And more action shots from Big Daddy

More action shots from Big Daddy

More action shots from Big Daddy

Big Daddy Action Shots

Procurement

This was a topic at the Pac Cup seminar. This is actually one of the things that I most worry about. I keep looking at the size of Elise and the available space below and I am wondering where I can fit the electric wine cellar. Seriously though, it will take a lot of thinking to figure out where to store everything. Since I live in an apartment and Nathan in a house, I inherited that task. I am more used to squeeze a lot in a confined space in a way that makes it look absent...yet within easy reach.

I will also label where things are so a) I can remember even in the middle of the night and not quite awake yet and b) Nathan will know where things are.

We need leecloths to make sure we won't fall onto the engine in the middle of our sleep...

Here's how we will plan our trip (and this is the recommendation we got at the seminar).
- plan day by day: 1 light breakfast, a light lunch, snacks for both salt and sugar, drinks and a cooked meal
- the first few days will be cold and rough (read bumpy) so we will pre-cook the meals or buy some of these dried ones which we can just throw in hot water before we eat.
- on the Lightship race I suffered from lack of food, so I will prepare ziplog bags with snacks that can be stored up on deck
- will bring plastic plates and my camping gear for pots. We have a plastic cup and plastic glasses.
- will bring a bottle of wine for mi-way party
- will bring eggs, they give you great protein, they taste super good, even boiled, they can be eaten hard-boiled and cold on deck and they don't need to be kept refrigerated
- will bring a finish line, you never know. Hopefully, we will sail faster than most fish, but there will be light mornings...
- will bring apples, they should keep fairly long and it will be nice to have FRESH something...
- will bring ready-made soups. Tossing one of those as a quick warm drink when you're cold at night will feel absolutely wonderful.
- if at all possible minimize the time we need to stay below: it will be bumpy and probably not so good from a sea-sickness perspective in the first three days and it will probably get really hot later on. Plus we will be so sleep deprived that every extra minute of sleep we can get will be a blessing.

Finally, we will organize storage on a day by day basis, so we don't have to rummage through a lot of different areas to get what we need. It also helps make sure that we are distributing supplies correctly. So we will store "day 1, etc..." - we will therefore have to start with the last day as we will use a last in first out stack system...

If any of you has experienced with dried camping food, or tasty light food, let me know. I'll put together the menu toward the end of June so you got some time...

Pacific Cup Shopping List update

Going down the shopping list...Recently, we got:

- hand rail for down below. We'll see if we need anymore of those. The idea is that we should always be able to grab something to keep us from falling...
- personal EPIRB (and Nathan will get one too if he wants)
- water maker (desalinate sea water, always handy if your water supplies run out on a life raft)
- complemented my "synthetic" or fleecy base layer (such a nice techie word for 'underwear'): I have light tops and bottom with long or short sleeve but always full leg cover (if I don't need this, I probably don't need the bottom base layer :)), useful to protect me from the sun. Medium ones for cool days and heavy fleecy ones for cold nights.
- head light (the camping style) but with a red light option (was actually a freebie from work)

Still need to get a few things: lee-cloths, mesh pockets to store things, a new and longer foreguy as it will be attached from the deck, more sails, bigger solar panels, etc...

Remembering Daisy

"As news breaks today about the missing yacht "Daisy," we want to let you know more details about our plans to remember Daisy, her skipper and crew this Saturday.

Island Yacht Club members will provide daisies for skippers in Saturday's OYRA Crewed Lightship Race to cast to the sea at these locations.

6 AM Island Yacht Club, Alameda Marina, 1853 Clement, Gate 7, Building 14, adjacent to the Svendsen's Travelift, a bucket of flowers will be outside the club's door.

6:30 AM Richmond Yacht Club, 351 Brickyard Cove Rd, Pt Richmond, a bucket of flowers will be at the stairs from A Dock to the Upper Deck

7:30 AM Corinthian Yacht Club, email IYCRacing@yahoo.com to arrange pickup

8-8:45 AM St Francis and Golden Gate Yacht Clubs, The Marina, San Francisco, members of IYC will be on the main entrance to the dock or as close as possible

9 AM If you are not racing and you want to participate, please come and join us drop daisies in the Bay at the Wave Organ (at the end of the breakwater past GGYC)before the start of the race.

Lucie Mewes

Commodore

Island Yacht Club"

You Can Vote for BeatSarcoma Mashup Project

At NetSquared - if we win, we get resources to build this project. Here is the link:

http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/beatsarcoma-race-life-across-pacific

And of course, you can vote for other projects too :) No pressure!

