What a game! Every minute seems to be counting, and Azure made the unbeliveable move last 24 hours and gained 5 nautical miles on us! They finally got the eastern shift they’ve been chasing as well as increasing wind speeds. We are currently hammering downwinds towards the Kaiwi Channel with about 60 miles to go, but will it be enough – also taking into account the possible compesation Azure is seeking? In about 8 hours we can’t do no more. That’s our estimated arrival time at Diamond Head – and we’ll all have to wait for the Cal40s to reach Hawaii to know the final results.

Sadly, this is our last report enroute. It’s been a blast, but don’t worry – we’ll continue to keep you posted about the thrilling days to come and the on spot details. It’s been a great race, and lots of more stories are to be posted once we’ve settled in Honolulu – but it may take some time depending on the amount of Mai Tais and coconut bikini density. So be patience – please!

Break a leg for us and let’s finish this race in style! Land ahead – ALOHA!

We know! Cubaneren still holds the position of a champ. Last 24 hours was according to plan and we nailed another 20+ nautical miles on both the Cals. Azure is still aiming for Russia as far as we know, while Sequoia is limping behind in our trail. But guess what? That damn weather forecast is now showing a light wind area just in front of the Hawaiian Islands as we are aapproaching them – and Azure haven’t gybed yet – so the drama is definitely not over. Great conditions for the moment, but will it last?? For sure we could have gone to church more often before be left, but thats to late – so lets just hope the tradewinds appreciate Norwegian sailors trying to make history.

The routing says we have just 250ish miles to go – and hence we have activated race mode version 2.0 onboard. That means we will sail even faster and have better VMG according to our captain. Until now we have been doing shifts of 4 hours throughout the night – on two teams. We’ll give you an example: Thomas will go to bed before or just after dinner around 7 pm. Maren will do the same after finishing the dishwashing – typical task for the women. Then Karl Otto and Eirik will sail as hell into the missing sunsets, while typing this report and planning what prank to perform when awakening the other crew. As it gets darker, Karl Otto will be the helms man – as he is afraid of the dark and need to focus on something not to think about it too much, while Eirik will perform the agreed prank on Thomas to wake him up. Karl Otto will tell Thomas where we are heading tonight (typically Hawaii for the last 12 days) and head for the coffin to prank Maren and get to sleep. 4 hours later it all happens again, but please exchange the names. Eirik means Thomas, Thomas means Eirik, Karl Otto means Maren and so on. You get the point.

At about 10-11 am (a lot of you struggle with the am and pm part, so am means morning ok), we all meet to hopefully celebrate the gain we’ve made throug the night, plot and watch the position of the other boats and have some late breakfast before those feeling the most dizzy will head to bed again. By lunch around 1 or 2 pm we all meet to usually enjoy the most exiting meal of the day: BACON! New weather forecasts are being downloaded and revised at the toilet next to Saturday in the front shortly after. The plan is put into action, we have dinner and occasionally we try to get some fresh fish in the evening – before it all starts over again. So far there seems to be no fish in the Pacific Ocean, except the flying fish God must have created on day 3 before he put on the lights – ’cause they look weird!

As we are approaching the Hawaiian Islands (tomorrow evening!), we thought it would be interesting to share som knowledge about the place. Remember we don’t have access to internet, and hence the information may not be 100% accurate as the resources are typically Wikieirika and our great captain who says he knows it all. Hawaii consists of many islands, we don’t know the exact number, but you should know that we are not going to the island called Hawaii. We are heading for the island of Oahu and the capital Honolulu. Approximately 4 million people live on these islands, so about 2 million coconuts have suffered their lifes to become bikinis – assuming 50% of the population are women. Only 15 different bird species are present on the Azore Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, but we believe more species are living here. We doubt they have monkeys and wolf-dogs as they are specifically listed to be prohibited in the declaration forms by the customs. On the other hand they welcome us to the 50th state of the US, and tells us that many plants and animals, found nowhere else in the world, have evolved on these islands because of the isolation in the Pacific. I guess we can all agree that isolation not necessary has proven to be the best way when it somes to genetics and looks (just think of the old royal families in Europe) – so exciting times are coming also ashore!

We’ll keep you posted – but until next time: ALOHA!

