Andy - 14:30 PCT, 7/14

Had a good night last night without any major or minor tragedies. Good wind and kind of hairy and we struggled to have our "A" team drivers fresh enough to surf all night long. Our biggest issue is finding time to make people sleep. When stuff breaks, like it did yesterday, it takes an enormous amount of time to fix it. So we spent all day yesterday splicing new halyards, guys, and various other lines, going up the mast, and changing headsails so no one got any food or sleep. What a marathon.

The wind and waves built overnight. And we had another potential gear failure that could have ended our spinnaker run. Tim flogged the sail after a 14.5 kt surf and the spinnaker starts going crazy and there is no control on the end of the pole. The pole goes wild and the spinnaker goes apeshit and we are sure that we are about to put the pole through the spinnaker or drive the pole into a towering wave at 13 knts. We assume that the foreguy has parted and start yanking strings. Tim cool as a cucumber starts flying the kite with the malfunctioning pole (at night, at 30 kts wind). I ask for "all hands on deck" (think this is the third night in a row) and we start sorting stuff out.

This was much better than the previous nighttime emergencies. No on goes over the lifelines, noon loses their cool, and Andrew doesn't even have to come on deck. It turns out that the guy shackle had flogged itself loose and nothing had actually broken. We drop the shoot into the V-birth on top of a sleeping Andrew, I tape and wiretie the shackle closed at the pulpit (with the standard breaking waves over my head, and then magically launch the shoot (which Andrew had packed in about 2 seconds). I think we lost about a mile. It was hot.

The "A" team drivers pulled through overnight in 1 hour shifts. I stayed up with them trimming and helping to call shifts and even managed to get some sleep as well. I got up at first light and the wind had moderated so I took the helm and whacked out a 13er without even collapsing the shoot and making a 1 kt entry into the next wave. Hells yeah, that's how we've been rolling fo' real.

The other fun even in this morning is that someone (not me) misread our GPA reported position and called in our incorrect position to the morning roll call. When we did the calculations it looked like we had slipped a position to 5th and had had a really slow day. We did have a slow day (we drove under genoa along for about an hour) , but when the real navigator rechecked our results, we had actually had a relatively good day. Still 4th, but we are creeping up. We do have to submit an embarrassing correction but we went from a little depressed to pretty pleased.

This is fun.

Andy