Experts mystified by loss of sailboat and 2 aboard

From SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/18/MN58VLMSO.DTL&hw=daisy&sn=001&sc=1000

Experts mystified by loss of sailboat and 2 aboard

Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Two days after a 31-foot sailboat was lost at sea a few miles outside the Golden Gate in an offshore charity race, what caused the boat's disappearance and the loss of both crewmen mystified sailing experts.

While the Coast Guard could not say Monday exactly what happened, the missing boat was among the slowest-rated sailboats in the 40-boat regatta. It had fallen significantly behind the others in the 25-mile race - before disappearing on the homeward leg Saturday afternoon.

One sailor at the trailing end of the fleet told a Sausalito-based sailing magazine that he occasionally looked back at Matthew Kirby Gale's boat but lost sight of the vessel when its sails vanished beyond the steep swells. He figured the boat, Daisy, had merely fallen further behind.

The Coast Guard began searching for the vessel Saturday night after it failed to respond to radio calls. Sunday morning boat debris was found near where Daisy was last seen. The search was suspended late Sunday, when authorities concluded that the boat's skipper, Gale, 68, of Mill Valley, could not have survived hypothermia from prolonged exposure at sea.

Earlier on Sunday, the body of his crew member, 72-year-old Anthony Harrow, had been found washed ashore near Half Moon Bay.

Some sailors focused on Saturday's blustery conditions as the culprit of Saturday's accident, capricious weather that produced radical wind shifts inside the bay and high winds, steep swells and at least some breaking waves outside the Golden Gate.

Others wondered about the condition of Gale's boat, a Cheoy Lee Offshore 31 that had recently undergone upgrades but carried only minimal safety equipment for offshore use.

Still others wondered whether Gale and Harrow had sufficient skills to participate in the offshore race. Both were experienced recreational sailors but not hard-core racers.

Gale and Harrow set out in Daisy on Saturday morning for the 27th Annual Doublehanded Lightship Race - a 25-mile course from a starting line beside the Golden Gate Yacht Club's race deck on San Francisco's Marina Green to a navigation buoy about 12 miles offshore and back.

Exhilarating conditions

For veteran racers, Saturday's offshore conditions were exhilarating, producing big seas that the faster, lighter boats could surf back toward the Golden Gate.

"I considered it to be windy and somewhat steep but regular seas," said Lucy Mewes, the commodore of the Island Yacht Club of Alameda, who participated in Saturday's race. "It was sunny. It wasn't flat water, but it wasn't terrifying water. The seas were regular and well spaced. ... We saw a few breaking waves on the way out. We had a lot of fun. It was a great, surfing ride."

But it was also rough enough for a large wave to temporarily swamp one 22-foot sailboat. That boat, sailed by Stephen Buckingham, a highly-skilled ocean racer, recovered quickly and won its division of slower-rated boats.

Buckingham who skippered a Santana 22, said in an e-mail that he did not recall seeing Daisy. "It was pretty bumpy, and we were surprised by one wave on the way back in that swamped the cockpit," he wrote. "I don't remember seeing this boat."

Rough seas warning

The National Weather Service had broadcast a warning of rough seas outside the Golden Gate in the area of the regatta on Saturday. The forecast, which called for seas 1o to 12 feet with waves at 12 second intervals also called for occasional breakers to 16 feet during maximum ebb tidal conditions.

The warning, which included a small craft advisory for northwesterly winds up to 25 knots, was broadcast continually on the marine weather channel.

Racers said the breeze was more severe - generally 20 to 25 knots, and gusting into the 30s.

"It was a nasty day. I wouldn't have gone out in it," said Tex Hax, the owner of a 45-foot sailboat who did not participate in the race. "My first thought is that they could have called the race."

Race organizers at the Island Yacht Club, which sponsored the charity event to raise money for cerebral palsy, said the conditions were challenging but favorable.

"As far as I know, it was a normal day outside the gate," said race manager Joanne McFee. "I don't think it was bad out there at all for expert sailors, and these were all experts."

All but two of the boats that set out on the race finished it. One small sailboat abandoned the race early, deciding after passing under the Golden Gate Bridge that the sea conditions were too rough.

Daisy managed to round the "Lightbucket" navigation buoy before running into trouble.

According to the Latitude 38 magazine Web site, the last sighting of Daisy was from competitors aboard a similarly rated boat who glimpsed back now and then to see if a sail behind them was getting closer.

"About six or seven miles out, we looked and the sail was gone," Rob Tryon, skipper of a 32-foot sailboat, Feolena, was quoted as saying. "We thought it was because we were sailing faster."

David Kuettel's Serena, an ultra-fast monohull, returned to the bay in first place with a winning time of 3 hours, 8 minutes. Feolena, the last boat to finish, arrived at about 2:45 p.m.