Yiii haa! What a morning to celebrate! And what a nerve wracking afternoon and evening that follows! Besides the 24 hour birthday party that started at midnight, we all received the long awaited news everyone has been expecting – Cubaneren has taken the lead in division 7! Last 24 hours and the next 48 will determine who will make it to victory, one of the Cal40s or your favourite racing machine – Cubaneren. The fleet is spread by approx. 200 nautical miles and none of us posess the power to significantly alter our positions and/or tacktical moves based on the competitors actions. Windspeeds will be different as well as directions – and the time has come for each of us to gain (or take the pain) of all our decisions ’till now. To add even mote thrilling facts the winds are currently weaker than experienced so far – and none of us know the abilities of the other boats in these conditions.

And to make the drama complete – Azure is allegedly seeking compensation after assisting one of the boats in division 4 last morning who reported the well known water as diesel doesn’t work problem. This means we don’t know how far ahead we actually are – or if we’re ahead at all…!! Oh nooo!

Even though we’ve finally taken the lead (or have we?), we haven’t focused to much on the sailing today. After screaming and celebrating to such extent that some of us lost their voice following the latest position report, we had Maren’s muffin for breakfast. One of the J105 in division 6 – Creative – noticed the birthday song on the VHF and joined the party in a close starboard/port situation (no kidding!) with a margin of less than 15 boat lenghts. Good fun – and as always, when they left the party, we agreed to see each other again soon like all drunk party people do. Hopefully it won’t be in too many days! Please!

Not mentioned yesterday when telling the story of life onboard, is the size of the cockpit. Or the outdoor area as non sailors will call it. Modern boats usually offer great space in these areas, but the evolution of such was definitely not started when the Wasa 55 was designed and build in the 70s and 80s. Cubaneren hardly fits more than three Norwegian sailors (equal to 5 Chinese maybe, but that doesn’t make sense since it’s a Swedish daysailor or?) while under sails. This turned out be quite challenging when having a birthday party of five – including Captain Morgan who also dropped by. As a result we have gybed three times today to keep less people in the cockpit – and more people on the foredeck. Turned out to be a great success and is higly recommended to other Wasa 55 owners looking to throw a good party onboard. The party itself cannot be easily described, but we’ll try to provide photos later as they are supposed to say more than a thousands words – way above our limit in the daily report.

Thanks a lot to everyone who sent their best wishes (or wishes at all) to Karl Otto and Eirik on their 72nd birthday. Especially the video smuggled onboard before start touched our hearts. Almost cried. Almost. No, just kidding :-p

And Matt – don’t worry, we’re trimming to win!

Now it’s time for some popcorn (crazy, I know, but we’re only turning 72 once) while sailing into what might be the second sunset in 12 days….. Time will show, but the Pacific Ocean almost never fails when it comes to dissapointing sun experiences.

Stay up at night, don’t let your Yellow Brick app go to sleep, send us your best windspeed vibes for the next 48 hours and we shall all be good! Felize Navidad! See you tomorrow!

30 nautical miles. Taste it, fell it! That’s the extra miles we gained compared to Azure yesterday. Mmm mmm! Sailing wise we’ve been gybing our way through the shifts, with a total of 5 gybes last 48 hours so far. Video material of gybing a canoe in big swells offshore will follow once we’re docked – but it definetly looks interesting (read insane) from a foredeck perspective… The wind has stabilized at around 14 knots, so Cubaneren is doing full main and S2 (the largest) spinakker. Preferred angle to Kaiwi Channel in the Hawaiian Island is currently 255 degrees, in which we are off by no more than 5-10 degrees while typing this. Let’s all cross whatever you can cross to make it stay like that… Latest weather reports indicate more even conditions in north and south, and less probability of the (necessary) eastern shift the northern heading boats are looking for to cash in miles by going there. But let’s look out for those Cal40s a couple of more days.. No need to stay up at night yet.

Racing downwinds for about a week – our beloved S2 spinakker was swapped with the S4 for about an hour to get some TLC. It’s all good now and ready to run the last 600 miles.

The sailing nerds highly appreciated that someone finally cared about them yesterday, so todays figures are TWA155-165, TWS14-16, COG240-250, SOG7-8. I know, but don’t get to excited guys even though it looks pretty porno.

The sun has been with us since early morning today, and is about to leave in a beautiful sunset in about 20 min. It’s interesting how boring this phenomenon turns out to be once it actually materialized. Bet it will be a pretty boring event tomorrow, kind of like «seen it before» – so sorry about all the sun, sunrise, sunset fuzz last week. Sun turns out to be just sun, no matter where you are.

