LongPac 2009 More Pictures.

Heather is pretty focused - note the handheld VHF with GPS clipped onto her lifejacket. If she falls overboard, Heather would b eable to radio back to the boat her coordinates.

A little heeling means a little wind...the band-aid looking patch is to protect the tiller autopilot plug.

Heather checking the trim
WARMTH!

Economy of movements. The tiller had to stay really really still not to slow down the boat.


I think that this picture was taken at the same time as when I was wearing shorts...

Our friends the freighters

We saw quite a few of those...

turnaround point

believe it or not, that was our turnaround point. We stored the position and time as an MOB mark in the handheld GPS (you can 'architect' that). Interestingly, a few minutes before, the wind shifted. If we had continued down to the West, we could have set up a kite. As we had to turn around, we found ourselves beating up again. unbelievable. The wind never blows from the North East, except when I don't want it to I guess...

Life on board

5 o'clock tea. Elise is a very civilized vessel. You will notice the Blue/Yellow/Black color assortment. This is not a coincidence. Elise is a very stylished vessel.

Forward
Must be the one watch I was on with sun out...

A 'Go Girl' drink!!! How fun!

Eating breakfast. Who said that girls can't easily multitask?


Notice the Blue/Red color assortment? This is not a coincidence. Elise is a stylish vessel.
My breakfast: oatmeal and blueberries and bran muffins in crumbs. And the transponders, attached to the boat by lines to two padeyes, and on top of the liferaft (which we were not supposed to walk on either)

Heather getting ready for lunch!

and what a lunch, look at this salad!!!

Got No Wind and Water

We mean it...(John, I hope that you liked the reference to Got Wind and Water!)

Once we even took down the genoa as it was flogging way too much. Later, we would decide to leave it up so we can take advantage of the wind as soon as it would go above 0.3 knots...

LongPac Boat Shots

the minute the sun was out (usually on Heather's watches...), the boat was transformed into a big massive laundry shop.

Mainsheet coiled up and ready to go. New cup holders with some ginger ale (everything was ginger-flavored on this trip for some reason....) and the cockpit handheld VHF

I hear that Magellan called the Pacific Ocean, Pacific Ocean because it was pretty tame...I think that I can see how that idea came through his head now...

Nice view of the new adjustable car system which we used quite a bit on this trip.

Wind!!!! (must have been on one of Heather's watches...)

We did run the reefing lines...but as you can imagine didn't have much of a use for them this time around...





Finally some sun! Quickly putting foul weather gear and undergarment up on deck for drying!



Radar reflector.
This is a requirement (especially in fog and at night) but Heather made a good point. Big ships will probably filter out small boat traffic, otherwise, they'd see spots on their radar all the time. and we also know from experience that they don't monitor Channel 16 on VHF very well...The only effective protection we could think of was to proactively find out where the ships are and stay out of their way. The AIS system helps you do that.


Our TackTick stopped working for some reason. It looks rather fried even though we didn't do anything special with it. Not a problem but alongside the spinnaker pole sleeve, a cup holder and a hammock, it is one of the casualties of the LongPac.

Long Pac Random Photos

The good news on a East-West course is that we can just pivot our solar panel to take advantage of maximum sun (especially when it is NOT sunny...) - there always was enough power throughout the day to recharge the batteries and we did not use our autopilot (not yet recalibrated after the Pac Cup mishap on the sensor so not ready to use)
This is our sole source of power (we have a spare panel just in case there's a problem with this one. We did hit some weird reading with our smaller battery (we have enough power for nav lights and instruments for the entire night on one battery so it wasn't a problem for us, that's why we have redundancy for this kind of trip) so I will look into this. If both batteries work great, we can also do a lot more cabin lights, GPS on all the time, etc...otherwise, we just need to be a bit more thrifty in our use of power devices.

You can also see a heaving line hanging off the stern lifeline. Not a requirement for this race, but something that I have find particularly useful, actually, in light winds!

Hollywood star - Heather.


Look, a whale!!!!

We actually saw whales (or heard) four times

1. I see something big in the distance, going North to South and spitting water...
2. We have a whale (and baby whale following in its wake) about a boat length away, traveling South to North. We could have touched the whale with the boat hook. We were close enough to count the barnicles on its skin (which looked rock hard). The whale was pretty oblivious of our presence but we turned away from it to make sure that there was not accidental hitting, especially given my relationship with sea mammals.
3. For two entire night watches (with NO wind, so we were not going anywhere), we heard a whale breathe right next to the boat. We think it was asleep as it wasn't moving either obviously. We kept hearing this at the same place. We tried to use our spot light to locate it but we couldn't easily find it on the water. Sound carries very well over water so it may have been out of the range of the spot light.
4. Coming back and as we were getting about to reach the Farallon Islands, a whale traveling west with a big spout!
   