By 5 p.m., Daisy was unaccounted for. There had been no mayday by radio, no 911 cell phone call to the Coast Guard, no distress beacon activated.

Race organizers tried to hail Daisy via marine radio, but there was no response. Gale's family alerted the Coast Guard, which began a search for the vessel Saturday night that continued into Sunday.

Just last week, Gale had paid about $1,200 for a new VHF marine radio and Global Positioning System - with a wireless, remote control device and mic that could activate those units from the cockpit.

"He was in good spirits. He was excited about the upcoming race," said Ari Castano, owner of Advanced Marine Electronics in Sausalito, whose firm installed and tested the new radio and GPS device on Daisy.

Boat still needed work

Castano said that the vessel still needed work and could have used more safety equipment.

"It's an older boat, and it needed to be rewired," said Castano, adding that Gale planned to soon have that electrical work done.

The boat was not equipped with radar, and workers did not recall seeing an inflatable life raft stowed on the deck. Some offshore sailors carry a spare marine battery well above the water line to reduce the chance of electrical failure; Daisy did not. Gale also did not have an EPIRB, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, which sends a distress signal for rescuers.

Gale had spent about $14,000 in the last six weeks on repairs at Anderson's Boat Yard in Sausalito - mainly for cosmetic repairs, but also for plumbing, fuel tanks, interior woodwork and rigging.

Race organizers required competitors to carry safety harnesses aboard, which enable sailors to tether their bodies to the boat to avoid being swept overboard. Prudent sailors use these devices offshore, but it can still be tricky and dangerous for a two-person crew to tether and re-tether to different spots of the boat in big seas.

Harrow, whose body was found Sunday morning a few miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge, was still wearing a life vest.

Bits of debris found

Searchers also found bits of debris on Sunday, including a rudder, an icebox and wooden planks believed to have come from Gale's sailboat. "The Cheoy Lee 31 is a good, sturdy boat. People have gone cruising in them across oceans," said Pat Broderick, president of the Yacht Racing Association of San Francisco Bay. "If the rudder or tiller broke off, they would have had trouble. It's a longshot, but they could've collided with one of those navigation buoys ... The shipping channel is dredged to about 55 feet, but in a lot of places it isn't that deep. Boats have hit shallow spots."

A small craft advisory is not unusual on San Francisco Bay and its approaches. However, warnings of rough conditions at the bar channel 11 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge had been posted all week. The maximum current was at four knots, a fairly strong current, about 11:45 a.m. Saturday. The forecast of occasional 16- foot breakers would mean waves more than half the length of the missing boat.

The Coast Guard granted a permit for the race, but does not warn race organizers of dangerous conditions. "Unless the Coast Guard closes the bar channel because of hazardous conditions, it is up to mariners to make their own assessment," said Dan Dewell, a Coast Guard information officer.

The victims:

The lost sailors had dedicated their lives to helping the sick, enjoying the outdoors and nurturing the environment. A12

Chronicle staff writer Carl Nolte contributed to this report. E-mail Jim Doyle at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com.

Double-Handed lightship pictures

http://lyonsimaging.smugmug.com/gallery/4524052_Amvek#266494568

In particular, cool shots of boats and Elise if you want on Page 13
Page 14 -
Page 15 -
Page 26 (picture 385)
Page 28 (picture 416)
Page 29 -
Picture 466
Picture 646
Page 52
Page 53 (closeups))

Will post more pix later on.

Another SFGate article about the lost sailors

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/18/MN1KVLFGD.DTL

Lost sailors were in race for the joy of it

Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A sailboat race 12 miles out to sea was more a recreational cruise for lifelong sailors and outdoorsmen Matthew Kirby Gale and Anthony John Harrow.

The longtime friends were in Saturday's 27th annual Double Handed Lightship charity race for the fun, not for the competition, according to relatives.

The two men left the Golden Gate Yacht Club in Gale's 31-foot sailboat Daisy Saturday morning and never returned. Harrow's body was pulled ashore near Moss Beach Sunday. Gale has not been found, but wreckage from his boat was spotted in the water.

Nobody knows what happened, but the two men were last seen struggling through 16-foot swells in the open ocean.

It was a tragic end for two men who dedicated their lives to helping the sick, enjoying the outdoors and nurturing the environment.

Gale, 68, of Mill Valley, was a retired neurologist. Known by almost everyone as Kirby, he had worked primarily for Kaiser hospitals during the past decade.

He grew up on the East Coast, graduated from Princeton University and got his medical degree from Columbia University medical school. In the mid-1970s, he moved to San Francisco, where he enrolled in a naval hospital residency program.

He lived for a time in New Mexico, but moved back to the Bay Area in 1996 after a divorce.

