Night Four

Hola Westward Fans!

After a couple of days of winds up to 30 knots and boatspeeds not often seen on our old girl, the winds and seas have started to calm. The crew is currently sitting up in the cockpit enjoying some Mint Milanos and the sunset after a leisurely dinner at watch change. The weather has started to warm a bit and it's drier on deck than it has been the last 48 hours. Even though we're not going as fast, the change in conditions is nonetheless welcome.

We've had a little bit of everything this race. At the start, as you saw if you were tracking us on Yellowbrick and we mentioned in a previous blog, the winds were light and we had to work hard to get everything we could out of Westward. The newer, lighter boats were able to sail away from us a bit and got into the wind more quickly. We did find the wind, though, in a big way and had a couple of days in it. Yesterday, we sailed over 200 miles in 24 hours, which is pretty good for us...and good news, too. This particular race has a time limit for boats to finish of 5pm on Thursday. After our slow start, we weren't sure that we would be able to make it in the time limit. With our high average speeds and miles of the last couple of days, it's looking more and more possible that we will finish on time.

Some boats have already finished. The first boat to finish, a multihull named Mighty Merloe, passed us on Sunday night. While the non-beards were on watch (that's Willie, Graham, and Alli), Graham noticed a red light directly off our stern. We looked at the computer and saw that it was our friend Mighty Merloe. Within about 30 minutes, they passed us and were again out of sight. We learned that they finished with an average speed higher than our highest speed. It really was something to watch.

All in all, our trip so far has been great. We've seen whales and dolphin, with a school of 50 or so following us at sunset yesterday...the sunset dolphins! We've had some great and challenging sailing conditions and are all learning a lot. We've been putting the boat through her paces and she's been handling it pretty well. During some of our windier moments, there's been a lot of groaning and creaking down below, and that wasn't all from the old guys. Some of it was the boat.

One of the more entertaining parts of sailing this old girl is that some of our sails are older than some of our crew. On Transpac, the kids got a kick out of flying the Great Pumpkin (a bright orange spinnaker) for a while. The thing was older than any of the kids (Alli was 32 at the time) and smelled just like a sail locker. Often, spinnakers are on the loud side because the material is so crinkly. The Great Pumpkin was quiet as a mouse. When the wind started to die today, we needed a replacement for the sail we ripped the other night. Fortunately, we have the Golden Lion on board...a sail that's probably more than 20 years old and, as you've probably gleaned from the name, is white and bright gold. It didn't smell as badly as the Great Pumpkin (which, by the way is Alli's bunkmate and Alli was the happiest girl in the world when it was finally dry enough to open the portholes), but it sure was quiet. We flew the Golden Lion for several hours until the wind died enough to put up one of our bigger, newer sails, which will probably fly most of the rest of the race.

Our crew has been getting along nicely. Lots of laughs and stories. As the only female on board, we thought Alli was helping to keep things clean (in a metaphorical sense, not a literal sense--Willie is in charge of overall cleanliness). But, seems we may have been too optimistic. When we took the Golden Lion down today, Alli, Graham, and Zack were downstairs putting the sails in their bags and Alli told Zack he could go into the fresh air if he wanted. It was hot and gross down below. His response? No. I'd rather be down here stuffing sails with you guys than up there listening to two old dudes talk about girls. I don't know any details, and I don't want to, but happy(?) to report that the presence of a girl on board hasn't dampened any spirits.

All in all, it's been a great trip so far. Keep doing your wind dance for us and we'll hopefully be finished by 5pm on Thursday and ready to celebrate in Cabo!

Team Westward

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