Aloha!!

Sorry for the late add, but has been an interesting couple days on Orizaba, and the good news is we arrived in Oahu on Sunday at 6:25am. At approximately 5pm on Saturday - BANG! What was that? We looked forward to see our forestay (the wire holding up the mast from the bow/front of the boat) broke near the top of the mast. Luckily it didn’t rip another spinnaker on the way down, and even more importantly it didn’t take the mast/rig down. We kept the spinnaker up to continue pulling forward on the mast, and a quick “all hands” had a couple genoa/jib halyards run forward to support the rig forward. We were able to continue sailing, but took it back a couple notches to make sure we didn’t break the rig. Some good squalls came up Saturday night/Sunday morning that we weren’t able to take advantage of, and in some of the bigger ones we even took the spinnaker down just to be safe. It was a bit of a stressful night, and none of us got a lot of sleep (a bit of the excuse for the late blog here). We could see the planes coming through before we could see the navigation lights of Oahu, but shortly after we were able to successfully orient ourselves with respect to the lights of the marine base on Mokapukuu point – our finish line. It all matched what we had put into our Nobeltec software as the finish line, but some wind shifts at the end required us to do a couple additional jibes to come in at the right angle.

We finished at 6:25am, for a total of approximately 10 days 17 hours and 15 minutes. Given the 8.5’ depth of our keel, we had to go through the main channel into the marina, which took about an hour and ½, but gave us a chance to start cleaning up the boat. The hospitality of the Pacific Cup folks and Kaneohe Yacht Club was quickly apparent, with a power boat escort in from the shipping channel, followed by leis, mai tais, and cold fresh pineapple when we reached the dock. Arriving in the morning worked out well, with the families waiting to greet us on the dock wearing their Orizaba Hawaiian shirts. Swimming in the pool with the kids, and enjoying all the boats coming in to the yacht club we lost track of time and given the lack of sleep it made for a very early evening with a couple of us sleeping right through dinner.

Today we’ll have a work party cleaning up the boat, and figuring out what to do about the forestay and some additional items that need to be dealt with for the delivery gang to bring the boat back the week after next, but largely transitioning into vacation mode. It looks like we’ll end up either 4th or 5th in our division, and 16th or 17th overall depending on how a couple remaining boats wind up. Given some of the difficulties we had we’re all pretty happy with the results. It was an exciting adventure for us with lots of talk from Dr. John and the gang about how we’ll do it differently next time around - but not sure we’ve gotten Sandi’s approval (yet?) to borrow her cruising boat again. J

Everyone is well rested (and thankfully showered) today, sharing stories of what happened on Orizaba as well as on shore while we were gone. Hope folks enjoyed the blog, and appreciate everyone’s nice comments and support. Mahalo!


We’ll probably make a few more posts as we think of things and sort through all of the pictures.

Orizaba