An outdoorsman and mountaineer, he had climbed some of the highest peaks in California, Colorado and New Mexico, according to his son, also named Matthew.

He had continued working as an adviser to hospital interns after his retirement, but spent most of his time going on adventures. He has gone trekking with friends in Tibet and Nepal and went to Africa last year, his son said.

"He really enjoyed many different things," said his son. "He's a very avid reader and was picking up new hobbies all the time. Our house is almost like a library. He would read a book or two a week, fiction and nonfiction and some academic and lighter materials, too. He was also very much an art lover."

Gale met Harrow seven years ago, and the two men seemed to hit it off right away, according to family members.

Harrow, 72, of Larkspur, was born and raised in England, but moved to the United States about 45 years ago and became a citizen.

Known by his friends as Tony, he worked for many years in the insurance industry, retiring two years ago, but he was always involved in other activities, including volunteer work helping AIDS patients.

A talented rower, he coached for a time at the Marin Rowing Association and was an avid birder and amateur botanist, according to his wife. He conducted a weekly census of birds at the Rodeo Lagoon, in the Marin Headlands, and hiked all over Marin County.

Quiet, with a wry sense of humor, Harrow enjoyed Gale's intellect.

"They were close friends," said Mrs. Harrow, who asked that her first name not be used. "They had quite the intellectual life together. They talked about opera and boats and literature and the ways of the world. They were philosophers."

Gale and Harrow enjoyed sailing, but it was a hobby for them both, according to their families. "He has been a hobbyist sailor on and off for the past 40 years, mostly just pleasure sailing," said Gale's son. "He's raced a handful of times over the years, but the boat he was sailing was not by any means a racing boat."

The two men viewed the race as an exciting challenge, and Gale even put in a new radio system with a telephone line in preparation for the big day.

"They had not done a race like this," Harrow's wife said. "I think they thought they were going out for a day on the ocean. It should have been pretty easy. That's what they thought."

They were last seen alive hitting swells so high that it was difficult for the racers to see the other boats, Coast Guard officials told the family.

"There is some sort of comfort," Gale's son said, "knowing that it happened when he was doing something he enjoyed."

San Francisco Chronicle Article

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/17/MNHDVL22R.DTL

S.F. charity sailboat race ends in tragedy

Marisa Lagos,Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writers

Monday, March 17, 2008

(03-16) 19:12 PDT San Francisco -- A sailing race from the San Francisco Bay into the open sea turned deadly this weekend when two Marin County sailors and their boat vanished in heavy swells.

One of the men's bodies washed up Sunday morning, while the other remains missing.

The race from the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco to a buoy about 12 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, began Saturday on a clear winter morning marked by 12- to 16-foot swells and high winds, authorities said. But when the three dozen competing boats finally struggled back to port at the end of the day, the 32-foot Daisy was missing.

The first clues to what might have happened emerged at 10:30 a.m. Sunday when officials retrieved debris from the boat about 5 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. And then, an hour later, the body of one of the missing sailors, Anthony John Harrow, 72, of Larkspur, was pulled out of the water at Moss Beach in San Mateo County, officials said.

The other sailor, and owner of the boat, 68-year-old Matthew Kirby Gale, has not been found. The Coast Guard suspended the search for Gale on Sunday night.

Gale's family members waited anxiously Sunday for news about the retired neurologist, who is married.

His stepdaughter, Megan Howard, said Sunday by phone from the family home in Mill Valley that Gale was an experienced sailor who did some racing. She was crying, and declined to comment further.

Coast Guard Capt. Paul Gugg declined to speculate about what went wrong on the boat. He said that sailing in any vessel can be dangerous, particularly in the open ocean but that Saturday's race took place in particularly treacherous waters.

"Racing is a thrill sport, and they went out in challenging conditions," said Gugg. "We don't know if they did anything wrong; we don't know if there was an equipment failure. It's risky and very challenging out there." A person cannot survive more than four hours in 50- to 55-degree water, the estimated temperature this weekend. But Coast Guard officials said that they did not know what type of emergency equipment, including a lifeboat, the pair might have had onboard.

Coast Guard officials have been unable to locate any Mayday calls or other calls for help from the boat in their records, officials said.

"We are working feverishly," Coast Guard Cmdr. Pat DeQuattro said earlier in the day. "We want to push until we cannot reasonably assume success."

At 6 p.m. Sunday, the Coast Guard suspended the search due to lack of new information and an "extremely low probability of survival due to water temperature and sea state," according to a Coast Guard news release.

DeQuattro said that weather and sea conditions were likely factors in any problems the men ran into, noting that the swells reached at least 16 feet and winds were hovering around 30 mph. The Coast Guard had issued a small craft advisory, but the men were sailing a fairly large boat called a Cheoy Lee Offshore 31.

