Racing With Dummies! (Transpac Edition)
Day 10
By Mike

In the dark this morning we decided to turn right again, after it got light. This jibe was uneventful, other than the fact that Bob didn�t know where he was when I woke him up to help. That was funny. It�s amazing how discombobulated a guy is precisely 1.5 hours into his night of sleep.

A few hours after we turned right the wind died. Not completely, but after wind in the mid 20s overnight and most of the morning a 10 knot wind felt calm. Mainly because the boat was moving so slow. We�re racing, dangummit! But it didn�t feel like it, crawling along at only 6 knots.

In addition to not blowing very hard, the wind was blowing us more northerly than we wanted. In order to go a better direction we considered going slower, by going monkey-winged with our big jib. We also talked about trying to fly a spinnaker straight downwind. But, we didn�t think that would work so well, expecting that the waves would jerk the spinnaker around too much and collapse it too often. There were still fairly large waves from the stronger wind of the previous 20 hours.

Taking the spinnaker down is a bit of a chore. We decided to move the mainsail across to the other side and try going �hog-winged� with the spinnaker and the mainsail out on opposite sides of the boat. That way we could skip the taking down of the spinnaker. We didn�t expect it to work and were preparing to take down the spinnaker anyway when it collapsed.

Surprise, surprise. Not only did the spinnaker not collapse, it flew more stably than it was in its normal configuration. My theory is that we are sailing geniuses. My backup theory is that by going more perpendicular to the waves the boat didn�t rock as much from side to side.

So there we were, going almost directly toward Hawaii. But we were going rather slowly. Other than a late afternoon experiment with the sails (which failed), we continued hog-winged into the night.

Daily Cuisine:
If you don�t count the hot dogs at lunch, I was a vegetarian today. Cake, cookies, bagels, chips, and crackers can sure fill a person up.

In an effort to lose weight, I have now gone 5 days without drinking a Coke. It doesn�t seem to be helping.

Fishing report:
Three days in a row with one bite. Ten (10) days in a row with no fish.

Arts and Entertainment:
It took a long time but I finally finished the last Beethoven sonata in the book. Most of his sonatas have three movements, but some have four. So I played somewhere around 60 movements.

Of those movements, I would say that around 20 of them are fun to play and sound good. About 10 are too hard to play for me to enjoy. About 10 are easy to play, but aren�t very interesting. And about 10 are plain lousy. My favorite sonatas are #s 1, 5, 8, and 12.