TranspacBlogII-27: Homestretch handicap

Finish time: a bit after midnight tonight, Honolulu time

Place your bets folks the horses have just rounded the backstretch, and are heading to the finish line.

I have to give the newbies among you a little information on handicap for today's blog. Every boat in this race has a handicap. This is a number that determines how much time other boats "give" them. Psyche has a great handicap because she is so old and pokey, relative to the other newer boats in the race. The handicap is determined by a special committee, who come and measure everything from mast height to water-line length to sail area, to net tonnage, etc. They are pretty good at predicting expected performance based on these measurements..

For example, an Express 37, like Brown Sugar, is so light that she gives us something like 30 hours. Thus even if she beats us, we place higher, unless she beats us by more than 30 hours. Likewise, a Beneteau 42, like Inspired Environment has a longer water line and therefore gives us lots of time. All the boats in our class, except Shanti and Lady Liberty, give us time.

Now there are 3 Cal 40's in this race. They are identical in size and shape, so you would think that they don't give each other time. But, in fact, there is some variation in tonnage and rig, such that some boats give other boats a slight handicap. For example Farfar (funny I should choose this boat) gives us 70 minutes handicap. Thus, they can finish the race ahead of us, and yet lose, if we can finish with 70 minutes of their finish time.

So right now, Farfar' lead is so small that the Transpac computers put her second behind us.

Farfar DID take a flyer. You should look on the Transpac web site to try to see this. She is 19 miles north of us. Her distance to the finish at Diamond head is 3 miles shorter than ours, but the range in wind directions she needs for the next 6 hours is very narrow. By contrast, because we are in the middle of the course, we can profit from many different wind directions. Bottom line, I wouldn't trade places with her.

Last night was even more dramatic than two nights ago. These things all seem to happen when the kids, Andrew (age 20) and Charlie (age 42, not really a kid but just the same) are on watch. I woke up to the sound of "chop chop. We've got to get the half oz chute down and jibe, right now!" I crawled out of a deep sleep, and looked at the readout of windspeed we have inside the cabin. "Holy shit, it's blowing 24." We all just scrambled out of the cabin to get that light spinnaker out of that weather. Guess what I forgot to take with me.

I forgot my glasses. I didn't tell anyone. Hell I drove before, I can do it again. I can just concentrate on the instruments on the cockpit panel. Shit the instruments are out. Something happened and they all just show "error". Ok. Fine. No instruments. Just the compass and that fuzzy wildly bucking spinnaker out there somewhere by the bow.

But the real heroics was on the foredeck, where Andrew and Steve were bouncing around like hell, trying to pull that poor little spinnaker on out of the sky. They did this, and then horsed all the gear to the opposite sides of the boat so they could set the 3/4 oz spinnaker on port tack. They did this remarkably fast, while Jim and Charlie and I jibed the main sail. When the sail came crashing across the midline, and Jim let the sheet pay out, it hissed out through its blocks.

In a remarkably short time, Andrew and Steve had fastened up the 3/4 oz chute, and we hauled it up, and off we went. I handed over the helm, and went down to get my glasses.

Now we are headed in toward Kaleapapa, a significant point on the north side of the island of Molokai. We slide past this island into the Molokai channel to our finish sometime around midnight tonight. But this will almost certainly be a wild ride. The wind is blowing around 20 here now, and if 2005 and all the Transpac lore are any indication, we will have significantly more wind as we approach Kaleapapa. It is there we must jibe from port tack to starboard tack. We did this in 27 knots last time, and the memory is still quite vivid. But this time the jibe will be in the daylight, making the maneuver somewhat more straightforward.

Regardless, there is a lot of anticipation on board Psyche. If we screw up anything, it could easily mean the race. If we do it all right, I think it will be hard for Farfar to beat us. Let's put it this way. If they do beat us, they did a hell of a job (that's how my dad would say it).

But the bottom line is that it is pretty damn amazing to race a match race across 2000+ miles and be locked in a dead heat in the last hours.

I will send another blog as we approach the finish line, so you don't have to wait in suspense.