Pacific Cup: Shaking off the concerns of shoreside life

The 2070-mile Pacific Cup had staggered starts on July 6 through July 11 for the nine divisions, with the 56 teams now down the track from San Francisco to Hawaii. After starting on Thursday (July 10), Wayne Zittel reports from the Santa Cruz 50 Hula Girl…

The work commute has been pretty nice. Traffic, for the most part, has been nonexistent out here. Life on board is good.

Jimmy is on his iPad, making sure I really know where I am going. Dale just took a shower and is napping, and coach Jasper is zonked out in one of the pipe cots. Mike just woke up and is getting ready to go on watch (he’s grazing for snacks in the galley as I write this).

The sailing team on deck at the moment is coach Geoff, with Marko trimming spinnaker, Joe grinding, and Alix at the wheel…. and they are doing awesome. Just about a week ago, this team had never sailed together. Now, here we are, almost 800 miles off the coast of North America competing in the great Pacific Cup race from San Francisco to Hawaii. And it’s pretty sweet.

We are well underway in shaking off the concerns involved with ‘everyday’ shoreside life. So many of the things and stresses that seemed so important a week ago aren’t so pressing anymore. They aren’t completely gone, to be sure, but the perspective is different. It’s kind of like having the vague feeling that somewhere I have frequent flyer miles which are about to expire, but I don’t really care. I’m more concerned with nautical miles, at the moment.

Saturday night out here was stunning. The full moon peaked out of the clouds for a while, and lit up an ocean full of jumping dolphin. Absolutely breathtaking. After a few days unstable winds, requiring extra effort to keep the boat moving, the wind has shifted to allow for the big 2A spinnaker and a course pretty much aimed at the islands for now. The breeze is up to 16-18 knots with occasional gusts to 20 and there is a small but building swell making for some good surfing conditions. It’s plenty warm, with most of the foulies getting stored away at this point.

We know the world rolls on without our immediate participation or attention, and it’s kind of nice forgetting about it, even if only for a bit. World Cup results, partisan politics, misbehaving starlets, self-driving cars, and the close of the markets really don’t mean much to us at the moment. And it’s pretty nice.

Event website: https://pacificcup.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PacCup
Tracker: http://paccup.info/track.html
Starting times for all divisions: https://pacificcup.org/entries