Thursday, July 24, 2008

Pacific Cup 2008 - Pegasus Racing Update


July 23, 23:10 PST, Night Busters rolling again
It's now pitch dark and the moon hasn't risen yet. We were lucky that that huge net didn't rip our keel off. Or we'd be in the life-raft right now. We're still trying to sort this out. We may end-up with a piece of the spinnaker around the keel. At night we can't see well underwater. We now have lost our lead and are sitting in waves the size of small buildings like a cork on the water going nowhere. It's wet. But we have a plan. We will try one more time and then do two back downs and try to sail. We will cut anything that we have to cut. We both have our headlights on. Night busters, probably busted by the squall. Luck is on our side, it could have been much worse. More later....
July 23, 22:30 PST, More unfortunate events but......
Never, ever give up. It took 11 tries and then we were able to get free of this mess. We're wet, yet warm from the pulling, pushing, grinding, cutting, name-calling, yanking, hosting, winching, towing, moving and finally succeeding. Almost, but not quite. We feel that we have a piece of the kite wrapped at the articulation between the hull and the keel. It should be safe and we'll tell how much drag it is fairly quickly. For sure we'll be 10 percent slower. But we're happy. Very happy. It's not over for us. So we hoisted our smaller kite and we just sent it! Straight down the track. This is not as fast as soon as the wind ranges under 25 knots. Right now we are sitting on 13.5 knots in 17 knots of wind. Pointing to Honolulu. We are very happy. We are the night busters! - http://www.pegasus.com/log.htm