maui in a race that is listed as 2308 NM long. So technically this is the half-way point of the race although we have sailed way more than that distance to get to where we are. We have sailed south of the pacific high before turning west to give us more wind. Now we are aimed pretty much at Maui. Most of the boats that went a straighter path and went very closed to the high are traveling a shorter distance. At this point it looks like they are fairing much better in the race than we expected. This is a very tactical race. Right now we don't have any more choices to make, we are living with the ones we've made.
We will celebrate arriving at the half way point tonight be opening a surprise box of special treats that got stowed aboard before leaving Victoria.
Yesterday we all had showers up on the bow (one person at a time) with buckets of refreshing saltwater. It was actually very good feeling. For supper we ate the Mahi Mahi that we had caught the day before and enjoyed a glass of wine that we found in a bag in Time Bandit's bilge.
June 30 After a short 124 mile day in light winds sailing SSE to try and find some breeze we found it. The trades are just south of us now and we are moving at about 9 knots. We are hoping for a 200 mile day. Today we caught a 10 pound Mahi Mahi that we will have for dinner tomorrow. Gregg says they are better if left in the ice box for a day. All is well. The weather is very warm and the boat is moving. We are having a great time.
June 29: Yesterday was a 200 mile day and we moved up in the fleet. Today will be much less. A high pressure zone has descended on the Vic Maui fleet and the winds are light. It is really difficult to know which way to go. We are headed south again to try and reach the trade winds south of LAT30 so right now our miles are not getting us any closer to Maui.
The boat is warm and dry. The foul weather gear is on hangers and we are in shorts. We are having a little wine tonight for happy hour.
June 28, 2004
It is Monday, day 6 of our trip to Hawaii as an entrant in the Vic Maui Yacht Race. The race started slowly for us after our start on the 23rd in Victoria, with the first couple of days having mileage on in the low hundreds. Today we have been having wind in the range of 20 to 32 knots and we expect to have our sloop cover nearly 250 miles. This has been some white knuckle sailing. New statistics have been invented to parallel other sports like "Round Up Ratio" and "Broach Saves." The seas are big enough that they
often dictate where the boat is headed and that causes the spinnaker to deflate frequently. Surfing down the big waves over night the boat was picking up a lot of speed. One one record surf down a biggie we hit 22kts.
We have been headed mainly south so far and are on a Latitude about 120 miles south of San Francisco and about 450 miles off of the coast. Once we get below the Latitude of the Pacific high we will be in the trade winds and will turn the corner for Maui. The fleet has made many different choices about which way to go and the end game of those strategies are not included in the result posted on the Vic Maui web page. We've bet on going further south and we don't get any credit in the standings for that.
The weather is warm and cloudy. We are wearing shorts.
All is well.
Bob