"I would not underestimate the weather in this," said DeQuattro. "It's a challenging environment when seas are 12 to 16 feet, and it can be arduous and dangerous."

The debris fetched from the water included wooden plankings, a refrigerator door and a rudder that matched descriptions of the Daisy, a white and green sailboat. The pieces were floating in the area where the Daisy and the crew were last seen around 1 p.m. Saturday, said DeQuattro.

Based on inspections of the debris, authorities did not believe the boat crashed into another vessel, said Gugg, but he would not rule it out as a possibility.

The men left Richardson Bay Marina around 9 a.m. to participate in the Island Yacht Club's 27th annual Double Handed Lightship race, a benefit for United Cerebral Palsy.

Gale's family called the Coast Guard around 6 p.m. Saturday after the pair failed to return from the race, which was scheduled to end around 4 p.m. The Coast Guard and other local law enforcement agencies immediately launched a search from air, water and land, which continued through Sunday. Authorities also investigated all vessel traffic headed in and out of San Francisco Bay hoping to gain more information about Daisy's whereabouts.

Janet Frankel, staff commodore for the Island Yacht Club, said it was sunny and clear when the approximately 40 boats participating in the race left from the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco, where the race began.

"The weather forecast predicted thunderstorms but that didn't pan out," she said. "All the (other) racers came back by 2:45 p.m., and we started hailing Daisy then, not because we were concerned but mostly because we wanted to go home. We wanted to know what its intentions were."

Frankel said she did not know Gale or Harrow personally. She could not recall a similar mishap in the club's 27 years of hosting the race, but said it's a difficult course.

"I've raced it ... and boats sometimes don't finish," she said. "At one point (Saturday) the wind died down and the boats were just bobbing around for 45 minutes. Then they all came back in quite a cluster."

Frankel described Gale's boat as a "full-keeled oceangoing vessel," and said the craft was large and well suited for such a race.

"His was not the boat we were worried about, it was the smaller boats we were worried about," said Frankel.

Anyone with information should call (415) 399-3547.

Daisy...

:(

http://www.examiner.com/a-1283048~Coast_Guard_suspends_search_for_sailor.html

Local Coast Guard suspends search for sailor
Katie Worth, The Examiner
2008-03-17 11:00:00.0

SAN FRANCISCO -
The two men who went missing Saturday aboard the 32-foot sailboat .Daisy,. competed in a boat race despite an advisory warning against the sailing of small crafts as high seas and high winds swept the Bay this weekend.

One of the two sailors, Anthony Harrow, 72, of Larkspur, would never return alive from Saturday.s Double Handed Lightship Race, a daylong competition organized by the Island Yacht Club. Harrow.s body was found by San Mateo County sheriff.s deputies around 11:20 a.m. Sunday at a tide pool area near Moss Beach in San Mateo County, about 20 miles south of the spot the sailboat was last seen.

An hour before Harrow.s body was found, a rutter, wood planks and other debris from the boat were found about four nautical miles west of Daly City, U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Lauren Kolumbic said.

His sailing mate, 67-year-old Kirby Gale, is still missing. The search for Gale was suspended at 6 p.m. Sunday, Kolumbic said.

The Coast Guard had conducted three search operations, Kolumbic said, but decided to call the search off late Sunday, based on the lack of new information and the low probability that Gale is still alive.

Though Saturday was mostly sunny, a small-craft warning had been issued because of high winds and high seas. Sea swells reached 16 feet, and gusts of wind blew up to 35 knots, National Weather Service forecaster Bob Benjamin said.

A small-craft warning applies to boats less than about 65 feet, Coast Guard officials said.

It was pretty bumpy out there,. said Stephen Buckingham, the winner of the race in the same division as Gale.s boat. .The night before, the forecast was 16-foot swells at 16-second intervals and I was thinking of not going..

The daylong race, which took Daisy and about 45 other boats from Sausalito to a buoy about 14 miles west of the bridge and back, was scheduled to end around 4 p.m. Daisy was about 7 nautical miles offshore at 1 p.m. Saturday when the boat was last seen, said Pat DeQuatro, the Coast Guard.s chief for response operations.

When the boat had not returned by 6 p.m., the Coast Guard began a search for the men. The initial search involved two coast guard boats, a helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft and covered 1,347 square miles, as far south as Monterey Bay, Kolumbic said.

Saturday.s incident comes less than four months after two fishermen were lost at sea after going crab fishing off the San Mateo County coast.

Officials from the club could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Big Daddy 2008 Landscape

Some pictures from Mark and some from http://cbergstedt. myphotoalbum. com/view_ album.php? set_albumName= album61

Big Daddy Elise Crew

minus Nathan who was taking the picture...and plus a Small Daddy on the right-hand side.

