1500HST, Wind 20 @ 070, Barometer 1016, Cloud cover 20 percent, (clouds of vertical development over land), Sea 6-8 feet, DTF 35nm, ETA 1815HST (estimate).
In his spare time when not hosting our team or posting to the Narrow Escape Blog SoCal Ben works at Cal Poly (there's a longer name but you know). I thought they made zip lock bags but maybe not too. Apparently Ben is a bit of a Math scholar and he pointed out that the Transpac handicaps made no sense to him. The handicaps never make any sense to me so I failed to pick up what he was laying down.
I thought the the Rating Column indicated total handicap per boat in hours for the whole course. So that would have meant that our boys would owe the (blood) Hounds - a not slow downwind design Hobie 33 - nearly 36 hours. The J-120 who normally pays Narrow Escape about 40 seconds a mile, according to me, received 24 seconds a mile. And I could not get my head around how they were ever going to come up with 2 and a half days between them and the J-35 Addiction.
And if my understanding of the ratings was correct why did it not even come close to jibing with the Transpac Daily Corrected Time estimates?
All is now revealed thanks to Ben! The ratings are expressed in seconds per mile. The course length is exaggerated to 2300 miles (2225 actual) because Transpac determined that the bigger boats had an unfair advantage over the smaller boats that the ratings alone could not correct out.
So why is this a News Flash? Because based on this new formula a faint hope has opened for our team to correct over the (blood) Hounds.
Yesterday at 0600PDT Transpac estimated that Plan B was still 4 hours behind on corrected time. This morning, because the Hounds had a short day, it appeared that Plan B had shaved that deficit down to only a hour and 7 minutes.
According to the new math (check me Ben!!) Narrow Escape owes the Hounds 22.89 hours. Therefore if the Hounds average the same speed they did yesterday over the next 24 hours Plan B needs to pull out by roughly another 50 miles, or average a little more than 2 knots faster to save their time. To put that in perspective up to now the single biggest day difference they have managed has been 41 miles.
What? I didn't say it would be easy. Slim Chance. That's what I said. Could happen. Everything is possible!
I just want them to read nothing here that might quell their enthusiasm or initiative!
And I guess Team Narrow Escape needs to give a Shout Out to the fantastic effort onboard Relentless these last two weeks. They completely crushed our division - and doublehanded no less!
I am sure all of us join the sailing crew in saying so (and the sailors will convey these cheers to them in person):
BLOODY WELL DONE Tim Fuller and Erik Shampain - Relentless - (bastards)!
BlogMeister
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