Some of our followers have made a request to get more details about the extreme racing life onboard Cubaneren, so read on if you’d like to know.

The yacht is divided into multiple sections. All the way in the front we have our motion in the ocean sensor. This is a water melon named Saturday (because we have to eat him before arriving in Hawaii due to customs) situated in the bed in the owner’s cabin. If Saturday starts moving various measures can be taken, like reefing the main, change to a smaller spinakker or simply just tuck him in with the bedding.

The next section is where all the important strategic and tactical decisions are made. It consists of a water closet situated such that you can view the windex in top of the mast through the hatch. Lots of hours are spent here daily. The WC section also serves two other purposes; (1) weight reduction is easily performed here and (2) if it’s very foggy the spinakker trimmer have a perfect view through the hatch to ensure maximum trim at all times.

Further back we have the area commonly known as the salong. For racing purposes this has been transformed to sleeping area for the youngest part of the crew. Two sea bunks, where the most heavy crew member always take the position to windward to ensure weight optimalization. This is also the part that broke during the 2nd night causing 15 min of lost sleep. Not good. The two bunks are separated by lots of chains and considering the fact that two unmarried men are sharing the area, this may be considered a little bit shady…

The last two main sections are the kitchen and the coffin. The kitchen is really just a kitchen. We boil water and fry bacon. The coffin is where the old crew members sleep. It is located aft on starboard side and you have to enter it feet first. You have a perfect view of the instruments at all time (especially enjoyed by the captain), but its also easy to seal off the area when and if needed….

I’d love to give you more details, but Maren has turned Cubaneren into «the boat of hidden treasures» to ensure the crew cannot breach the predefined diet – hence no facts about the various closets and other bunks are known.

And by the way, the sun left us now. But again no sunset. Just a cloudy wall to cover it. Who cares…. ‘CAUSE NOW IT’S ONLY HOURS ‘TILL BIRTHDAYPARTY!

Oh yeah! We’ve all done the math, and as the numbers are coming together Seqouia is finally falling behind, while Azure is making an extraordinary attempt heading north to keep onto her lead. Latest weather forecasts will give us all the most thrilling end to this Transpac as an area of lighter winds are establishing just east of the Hawaiian Islands – leaving the fleet with 3 options. (1) Head north and pray to your favourite God for more winds than forecasted, (2) breach transpac protocol and start gybing multiple times through the ligther winds or (3) hope for the best and head a long way south where the sea temperature is higher and winds stronger.

We started gybing last night and have now made a total number of three gybes (probably already 1 more gybe than average in transpac) – so go figure out what we currently are planning to do….. For you sailing nerds our sailing configuration as we speak are S2, full main and stay sail, medium-light running backstays and quite a lot of kick. No record speeds or distances for tonight, as we’re reaching on TWA 160-170 in TWS around 10-14 knots. But great VMG!

Some of our followers are very curious about how a Wasa 55 aka Cubaneren is able to surf for days in speeds of 12-19 knots doing more than 200 nautical miles in 24 h. Well, here’s the receipt:
1) Bring your Wasa 55 to a shipyard in Mexico, near the U.S. border for hull cleaning and water sanding. Make sure you hang around so that the work gets done properly.
2) Ship all your belongings (including warm clothes) in a container to Hawaii
3) Bring in a racing crew from Norway to help trim and helm the boat
4) Stay patient in light winds and wait for the Pacific Ocean to get rocky – not only the swells. Takes about 5 days
5) Look for winds in the range 16-24 knots and waves about 10 feet, max 15. Lenght is not that important as Cubaneren is narrow and will penetrate the adjacent waves
6) Enjoy the ride and hang onto the stick while screaming «I love Cubaneren»
7) Evaluate and compare the ride to the most iconic downhill slopes like Wengen, Kitzbuel, Val Gardena, Kvitfjell or Holmsjordet
8) When the above is getting boring, start doing it in complete darkness at night. You can try it at home by using a blindfold. It’s surprisingly similar.