Mr. Cranky

Sometimes you need to learn to survive on native food. These skills can come in handy if you end up on a desert island in the middle of nowhere. This is a risk that all sailors are well aware of as it might be their chance to meet Tom Hanks. And if you are a vegetarian, you need to set up practice times. They won't happen naturally.

Calistoga Water

I am sure that you will be pleased to know that Calistoga is sponsoring the Pacific Cup and will donate many-a gallons to every Pac Cup participant...

This is very cool because if I get stranded on a liferaft again (remember, Nathan booked us a FOUR-person raft so we can have a little party in there) then I'll have some really high quality water around. I will put the bottle of wine in my grab bag and we'll be all set.

Seriously, it's incredible how people are able to market...water...H2O...

Oh, and we were definitely told not to bring a book as there will be no time for reading. I agree with this statement while you are actively racing your boat. If you end up in a liferaft, you will face the most boring time of your life and you'll be prepared to die for something to read, even if it is the finance pages of the Wall Street Journal. So if you want my advice, bring some really nice reading material in your grab bag...

Navigation

One of the topics at the Pacific Cup seminar was around navigation. When someone asked about bringing a sextant and knowing celestial navigation, the answer was: "bring two GPS"

Navigation for the Pac Cup is overall pretty straightforward - strategy and local tactics around squalls, etc...to avoid being stuck in the hole behind the squalls but where you're going is quite straightforward. The further South you go, the more distance you are adding to your destination. The further North you go, the more likely you are to hit the High and end up in the No Wind dread zone.

It is straightforward if you equip yourself with the right tools...Viewfax to view weather info, "Expedition" was recommended for race tactics. It takes parameters for any given boat + weather info from your weather faxes and probably has some general info about the area you are navigating in and will recommend a course. Apparently, it is not always accurate...sometimes, it thinks that you are in a storm when you are really enjoying a nice and pleasant sunny afternoon. So its suggestions are not always perfect.

Gone are the romantic times of meeting with the moon and stars to find out your position...

Nathan and I are taking a Celestial Navigation class (right now in fact!) - someone told us about these solar flares that can disrupt and shut down the entire GPS system for a while...And it's fun. I like maths.

I really need to figure out what to do with a laptop. I am looking at very low power consumption laptops. They all take 12V so we could get a car charger and hook it to the boat battery. Since we won't be using the laptop very often, this should last us quite a while. If you have any recommendations, let me know.

We are buying all this big equipment now as we want to have time to see it fail if it must ;-)

Engine

We decided not to do anything about the engine - we were looking for an engine that has a fuel pump and a fuel connector. All of these engines weigh half my weight and it would be quite hard for me to mount it safely (if I can manage at all!)

We will set up a way to solidly anchor a gas tank at the stern and have a piece of rubber hose go down to the engine, which should ensure a continuous flow of gas when we want to refill (which we have to do every 45 minutes or so)

So that's one item we can cross off our list

Weather at the Pacific Cup seminar

This seminar was a day-long business during which you drink a lot of hot tea. There were several topics in there and frankly, I didn't learn much during the seminar. It was great to see all these people who will be racing in the Pac Cup. It really does feel like a great community. I am sure that it will be war on the water all the way to the finish line, unless someone is in distress but until then, everyone is helping out with advice to make sure that all these boats make the start line in great shape. And it already gave us a sense of excitement...

I can't wait to do this race!!

First, there was a weather lecture...Bottom line - after the start, every participant is only allowed to download free weather data. You can get raw files (that feeds into any kind of SW that can read and plot them) and you can get data after some clever statistical modeling on top of it.

And you have some cool-looking piece of software that you can buy that will take into account characteristics of your boat and weather data to recommend a perfect course to Hawaii, trying to avoid the South Pole most of the time.

There are also three areas during the Pacific Cup:
A- first three days, cold cold cold summer like reaching/beating...
B- X days, not much going on...
C- we catch the trade winds and have a blast under France all the way to Hawaii

Bottom line and lesson: we need to figure out how to get a laptop to work...and get sailmail and some cool piece of software...

Pacific Cup Seminar (courtesy of Oceanaire)

Nathan and I attended the Pacific Cup seminar a few weeks back at the Vallejo Maritime Academy...

I thought that you'd enjoy the following - from http://evk4.blogspot.com/2008/02/life-raft-explosions.html

"That's what I expected. I wanted to see the damned thing hit the water and inflate with a loud smoky POW! that would reverberate through the entire poolhouse. The last time I opened a life raft was in 1991 or 1992, my Dad and I knew we had to repack the raft so we took it out on the water, threw it in and watched it inflate. If I remember, we held onto the painter and it inflated as it hit the water. So, I expected something like that but with pyrotechnics.

