News from the Front

I’ve been in fairly regular email contact with the crew. I received the following email yesterday morning:

Thanks for the note and encouragement. Yes the miles are slipping away now and we are looking forward to a "halfway" celebration with our dinner this evening. Don't worry too much about the e-mail length. As long as they are text files we should be ok. Our weather grib files are the largest and Sailmail blocks anything bigger than 30,000 bytes.

I am off the early morning shift now, have made bacon and eggs for the boys this morning, cleaned up, brushed my teeth and am now loonging forward to crawling into that back pipe berth that I call home these days.

All the best from the middle of the Pacific,

The Crew of Narrow Escape,

Doug


Doug mentioned the email length because I sent them a copy of an article about the Transpac. I thought they might enjoy the read. I was impressed that they were able to have a bacon and egg breakfast. After those miserably slow first days, I’m sure some of the boats are thinking about rationing their food. Doesn’t sound like the crew of Narrow Escape is hurting for food. About an hour later I received the following email:

Thanks again for this note. To put the driving in perspective, do you ever remember this boat having a very small rudder?? I don't recall that ever being a problem in the past? Well in the 15 - 20 knots of breeze with the full flags flying the rudder can suddenly and instantaneously disengage from fluids (wait this just in from upstairs. Ross says '17.9' and Chuggy adds 'Sustained') now back to my story. Oh yes, the rudder will dissenage at speed as the rooster tail turns into white frothy suds. Well funny, without the rudder the boat doesn't steer nearly as straight, and we crash -- or 'wipeout' as we like to refer to it as the crashes are really pretty modest. We are getting better at the crashes now with a new "Evil Designed Spinnaker Quick Release Mechanism" (EDSQRM for short). Properly applied the wipeout will drop you to about 8 or 10 knots and then we can quickly get underway again.

As Chuggy will tell you, driving downwind is pretty ease. One just needs to hold a course of 240, 10 degrees lower and the spinnaker collapses in behind the main and does that twirly thing. 10 degrees higher and we initiate the aforementioned wipeout procedure. Did I mention the confused seas with two sets of swells the size of your house..., driving downwind is pretty easy really and we have all decided that we are now going to work hard on 'quiet crashes' so the the off-duty boys can get a little sleep without fearing for their lives. Recall that it can get pretty noisey inside the culvert.

Chuggy describes this whole process as driving a Budget van down the Choquhalla with no lights and no brakes, Ross seems to think it is like walking down the basement steps with the light off carrying a box of knives.

But as you say, it is all beautiful and we are enjoying each and every minute.

Over (that's navigator talk),

Doug

This email should help explain my last posting about the EDSQRM and I’m glad that Doug is finally picking up some navigator talk!