Hail to the King!

HE is speaking to us! The king himself comments on our blog - I am re-attaching his mighty words at the end of this post - and commands us to save HIM. We fell on our knees immediately and praised his words (and at this occasion were inspecting the bilge for the best place to reside in for the rest of the trip). The skipper immediately - well, not quite, he took a nap first - decided what to do:

We must sail faster!

What a wise decision, only a seasoned skipper would be able to arrive at. Unfortunately, there appear to be seasoned skippers on many other boats too. The wind has picked up over night, coming to 10 kn and peaking at 15 kn. The boat was heeling over, with the port rail (the left side, for you land lubbers) in the water, and waves on occasion jumping over the bow and washing the foredeck. After some sail trimming we reached 7+ kn of boat speed. That's the way to go! Now the wind is down again, and boat speed to around 6 kn. Still, it is much better than waltz dancing on glassy seas. We expect the wind to increase, and wind angle to change, to allow flying the spinnaker in 2 days, and probably jibe in 6 days, then pointing directly to Kaneohe.

In the meantime, the glassy hole we got stuck in got plugged with wind, and the consequences are best seen in the attached little graph from Cirrugator. If all boats were going as fast as expected, their tracks would form a vertical line from the top to the bottom at corrected time 0 (zero). However, while this applies to the Thursday starters, all of the Monday, Tuesday (that included us) and Wednesday starters veer off to the right, i.e. are significantly underperforming. The weather forecast suggest that the fast boats starting on Saturday will enjoy conditions as good as or better than the lucky Thursday starters did.

Only a miracle will Save the King! Make miracles happen, dear Readers, the bilge smells really bad!

Aloha,
Ulli

HIS words: (I may have to ask my friend Ben for a proper translation,
he may be more familiar with that antique style than I am. A whole lot more)
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"What this means for the King"? How dare you! I command thou to take
back those scoundrel words that would render asunder my union with
dearest Bill lest I relegate thee to finishing this voyage residing in
the bilge! Art thou not on board to defend my honor? Art thou not on
board to sail? Shall we rename thee "cargo"? Blaspheme, I say! Now I
command thee, end these pointless words of defeat and get out there and
sail, man, sail!

Under my seal on this 9th day of July
The King
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