ALICE MARTIN

Saturday July 08, 2006 @ 04:51 PM GMT-08:00

Day 6 - searching for wind

Lat:29.0498° Lon:-135.1616°  Wind: NE 14.5 kt | Temp:68° |

Today is Saturday (or so we are told - but it's just another day to us) - day 6 of this adventure. At 11:00am we were at N29 13' 36", W134 21' 13" - 785 miles from SF and 1350 miles still to go. Yesterday we sailed only 148 miles in the 24 hr period - and that was a hard-fought 148 miles! Find wind - but where? So we decided that we needed to head south - we took a sharp left turn and rolled the dice! We have weather information available to us - so it's a matter of looking at what the maps show - straight on didn't look too good. The 9:00am roll-call will let us know. By the way I have now got our positioning software installed and running and so I now load the boat positions as they are called in the roll-call and then the s/w will tell us how we are doing.

Today's picture was interesting. We went south while everyone else drifted west. California Girl's southern route now looks like it is paying off. She did 161 miles yesterday while our other main competitor (of course they are all competitors!) - Green Buffalo headed west for only 123 miles. Cali Girl is now leading our division with Hooligan 2nd. the Buffalo has dropped to 4th - but it's still a long way to the finish!

Today the wind is better and steadier. We are less frustrated and getting on with the serious attitude of making Hooligan go as afst as we can. She is responding well - still in great shape and today we are making a steady 7-9.5 knots. Hopefully the weather forecast will deliver tomorrow and we can start riding the trade winds.

Yesterday's main item of note occurred during dinner time. We aim to have dinner at 5pm (Pacific Time - we run Hooligan on Pacific Time and will do so all the way across). We had just finished our wonderful lasagne - thank you Jaye - and demolishing some wonderful bittersweet chocolate pots de creme (thank you Rene') when we had some action on the fishing line. We had hooked a beautiful 15" yellow tail tuna. Nothing like finishing off dinner with fresh sashimi!! This mornings breakfast was a wonderful scrambled egg mix with fresh tuna and vegetables. Well done Bert for cleaning the Tuna and fixing meals today.

Well so much for today. Hopefully tomorrow will bring us the wind and Hooligan can make her rendezvous with family members in Kaneohe on Saturday 15th.

From Ian (on behalf of Alice, Stan, Bert, Irwin and Rudy)

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