BREAKING NEWS!
When planning for the Transpac as well as leaving LA and heading into the Pacific Ocean we where made lots of promises similar to the Genesis where God created the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day – latest…. As you already know, that did not apply this year. Very dissapointing, as all other elements in the creation story, you know the ocean, fishes, other sea creatures and all that stuff became evidend even before the start. BUt things have changed! Today the German concrete fell apart and sunlight was shed on our white (now red) Norwegian bodies. A little bit to much of clothing came of, but by dinner we were able to agree on a common minimum dresscode.It would be to much to ask for one of those (mythical) spectacular sunsets of the Pacific Ocean on a day like this – and the sun obviously agreed and made sure to hide behind the clouds well in time before the set.

As most of the crew today have been enjoying the sun partly in shock, nothing much else really happened. Oh, except for the mysterious call on VHF channel 16 where an unidentified guy on an unidentified vehicle called Cubaneren by name. We replied his call, but he disappeared in silence – and there are no boats visible even on the AIS….. Our captain believe it was a guy rowing from US mainland to Hawaii who just wanted to have a chat, while the more educated marine personell believe we were spotted by an US submarine. We’ll probably never know….

See you tomorrow!

Cubaneren is rageing towards Honolulu and the good old lady sat a new personal record doing 204 nautical miles last 24 hours – also assumed to be a world record for Wasa 55. An other exciting figure is also a current top speeds of 19 knots. Those of you who did the math at breakfast yesteday probably now have a post-it sticker on your refrigderator door (next to the picture postcard from L.A.) telling you we’re about 4 nautical miles behind target to beat the Cal40s – but don’t worry yet. We changed our calculator from degrees to radians and even though we only beat them by 16 miles yesterday, the math says our position is more favourable now. So keep the spirit high!

From an entertainment point of view it’s been an exciting day of sailing. We’ve spent the last 5 days pretty much alone in this big lake – but this morning one of the larger racing machines, Aszhou, decided to swing by on their way to Hawaii and give us a hand for showing them the fastest path to the islands in the west. Pretty rude to pass us on windward side, but it was only a matter of seconds before she took off and disappeared into the horizon. Also we’ve swapped from our S2 spinakker to the new S4 as the wind has been picking up. It’s red and looks exatly like the old one, so don’t tell our competitors. They will not notice! The manouver was flawless. Video evidence exists. Winning!

The crew is doing fine, and this morning was so far the best as we celebrated only 1000 nautical miles to go by having Gin & Tonics for breakfast. Corn flakes and choco pops never tasted this good.

As we’re about to complete 1900ish nautical miles on starboard tack and hence steering only using left hand this is about to make us look like Rafal Nadal at the end of his youth career when he only fed his right arm Italian beef á la Contador whilst forgetting the other.

Also, you still don’t have to worry about us getting dehydrated or sunburned now that LA reportedly experienced the hottest day registered since 1886 today. The 100% overcast is still as solid as German concrete made in the 1940s, and due to the persistence in lack of fallbacks in navigational methods if our primary systems collapse – we’ve spent some time to develop and innovate a groundbreaking way of navigating. The newly completed safety course referred to sextants, lunar measuring and even just following the airplanes. Clever?! Or not! We don’t even know where the sun rise or set, so we are now monitoring the sea temperature to map where we are and if we’re going north or south. That’s what we call clever!

And guess what!? Two more packages of bacon was found opened this morning! Monsieur Poirot was immediately contacted as this serious crime now escalated – and he was the only one NSA knew about that still does interregations via morse. And yes, in true crime style it turned out not to be the first suspect Eirik, but rather the youngest kid onboard – Thomas – who is getting sick and tired of the freeze dried food after years in the army.
And speaking of Thomas, he is about to become an expert in retirement lifestyle. His post dinner naps have become his actual bedtime, and as a result we have decided to have dinner later to keep him up.

Our great captain and leader Kim Otto Book-Ond is sleeping less, but makes sure the crew is getting Cubaneren the fastest to Hawaii by wearing less and less underwear. Luckly he has decided not to set of any of the rockets we carry to attract further attention – for now.

Fair seas – and au revoire!

Okay, enough chick chat about sailing stuff in terms of nautical miles sailed here, wind directions there and other even less interesting terms. Let’s have a look at the hardcore facts and most important topics – the results! We know a lot of you are watching us on the Yellow Brick tracing and are either celebrating your favorite team’s progress or having sleepless nights for no reasons – yet. So, we have spent the day doing the math for you. It’s like any sailing result mathematics – a complex numeric approach with tons of assumptions we wont tell you – but in the end you’ll realise it quite exact.

