Halfway There!

Hello Westward Fans!

Well, we've made it past the halfway mark (about 1112 miles to finish). That happened about noon Westward time (which is the same as Pacific time) yesterday. We celebrated with carne asada tacos and a beer for lunch. As this is being written we have about 900 miles to go to Honolulu.

Yesterday was a mixed bag race-wise. If you've been reading the position reports, you've probably guessed that we spent a lot of the day in light air. For most of the daylight hours, we were averaging close to 6 knots. This was below our usual. The weather was beautiful, though, and it is hard to complain too much when you're spending a beautiful day sailing.

Thankfully, by the time night rolled around, the wind picked up. We spent about three hours averaging 9 knots down the moon river. Absolutely beautiful sailing. When this boat gets going downwind (her favorite) she pretty much sails herself and it's really fun. As night wore on, the wind kept building and all hands were called for sail changes and gybes. It's become a running joke on board that when we do change a sail, we often change more than once and sometimes end right back with the sail combination we started with within a short time. Last night was no exception. Let's just say that we're becoming very good at sail changes and spinnaker packing. Fortunately, the sail we left up for the 2 am watch was the heavy-air runner because they saw some big winds with a squall and spent most of their watch seeing speeds of almost 15 knots on the speedometer.

When the position reports came this morning, we were able to see how we performed compared with the competition. We are still third in our division, which is good. We had a slower day than Dorade (who we haven't seen since the last blog post), and are now about 14 miles and almost 10 hours behind them. They are currently the division leaders. We are in 22 overall, which isn't surprising considering that all the boats have started, so we expected that some of the super fast boats would pass us.

Today has been great sailing, and we're doing our best to keep Westward pointed to Hawaii and going fast. Right now, we are routinely seeing 12+ knots on the speedometer as we surf down waves. Now, we just need that to be our average speed rather than our max. Everyone think fast thoughts for us!

Aloha!



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