Kinetic Vic Maui Report - 07-13

Kinetic friends:

Monday we marked three quarters of the passage with both watches eating dinner together. Due to popular demand, the ship's bell is being now struck as we pass each remaining hundred mile to go milestone. We've sailed so many days in stronger breeze that an afternoon sailing with fourteen knots seemed positively calming. It wasn't long though, before the breeze moderated even more.

We spent agonizing hours overnight in almost no wind, with a swell left over from the previous wind rolling and slapping us around, slatting our sails and frustrating our attempts to make decent speed in the desired direction. We imagined our competitors passing around us and our distressing patch of windless sea, leaving us miserably behind. We were incredibly relieved, first when the wind ever so gradually filled in and second when, many hours later at our daily fleet roll call, we learned that we had not been alone in making much slower progress over the twenty four hours between position reports. Speaking of position reports, our satellite transponder has not been working well, so we have been voluntarily emailing manual position reports to the race committee and tracking company. Hopefully people ashore are able to follow our progress on the race tracker at vicmaui.org.

Sea birds occasionally wheel overhead and swoop low behind the boat, looking for a place to rest or for a tidbit in our wake. We offer neither, and one cheeky bird leaves us a good luck token splattered on our spinnaker. Flights of flying fish scatter before us like spray across the waves. Magically, Tuesday afternoon we spotted two majestic whales which crossed our track, very close behind the boat. The whales were of similar length to the boat, about fifty feet long, and may have been sperm whales, based on our field guide, one of the few reference books onboard.

The weather has been mixed, all very warm but variable between clouds and clear skies. When visible, the starscapes are amazingly clear and the Milky Way is smeared across a huge swath of the breathtaking night sky, itself as vast an ocean as the sea below. Squalls brush by, darkening the sky and rinsing the encrusted salt off the boat. We sail hard, spinnaker pulling, boat rolling, gear groaning, crew talking in hushed tones on deck, downwind in the dark in the boundary layer between these two endless oceans.

Kinetic out.

View All Posts