And the findings; in division 7 we are fighting the two Cal 40s Azure and Sequoia. They are supposed to be slightly slower than the racing machine we are handling, and in numbers we have estimated that we – starting today – need to gain just below 20 nautical miles per 24 hour until we reach Diamond Head lighthouse on Saturday. So, if you’re having breakfast while reading this, and Azure and Sequoia is 20 nautical miles further behind next time you eat breakfast – well, then Cubaneren is on track to be the champ! And just for the record, last 48 hours we’ve sailed 45 and 49 miles more than Azure and Sequoia, respectively……..

When not arguing about math we’ve spent some time celebrating that there’s only 1.111 nautical miles to go by enjoing a non virgin rum’n coke. Winning!

The biggest dissapointment of today is not sun related anymore (and yes – we have not seen the sun since last Monday!), but rather the long awaited beef stroganof that we’ve been saving for the precious Sunday dinner. Not even in our greatest fantasy were we able to relate the content in the meal to anything within any proximity of a stroganof beef. It would serve fine as an appetizer named mushroom soup with noodles, and hence by default got a rating 1 on the food scale. If some of you can please provide us with the customer support e-mail of OFD Foods Incorporated we will give them further details directly not to turn this daily report into a novel.

Occasionaly we receive random news from other boats in the fleet, and this morning we read that one of our main competitors along Comance, the Rio 100, hit an UFO (not the flying one, but unidentified floating object..) and lost her port rudder. The crew and boat are doing fine, but unfortunately the rudder of Rio now also is an UFO along lots of lots of other garbageish items just laying around in Mare Pacifico. So watch out – and bring your trash back home – just like we do at Cubaneren with our message in the bottles. We can’t access Facebook out here (we know it looks like we’re posting every day, but thats some automagical stuff we sat up before we left) – but rumor has it that there are quite a few comments these days. If you want to get in touch with us directly – right here, right now – go to www.cubaneren.no/flaskepost and throw our 100% enviromental friendly bottle posts in the ocean. We’ll pick it up right away!

On that serious note for once – remember the 20 nautical miles per day. See you tomorrow!

The battle continues in division 7 – and what a race! Yesterday and last night we gained 15 nm on the Cal 40 Azure who has been in front of divison 7 since start,,,, – but things are changing! We’ve physically passed Azure now and have a shorter distance to Hawaii, but lack a couple of more miles to be number one also on corrected time. We just missed our 200 nm target yesterday by 6 miles, but belive us – we are sailing like hell for the moment – and as we speak the current figures match 200+ miles for tomorrow morning. The sail configuration is still spinakker and full main at about 12-18 knots and great surfin’ waves. From an overall perspective we are still in front of Comanche, even though they sat a new 24h Transpac record for monohulls covering 484.1 nautical miles this morning. We’ve concluded Cubaneren must be fast!

From a sightseeing perspective the attractions remains to be missing – although we appreciated the flying fish and a random small bird checking out our racing machine today. As the boat now finally is travelling in something closer to a horisontal level (remember we’re sailing an overrigged cano) – some of the crew members were forced to take a saltwater shower on the sunset cocktail deck aft of the cockpit due to evolving odeur issues. This is reported not to be a pretty sight.

Following your feedbacks about the weather situation discussed yesterday, the crew is now demonstratively wearing shorts and longsleeves at daytime to pretend it’s summer. As a result one beer per crew member was permitted to temporarily forget about the cold. Winning!

Saturdays in Norway means pizza evening (thank you Stabburet & Grandiosa) – but due to lack of freeze dried pizzas we opted for lasagne tonight. The packaging said «a taste of little Italy», and even though we’re stuck in 100% overcast in the Pacific Ocean in something named after a place they make sigars, we agreed it was at least a 5 on the food score.

To our female followers: Maren is still onboard.

Note to Theresa and Kevin: we remember you and will get back to you with our ASL.

What a ride last 24 hours! 186 nautical miles, and today we’re currently on track to do 200! It’s still spinakker sailing on the menu, and even though the heat isn’t picking up yet, the tradewinds have arrived in style.
The overall results doensn’t look to good at the moment, as the divisions leaving Long Beach, LA, on Wednesday and Thursday experienced significantly more wind at the start – but we received the news of being well ahead of one of our main competitors, Comanche, in great spirits. The battle in division 7 is on for real and for now is seems to be Wasa 55 Cubaneren versus two Cal40’s – and a northerly route versus a more southerly choice. Let’s see who can do the most milage throughout the night!

