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Shorthanded Racing in San Francisco Bay

2002 TRANSPAC News and Position Reports

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Sunday June 16

0900 hours radio check in

via SailMail from Steve Wilson on board Westerly
YachtLatitudeLongitudeNotes
Rusalka36.00125.21
Alchera36.09125.30
Tease35.33124.36All is going well.
Endangered Species35.46124.33Did not get on ssb but all was ok on vhf last night. [this 0900 position report relayed at 2100]
Seabird36.11125.26
Zapped35.32124.39
Westerly35.35124.24
Haulback35.39124.01

2100 hours radio check in

via SSB from Rob Macfarlane listening in
YachtLatitudeLongitudeNotes
Rusalka35.10126.44Found flying fish on the foredeck this morning, but decided not to cook it up for breakfast.
Alchera35.04126.58Likewise woke up to a fish on board, but as Mark already has 20 cans of fish, he sent it back overboard.
TeaseDid not come up for position
Endangered Species34.49125.54Having trouble with 4.009, using 4A as backup channel. Position courtesy of relay by Seabird
Seabird35.04126.37
Zapped34.18125.52Also having problem with 4.009, position relay from Seabird
Westerly34.26125.19Enjoying a wonderful lasagna dinner, followed up with coffee and reading up on interpreting 500 mb weather faxes.
Haulback34.35125.07

Day 2 of the SSS TransPac, from Alchera 6/16/02

Day begins at 4 in the morning when the autopilot fails and begins heading off in a random direction. Jump up quick and get to the helm to disengage. Surprise! It won't disengage! Run back down to the nav station to see if the other control head works. It does. Disengage autopilot. Run back to the helm to try and sort things out and get the boat tacked back over and going in the right direction. Control unit at helm is dead. Ok, now how do I turn the autopilot back on? Quick run back down to the nav station before the boat notices I'm gone and turn it on there. Whew! It works.

10 minutes later autopilot fails again. See previous paragraph.

Fortunately that's the last failure for awhile, the controller at the helm station seems to be totally dead, and during it's dying spasms was sending bad data into the system. Hopefully it will stay good and dead. I've got the controller at the nav station and a remote handheld unit I can get by with, so long as the bad unit doesn't spasm anymore.

Morning check-in. Seabird and Rusalka are hot on my tail. Got to put on some speed, we're getting into the high and it's time to use my high tech roller furling code one spinnaker that I brought along just for this situation. Get the spinnaker hooked up and hauled to the masthead. Top part of the spinnaker unwraps and then wraps again backwards before I can get it unfurled. This makes it impossible to unfurl. Drop it back down on deck to sort things out. Haul it up again. Does the same thing. There's no way I can get this thing up and ready to unfurl before it does it's little figure 8 twisty thingy. This worked OK on the test sail when there were three of us. Singlehanded is a different story. Wish I had a snuffer sock on it now.

Drop the sail back into the boat. Maybe I can unwrap the thing and steal a snuffer sock from my reaching spinnaker. Spend an hour trying to unroll the code one into some sort of shape that can be put in a snuffer sock. Not easy. In fact, I never manage to do it. By this time the wind has shifted anyway, which will allow me to use the reaching spinnaker I was just about to cannibalize. Give up on the code one.

Start hooking up the reaching spinnaker. Furl the jib. Haul up the spinnaker sock. Oops, you never fixed that snuffer line problem you were going to get to. Drop it back in the boat. Unfurl the jib again. Fix the snuffer line problem. Furl the jib again. Raise the spinnaker. Finally. Now we're cookin'. Unfortunately, it's now 4:00 in the afternoon - 6 hours spent working on problems of one sort or another.

All this time the weather has been beautiful. 10 to 15 knot winds, blue skies, warm breezes - almost like we're in the tropics already. Too bad I couldn't just sit back and enjoy it. But now, for now, all is well.

- Alchera

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