'Nat, can you pop your head out?'
Nat (in the process of changing, thus not very dressed) pops her head out to realize that Heather was arming a camera...

This is the new system that we have put in place to cleat the
Sunblock (not super useful during this trip), winch handle and drying goretex sock...

Competition. We couldn't tell who that was. We think it was Taz!

Breakfast time: cooler box with on-deck food ready for the driver. Cups, powdered milk, bran muffins (ready to be spooned out after a couple of days), coffee (you can see the press) and oatmeals with blueberries and strawberries. On a chicks' boat with no wind, we eat WELL.

The gas tank was just put outside because it was find to be leaking inside the bilge. We waited until we couldn't smell any more gas fume inside to use the stove again. So much for the advertised 'no spill' technology on these guys...

Changing up to a genoa...

We didn't keep our jib up for very long. As soon as we were out of the main channel leading to the Golden Gate bridge, the wind dropped so much that it warranted our bigger genoa.

Elise has hanks on all her headsails. This has drawbacks as one sail has to come down before we can raise another headsail but out in the ocean, especially short-handed, we consider it much safer. If you have hanks, you can easily lower your sail by releasing the halyard. The sail will come down onto the deck. You can also raise it again without having to go to the foredeck. With tuff luff (a track that the sail goes up through), you need a pre-feeder to raise it again, you also may have to go to the foredeck for lowering the sail as there is much more friction in the system and the sail may not go down). Older designs would have hanks and TWO headstays (huge additional windage) to get around the problem. Performance-wise, both types of pretty much equivalent if well done.

Since we do a lot of short-handed sailing, and out in the ocean, we opted for safety over speed and convenience. It does mean that it is a challenge when we make a sail change upwind. (downwind, we can make a sail change while the spinnaker is up and there is much less of a hit in performance).

Heather is demo'ing how we can get the most of out this.

1. remove the LOWEST hanks (2 should do it) from the jib up on the forestay.
   
2. attach the tack and all the hanks of the new sails in the space thus freed - also attach the lazy sheet to the new sail
   
3. lower the jib and remove the hanks from bottom to the top.
4. when you get to the halyard, quickly put the halyard onto the new sail
5. quick tack and up goes the other sail (we're beating upwind and tacking is an option in our case. If not, then just be quick!)
6. attach the now lazy sheet to the new sail. On the new tack everything will be set right!
   

Heather has just switched the halyard from the old to the new headsail and is getting ready to jump up the genoa

New genoa is up, Heather is bungee'ing down the jib. Wind was so light that we couldn't point very well.

Heather is making adjustment in jib car (with the new adjustable car system!) to finish off the sail change settings

Heather is attaching the second sheet and we will be good to go!

LongPac Pictures from SSS site

From - http://sfbaysss.org/Longpac_2009.html

Long Pac photos - first pass

We saw quite a bit of marine life...including a sea lion who decided to ram into Elise a couple of times...

Off to Point Reyes

Leaving on a foggy and rainy San Francisco summer day...

Full gallery is here

Long Pac, Track Appears Stale

The track at magnatrax hasn't been updating recently even though the underlying data seems to be there. Perhaps it gets overloaded after a certain number of points.

I think Elise is about 2/3 of the way back (~5/6 complete with the whole race) and crossed 124 deg West at about 0330 this morning.

The weather forecast last night was almost humorously bad (very light with at least one or two major shifts per day for the next couple of days). Now the situation looks a lot better; they should have 5-15 today though it might be swinging around behind them.

Long Pac, Under 100 Miles to Go

Elise has less than 100 miles to go, but the forecast is for 5-10 NW switching to S.

Normally, 20 hours * 5 kts = 100 nm might not be a bad basis for a guess for an E27, but in a dying breeze they'll be hard pressed to make that good (probably steering very hot angles just to keep the boat moving and the sails full).

Taz (the single hander) is pretty close, as is the Moore 24 skippered by Andy Hamilton- looking at the positions over the course of today, they may well have seen each other and possibly even sailed in close proximity on the same tack for a while.

Elise's most recent position report hasn't been posted yet, but it look like she may be splitting with the above-mentioned boats and heading north.

Long Pac - Halfway Point, for Real This Time

Elise has turned the corner. Great White has a pretty solid lead at the moment, but Nat and Heather are now pretty even (on longitude) with Taz (but George is singlehanding).

The forecast is for 5-15 kts the next couple of days, and the recent racer tracks out at the 200 nm offshore area seem to have slowed down- wind drop? The downhill portion of the race seems to have been brisk for the leaders; we can hope the same will hold for Elise.

We'll see if they make it to work Monday morning!