As for the more important news we would highly appreciate if someone can tell us when to expect sunshine and summertime. Last 48 hours there’s been no sunrise nor sunset – so thanks to Marius Milde for telling us fake stories about such experiences.

Other matters involving the crew is mostly related to new knowledge gained from the autobiograpy of Per Tangvald. For those of you not familiar with Per, he sailed around the world without any mechanical or electical installations onboard in the 60s and 70s – loosing three of his wifes at sea along the way. Our female crewmember Maren is still onboard for now. Per’s most tempting advices is to head south for hotter conditions and get rid of our bermuda rigging and spinakker to have the preferred downwind setup with a gaff rig. We will decide tonight at the bonfire about Maren and the other options.

Sail fast – live slow!

S rocks, P rocks, I rocks, N rocks, A rocks, double K rocks, E rocks, R rocks – SPINAKKER ROCKS!

Finally we’re running for real towards Hawaii. Through the night and half of thursday we reached into the Pacific using the A5 genakker before we hoisted the spinakker and celebrated the first milestone – 500 nautical miles! Only approx 1700 nm to go! The position report this morning still favours the boats on a more northerly route, but latest forecasts indicate that Cubaneren has a favorable position in terms of windspeeds and we are awaiting Friday’s report with excitement – especially since the boat handling changing from genakker to spinakker was flawless. Maybe 0.1 knots in lost boatspeed for 5 seconds. Winning!

The Siberian winter is finally about to leave us now, and today we’ve experienced something closer to a hot Norwegian summer – still cold, but not freezing. We’ve focused a lot on the sailing, so for you fans who is only chasing for gossips – it’s been a boring last 24 hours. Except, an unidentified crew member opened one of the large vacuumpacks with bacon last night – a meal that was not planned until end of the weekend. No suspects are yet identified, but investigations have been initiated. Anyways it resulted in the fact that we had bacon and eggs for lunch today, followed by pepper beef without pepper for dinner – so 4 point on the food scale. Updates to follow.

And hey, if you’re considering bringing your boat from Norway to the Pacific Ocean because you’ve heard rumors of easy and comfortable sailing – forget it. It’s just rumors! We actually recommend you just drop by the Hardangerfjord to experience similar conditions as the last 72 hours out here: windshifts of 40 degrees and change in windspeeds of 5 knots like every 10 minute or so. And yeah, if you drop by the Hardangerfjord you may see some exiting stuff like a troll tonque or something – the Pacific is currently nothing like the Kon Tiki movie. Where are all the sharks??

Another day of sailing – and things are getting more interesting. The pre start weather routings were all showing more or less the same paths until Tuesday night, and most of the division 7 boats were still grouped at that moment. During the night other sail configurations were made possible and Cubaneren opted for the A5 genakker setting in pitch black darkness heading west south west – slightly south of the rumbline. The position report this morning showed that some boats must have opted for about the same configuration as us, while other boats have taken a more northerly/western course with possible genoas doing a shorter route close to rumbline – hence the very thrilling rankings of the fleet so far.

Our mysterious day 5 waypoint have been adjusted according to the prevailing winds and currently we’re still running our A5 and full main into the sunset (except there will be no sunset today either due to the clouds..).

When not sailing we’ve spent some time using our modernised sextant, also called a GPS, to figure out where we are, where our competitors are, and where we are going. Some turtles have been spotted, all birds are gone and we’ve passed the range of getting a helicopter lift back to LA if Cubaneren decides to take a Titanic on us and leave us in our life raft – named Das Tiki. The owners have finally responded to the claims following the interior damage reported a couple of days ago when the sea bunk broke leaving the crew tumbled on the floor – and today reinforced the construction guaranteeing a breaking load in excess of 0.105 tons (see picture).

And yeah, three more things:
– Thanks to Jane and Henny for sending us exciting info about both the Rosenbird and the Pacific Oceans. Discussions closed – for now.
– Thanks to Stolpestad for the very exciting dilemma. Seems like all children of the world will be killed.
– One of our followers (Kristine.) requested more information about our competitors. Unfortunately we don’t know much, but we’ve tried to summarise below. If any American fans are reading feel free to share your knowledge with Kristine and everyone else about our competitors by making a random comment on our Facebook page!

