DAY 21

I sailed yesterday afternoon on the same NW wind that ranged in speed from 10 kt to 19 kt, usually around 15 kt. Fortunately I had raised the mainsail with one reef early that morning when the wind was weak but had expected it to pick up. My speed ranged from 5.5 kt to 6.8 kt and I was headed for Vancouver island. Just before dark I rolled in the jib from the no. 1 that I had been running all day to just below a no. 2.

It was just Richard, Ryan, and myself - sort of - at the 7.30 session. Richard could hear me clearly but I had difficulty in hearing him so Ryan had to act as relay at times. Richard was - you guessed it - becalmed again. I told him that the grib file indicated that he should have a good SE breeze. He had a SE breeze alright, but only 1 kt. I don't know what is going on up there. He is now only 5 degrees of latitude (300 nm) higher than me and 7 degrees of longitude (about 300 nm) to the east and yet our conditions are vastly different. The grib file (which has been accurate for me) indicates that he will continue to get a SE wind but tomorrow at about noon will run into the middle of a weak high with weak adverse winds. I don't plan to tell him this because he has been demoralized enough and anyway the grib file prediction may not be very accurate where he is.

As usual in these conditions the boat sailed itself beautifully all night. All I had to do was to put up with the shaking and rolling while I lay in my warm dry bunk sleeping. I got up several times during the night to check the boat. At one time I found it heading just north of Vancouver island so I tweaked jeff and increased the course by 10 degrees. In the morning the boat was doing of 6 kt and I was pleased to see that I was only 770 nm from Cape Flattery.

At 10 AM the wind started to wane and veer. At 10.30 I rolled out the full jib, tweaked Jeff to sail the boat closer to the wind, and hardened up the sail. For the present I was doing OK: still headed for Vancouver Island and doing about 5 kt. Not long after that I got a scare when the wind dropped to 6 kt and I found Pachuca steering WSW. Fortunately the wind reestablished itself and soon I wAs again heading for Vancouver Island at over 5 kt. Jeff was having trouble keeping Pachuca close to the wind, no doubt because it had the outboard motor in its face. I engaged Vistar the autopilot and set it to steer to the wind, rather than to an absolute course. This facility was a big advantage of having installed the Raymarine wind instrument and finally getting it to work. It sends its wind data to the autopilot via the Seatalk network.

Over a period of 90 minutes I successfully downloaded 4 weather faxes from Honolulu. An hour later the Getfax program crashed when trying to download the 5th one out of San Francisco.

At noon HST Pachuca was at 43.38N 141.29W, sailing well toward Vancouver Island. We had a noon-noon distance of 136 nm. we were 1570 nm from Oahu and 748 nm from Cape Flatter. More than 2/3 of the passage had been completed. I was now much closer to Kodiak Alaska (950 nm) than I was to Oahu.