NEWS FLASH: Shocking no one, Pyewackett 70′ was first to finish in this year’s Transpac, at 02:53 HST, July 23.
19:35
TWD 057
TWS 21.7
TWA 155
BSP 14.2
COG 256
Hi From the stress ship Triumph… Man, we think the guys on Horizon have found a way to hack into the Yellow brick tracker live data feed or owner john Shultz, being in the medical device business, has somehow tapped into our covid vaccine chips to track our every move! (Follow them here – ed.)
I have never seen a matching track so perfect… So we had to employ our own countermeasures from this attack to shake them a bit to get some leverage. How did we employ this strategy? Well with the trackers we get reports every 4 hours so after one report the wind was a gybe split so we gybed right after so now we had 4 hours to work with before they knew we had gybed.
We were really aggressive gybing back and forth on 5-degree shifts in 22 to 25 knots, and now after 4 hours we see they gybed to match and they won’t know we are now on stb!
Hopefully, this has worked but time will tell as this race is going to come down to a very close corrected time battle. Maybe under our 2013 time win on the R/P 52 Meanie where we won by 3 mins, I would expect something similar this year hopefully in our favor again!
I have slept about a total of 3 hours in 2 days don’t see getting any more anytime soon…
Jeff
Now for our Skipper Steve:
Dual in the Sun.
For those paying close attention to YB, you can see we are in a battle royale with the vessel Horizon. They seem to be reading our minds as we gybe on every wind shift, so do they. Did they smuggle a tracker onboard Triumph or are they just darn good sailors – probably the latter. They also are holding our own in a Santa Cruz 52 which is 5000 lbs heavier than the lighter Santa Cruz 50 which makes me proud of our boys.
Everyone is gelling. Our gybes are completed in 6 minutes from decision to turn through to execution. Quite an advancement primarily due to the coaching of Mr. Jeff Thorpe. He has high expectations and does not tolerate any non-sense in sailing execution. So we give him a wide berth and listen and learn. His knowledge of the wind, racecourse, and weather is on another level.
Other miscellany:
-The boat is clean and so are her crew. Even the foul language has decreased.
-There is significant debris in the ocean and we hope to avoid.
-We enjoyed cuban cigars and Hanna’s legendary rum cake last night – truly a treat.
-We are so far covid free but continue to wear our masks and social distance whenever possible – I think Fauci would be proud of Team Triumph.
-The skipper, yours truly, really f’d up and we have at least 2 crew members suffering from caffeine withdrawals. Did I do these guys a favor in the longer run, maybe but for now we are watching them battle the caffeine demons.
That’s all for now. Send prayers our way. We will sleep when we get to Hawaii!
– Skipper Steve