There are two Cal 40s (or in Norwegian: to kæillar på 40) chasing us. They look like a hobbit, but sails like rockstars. Typical American boat designed in the 70s we guess. They are supposed to be slightly slower than us, but have benefitted great at the start because of their genoas.

One Sabre 38. Blue hull. Similar to the Cal 40’s (kæillarne), but slightly more modern. Very fast upwind (compared to a Wasa 55 with self-tacking jib). Also genoa setup for great beating. Took the more northerly route last night, but we sailed neck on neck until such.

One 41 foot something we haven’t seen other than the position reports.

Two french comfort zones about 46 and 48 foot that seems to have struggled in the light winds ’till now.

And last, but not least, the (air)carrier (hangarskip) of our division – USS Between The Sheets. 50 feet of, so far, fast sailing.

Live slow, sail fast! Talk to you tomorrow!

This morning started of in a great way. We’ve sailed fast through the night and celebrated with a mix of choco pops, corn flakes and white party (see picture) for breakfast that Cubaneren finally was picking up speed and was about to leave our competitors in the wake.

And yes – we know you’e thinking the position report is nothing much to celebrate, but taking into consideration the fact that we’ve spent most of the race ’till now with our self-tacking jib doing about 70-90 degrees TWA, it’s not bad at all being able to keep the genoa boats behind physically at this point.

For today the above actually summarises the last 18 hours of sailing. Occasionally we’re able to fly our A5 genakker, but since we’ve decided to race for Hawaii and not Galapagos, the current wind angles most of the time limits us to the jib on our way to our secret 5 days away waypoint..

About the fun part that doesn’t involve sailing the crew today observed another whale. Boring. Seen it before. Also we’ve seen a bird that looks like a mix of a penguin and the light wind foils of America Cup Team ETNZ catamaran. For now we’ve named it Rosenbird until someone is able to confirm it’s actual existence. Most shocking though is the weather. We signed up for the Transpac and the race for the promised land of Hawaii because of great downwind sailing in shorts and ultimate tanning conditions. So far it’s only getting colder and colder and we’ve put on all the clothes we carry onboard as well as running the heater. No sun, no downwind, no tanning, no heat. Let’s hope Hawaii actually exists somewhere far, far, far out there.!?

As this is getting posted we’re just about to finish the discussion of why the Pacific Ocean is named the Pacific Ocean, Mar de la Pacifico or0 Stillehavet. So if someone can drop us a message through the website that would be nice!

And hey! Look at that giant turtle! Or is it a shark???

Note to Milde: There’s actually be NO sunset tonight. Too cloudy.

Message is delayed – sorry. New update will follow soon!

And we’re off! Leaving Shorline Yachtclub and Rainbow Marina with a great Aloha we steamed north to the staring area close to Point Fermin. Boats in division 5, 6 & 7 were sent off in light breeze around 5 knots of speed straight on the nose. Cubaneren and it’s self tacking jib was not to happy about the conditions and though great efforts were made we were 40 sec late across the line. Error noted.

To make up for the slightly disappointing performance we did a port tack and headed for the spectator fleet and coastal route off the starting area. Less current was good, but we tacked onto starboard just a little to late to fully benefit from the forecasted (yes – we know…) wind shift that allowed most of the fleet also further west of us to reach north of Saint Catalina (a mandatory waypoint) and into the Pacific.
Right now – in complete darkness and cloudy weather – we’re racing within sight of our main competitors with a heading around 230 degrees in winds that exceed the forecast (10-14 kn) – highly preferred by our cuban cigar who is still limited to carrying the small jib in true wind angles around 60-70 degrees.

And for those of you who doesn’t care about the sailing – here’s the news for you! Yes – it only took two hours before we did our first whale spotting. Nice! We’ve had chicken teryaki and chilli con carne for lunch and dinner – both rating 4 on the crews food scale. Interior damage is already in place due to missing sea legs in upwind conditions. And it turns out our compass works the best with the spray hood in place. And @mariusmilde – the sunset was just okay. Nothing special.

And to our American fans – Happy 4th of July!

Cubaneren has left the Shorline Marina and is heading to the starting area north of LA breakwaters. Nice to see that our main competitors in the Division 0 aka MOD 70s are joining along the way…

It’s about time to get going to Hawaii and the Race Center will keep you posted! Have a look here to know the details of our final preps.