Rich Wilson, USA (Great American III):
"1823 utc 32/26 n 41/47 w 5.1 kts @319T solent and full main, broad reaching, more stable in light winds than big sail i think. difficult 24 hours. tried to get across high pressure ridge last night. as one wraps around where you think the end of it might be, the wind will supposedly
follow you. as we weren't making much progress, at 1-2 knots, thought best to try to cross perpendicularly, to make the crossing shorter. as ridge was ne/sw, we headed nw. 4 times the wind changed direction to suggest it was coming in from s or sw, so gybed 4 times, and then it did, but then it didn't, so gybed back, 8 gybes in all last night, all at 2-5 knots, very frustrating. would try to sleep in between, do the gybe, turn off the lights on the instruments so i couldn't see them, and sleep, since i hadn't been in the bunk really for weeks. worked ok, got some good naps, but also awoke twice to pilot off, and mainsail aback and solent aback when one of
these wind shifts would come in. all a tease. ended up this morning simply heading higher on starboard up into ridge, it seemed as though we actually were across almost, and then late in the afternoon gybed back nw again because we were getting lifted right back up into the zero wind zone. and as we get to nw, should get headed up toward north. then the next huge high
comes in with ne winds. and the grib file shows that the long range shows a giant depression in bay of biscay when we get out of the high finally. we'll see how to approach that."
" The best thing about today is that it is my mother's birthday - Happy Birthday Mom! My mother was the original adventurer in our family, going to Alaska to work at a radio station in Fairbanks in 1938.This was 20 years before the Alaskan Territory became a state. Her show was called "Tundra Topics"!. When people nowadays go to Alaska as a great frontier, I wonder what it must have been like for a single woman to go there 70 years ago. And she thinks nothing of it! What an inspiration she is. We have a photo of her with a friend swimming in a lake there, with a distant shore of trees a mile or two behind, and on closer inspection, you see that the white in between the two swimmers and the shore in the distance, is ice! There she was, my mom swimming in an ice-filled Alaskan lake! She looks as though she is working on her stroke! Elle est incroyable! Happy Birthday Mom! I love you very much and wish I was there with you today."