Sal from Sal's Inflatables threw it in the water :


And it sat there, floating:


It turns out you then have to pull the painter and watch as it slowly slowly inflates:


And, finally, after an eternity, you could climb in:


It was all fairly unimpressive if you were hoping for more but at least I have a refesher on what to do 16 years after my last practice. The person truly unimpressed was Nat (all the way on the left) who less than two years ago had to sit in one of these while watching her boat sink from a whale attack.

"Been there, done that" would make a good caption."

Shipping Elise

I booked the return trip for Elise. Sailing a 27-footer against the wind for weeks on end isn't the most comfortable experience and finding a delivery crew would be quite tough. Besides, we have a race schedule to get back to as soon as the race is over and shipping the boat will be much faster than sailing it. She should be back within a week of boarding the ship. Plus, there's no reason why Elise shouldn't enjoy a little bit of sailing herself, when someone else is doing the work.

Shipping Elise back means first shipping the trailer to Hawaii and the pair back to San Francisco.

There were basically two options: one via Matson and out of Oakland and one via Pasha Hawaii Transport Lines, out of San Diego. The latter works with boat haulers and offers special deals for Pac Cup racers. This is the solution that we opted for. No hassle and cheaper than the other one for our boat. Don't take our word for it. Ask a quote from both and see what works best for you if you are considering sending your boat back by freight.

Load a Boat will come pick up the trailer right at its spot, somewhere around the end of June. They will drive it down to San Diego, put it on a ship to Hawaii and Pasha will send it over to Hawaii for free. Then Elise/trailer will get together, the mast will come down (us or Boat a Load for a little extra of course), board a Pasha ship and 6-8 days later arrive at San Diego. Load a Boat will then drive the set up to the Saint Francis...It couldn't be any easier! We now have all the time in the world to actually prepare the race!

Early August, we're back 100% into the Bay racing game.

It will be Elise's first cruise :)

Head and Tale

Getting a-"head" of the game - preparing for field testing

One definition of "comfort"

Bathroom design at sea is a big problem for me. And it can be quite a challenge on a race boat where weight matters so much (the more you weigh, the slower you are). We will already be ultra-loaded with all sorts of absolutely necessary offshore items but that is no reason to add un-necessary weight in places.

For those you are just joining us, a "head" is one side of a coin, as well as what hosts our thinking matter. It also happens to be a sea toilet. What it is called a head, I am not quite sure. Perhaps because setting it up right requires a lot of thinking...and the amount of space available to the user tend to be as small as a coin?

The additional consideration is comfort. Perhaps a short description of one of my previous adventures will shed some light on the matter.

Imagine a 40-footer whose name I shall not mention. The above-mentioned "head" is a regular white bucket. It sits in an open closet. There is no door and there is no curtain. Privacy is achieved by verbal warning in a language that other crew members can understand, or by distributing smelly French cheese around a semi-circle of security, a few feet away from the entrance of the throne room.

Balance can be a challenge. First of all the bucket is not tied to the floor, or to anything. Hence, in order for it to remain upright at sea, you need to keep it in-between tight legs. There is no door to keep you, your load and your head inside, so your hands are busy holding something so you don't end up on the other side of the corridor, across from where you are, with your pants down.

Interestingly, on this particular boat, there was a stove right to the side of the head room which did have some headroom (see? I have one good thing to say about this arrangement). At night, that stove served to boil water for coffee. Nighttime is also the time when moving around can become risky and burning yourself on a stove before entering a bathroom with no running water isn't the most pleasant of all past-times discovered by man since the beginning of times.

Finally, once you are done, the results of your hard work need to be disposed of overboard. This means a trip across the main cabin, up the companionway, to the leeward side of the boat. At night or in rough weather, it might require you to put on your gear and a harness. This can be made even more complicated if you are handling a leaky bucket as was the case for me at that time...Or you can pass up the bucket and bury any self-consciousness deep inside it.

Anyway, on Elise, I have to say that I was the main opponent of the idea of using a bucket. The chemical head was far too heavy and bulky to stay too long on the boat though. Perhaps a few races and a hint of fleet competitiveness did the trick...We turned to a bucket.

However, it is not leaky and we are maintaining a minimum level of comfort by retrofitting a nice soft seat (this is not hard plastic!). So there's no shower on Elise but you get a reading salon!

Elise's Annual Cleaning

Check out the fleece...

My mom is visiting which is very handy. What do moms do when they visit their children? They do a lot of work with their children, even when they claim that they are visiting just to rest. Just an observation on my part of course.

