San Diego to Puerto Vallarta Report – J World’s Hula Girl – Evil Monday….
Evil Monday….
We didn’t just park it. We valet parked it, lost the stub, the valet lost the keys, got fired, and went home early. By the time we got our ride back, it was looking pretty ugly.
Monday was unkind to us aboard Hula Girl in the Sand Diego to PV Race. Hula Girls goin’ ’round the outside (for a variety of reasons explained earlier) got punished. We kind of expected everyone to be sitting in the light patchy stuff, slatting for a while, then catching a puff for an hour or two, then slatting for a couple hours all over again. It looked to us like the whole are was to be plagued with these unstable conditions. But, apparently, we were quite wrong. Blue Blazes put some 40+ more miles on us, as did Ocelot. And we only put 12 on Miramar?!? And that doesn’t even touch on the beating the big boats gave to us. The reports from other boats were for nice 8-9 knots conditions…. while we were having a hard time keeping our bow pointed towards PV due to a lack of steerage.
This is precisely what makes Mexico races sooo challenging (and fun). We went from scary fast rides to a swim in a pond. We used almost every sail we brought along. We went form third, to fourth, to second, to fifth,.,… and it still ain’t over yet!
As our buddy Mike put it: If you can’t be with the wind you love, love the wind you’re with.
We finally got into the prevailing breeze just a couple hours ago and are finally in 12 knots of breeze, just peeled from the 1A to the 2A a bit ago, making good tracks towards Puerto Vallarta. Roll call will be interesting in the morning, if only to see if anyone else found any of the killer holes, or if we were solo in our miseries!
BUT there is this too: I just sat in the cockpit for an hour with, at various points, Rob and Lee and Drew and Mark and Josh. It is absolutely fantastic right now. The moon is high,. The boat is hissing along,. The seas are flat. The weather is warm. Midnight right now (2am local time, actually, in the Sea of Cortez, in shorts and T-shirts and diggin’ it.
Ok. Going to crash now. Unless the wind goes right as forecasted, we’ll have to gybe south of the Marias (the prison islands) to give them the required clearance. I suppose sitting in a Mexican prison would make sitting in a wind hole look like a vacation at the Four Seasons. I think we’ll skip that, and get to the Margaritas waiting in PV…
See you all in the morning…
Wayne Zittel and the Hula Girl Team…
———-
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
