Cirrus on Day 5

Wow, another day on position 2! We celebrate them right away; you never know what comes next. We were surprised ourselves about our performance since while the daytime yesterday saw some hot rides, the night was quite a bit softer. When you look at the standings, you'll see that we had caught up on Checkered Past by 4 hours since yesterday and are now "only" 3 hours behind them. Overall we are on position 14 out of 60 boats, which is also a very good result for us. As part of the Pacific Cup we also have a race among the Hawaiian boats, of which there are three: Urban Renewal (Div C), Buzz Off (Div D), and us (Div B). Urban R. is on position 12 overall, i.e. two positions ahead of us; Buzz Off seems to have difficulties as they are on position 57. Urban R. is 40 miles ahead of us, which is a lead of about 6 hours of our driving. But they are rated much faster than us, so after handicap correction there is a chance left for us. I'll explain this some other time.
In the morning we saw Kokomo south of us, barely visible on the horizon. Late afternoon we were almost running over Plus Sixteen, a double-handed boat from the first start on Monday. Man, are these oceans overcrowded - somebody 's gotta do somethin' about it!
By the way: Double-handed does not mean sailors with some genetic manipulation that grew an extra pair of hands (which would be really useful), but two regular people, each with one left hand and one right hand. But on a boat you do need to hold on to something while you do your work, therefore one person equals one hand available for work. And a double-handed boat then is one with only two people on it. I did double-handing once, and not in a race, but I can tell you that this is exhausting, as you never get enough sleep. We already feel the impact with a crew of six. And we have to do it for 2 weeks!
The sun came out today, and it sure got hot. We dumped the foul weather gear and sailed in a T-shirt (with the life vest worn over it). Now in the evening it is mostly overcast again. Unfortunately, the wind speed continued to drop, and we sailed long stretches at only 6 kn. We can only hope that the competitors suffer similarly.
We were debating a jibe today. Buoy racers will freak out when they here that a jibe after 5 days out is "considered", nicht wahr, Christin? And at the end we did not jibe. Maybe in two days.
"Tina's Diner" was open again, tonight with hearty enchiladas. Highly recommended. Tina was on this years delivery crew for "Cirrus, and I believe she is linked to under "Delivery Crew" on this blog site, so you can read who made our delicious frozen dinners.

Aloha, Ulli

position: 20 July 2008 2125PDT, lat 30n25, lon 138w40, cog250, sog 6.5kn