Anyhow, mom and I did some work on Elise this week (as well as on the Sarcoma Cup preparation).

1) We removed all the mildew from Elise and treated her with a "mildew blocker"
2) We cleaned up all the items contained in various containers on Elise (well, mom did)
3) We rinsed the boat's V-berth and the two buckets
4) We applied anti-rust all over the boat metal parts
4) We cleaned up everything that can be cleaned without vacuuming (taking everything out, cleaning up, waiting for it to dry and putting everything back in)
5) We removed unnecessary items: a harness, a tether, some spare lines, etc...to make sure the boat is as light as possible for Bay racing
6) We treated the inside wood on the settees and the bulkhead with teak oil (and cleaned them up)
7) We put some order into the sink, navigation table and everything else that needed some help in that department
8) We took away with us most of the users manuals that were getting moldy on the boat
9) We aired out the boat as she needed this quite a bit after the various local deluges :)

Elise looks quite beautiful now...wait, not just now of course. And it feels so satisfying when you do something like this - as if your own thoughts and life become orderly and clean all of the sudden. Hugely therapeutic.

A nice hot drink at THE Peet's Coffee at Berkeley was a well-deserved reward.

Berkeley Midwinters - writeup by Eric

Elise' modus operandi is the following:
The driver focuses on driving and together with the trimmers on boat speed
The lead trimmer also makes sure that boat operations/maneuvers go smoothly
The tactician is focused on everything that is not happening ON the boat, but AROUND the boat and calls all the shots (tack, jibe, follow this course, do this, do that, etc...). Everyone can share opinions, recommendation, information obviously to make this happen, the final call is made by the tactician. It takes a lot of concentration and attention to do a good job, and if we have enough crew, it is worth having a dedicated person to do thta.

Here are our positions for the race:
- Helm: Nat
- Tactics: Eric
- Trim 1 upwind and Foredeck downwind: Eric
- Trim 2 upwind and Trim 1 downwind: Dayne
- Pit and Trim 2 downwind: Jacob

"Start? You mean there is supposed to be a start? After Nathalie’s mentioned donuts, there was an initial attempt which was aborted after a few minutes when the race committee realized that there was no way for everybody to make their appointed start times. The second delay lasted until about 80% of the fleet was on the right side of the line and there was a little more wind. Sandwiches were brought and eagerly eaten. Miscellaneous other food and drink were had. Nat brought out cherries and worried about stains. Can you tell it was a long wait?

The start itself found us buried in the third tier at the favored(boat) end of the line. We tacked when we could and managed good enough boat speed to pass two boats and make another one nervous. We tacked towards the next mark and proceeded well. A couple of tacks later found us loosing to the mark (blame the tactician for this one) we tried to pinch it up and lost all boat speed. This lost us the boats we had worked hard to get by. Once around the mark we briefly tried the spinnaker only to find the wind was shifting too far to carry it. We abandoned the attempt and dropped the spinnaker. In the process we gained back a position. The next rounding saw a good set and a nice spinnaker run to the finish (shortened course by the race committee). At least we were not last.

We managed good boat speed on most points of sail and this bodes well. A little miscommunication at the start and a bad tack call or two dropped us back. Boat speed is getting better and the crew work was good. Light air and a delayed start makes for a great training venue. There were no major sail handling screw ups. Weight placement was crucial and helped the boat speed.

Once the race was complete we hoisted a glass of wine to the skipper and in thanks for a great day of sailing. For those of us that hadn’t been out in a while this was just ticket to remind us of why we go sailing. Fresh air, fun, and great friends."

Berkeley Midwinters - action shots

Well...as much action as you can get in no-wind wind down on wine type weather.

Strange. When Jacob takes the helm, the boat goes a lot faster.

Assorted lifejackets!

Trying to find the committee boat...

Berkeley Midwinters - relax

I am hoping that Eric, our tactician during that race, will do a writeup. Meanwhile, here are some pictures!
During the postponment period... (over 2 hours...)

Dayne is reading up on race tactics. We will set up an exam for him next time.

The fleet was rather "board", turning anticlockwise in a big giant snail around XOC, following the committee boat (trying to figure out where it should anchor...)

Nathan is quoted on Norcal Sailing Weekend Updates!

http://www.norcalsailing.com/archives/Entries/2008/1/26_Three_Bridge_Fiasco.html

“We had a good first part. We’ll find out when we see the score sheet for the second part,” said Nathan Bossett of his race with Nat Criou aboard the San Francisco-based Express 27 Elise. “When the wind died in Raccoon Strait, we lost track of everybody. We were in the counter-clockwise crowd, meaning Treasure Island first, Red Rock second, and Blackaller last.”