The Bella Mente has left Hawaii and is in route to San Francisco in the first leg of it’s trip back to the East coast to the Merchant Marines. The current Bella Mente is ours no more. Pirate, JV, and Matt are bringing the boat back to the West Coast with a few of the cadets. All of our focus now goes into the new boat. Our containers will head to Newport where one will go to the Merchant Marines, and the other one will get gutted and refit for the new boat. We have received a new container which will have to get fitted out.
Doogie

By now, most of you would have seen that we finished this morning, over 2 hours ahead of Magnitude. The team was ecstatic with the victory. It has been a long road.

We sailed hard all day yesterday and night, doing a few changes to keep the boat on course and pointing towards the mark. Magnitude had to gybe down to the line while we hauled straight to the mark. I’ll try and add a few tid bits of the race that we did not post during the race for various reasons.

For example, on the second night with the kite up, we blew up one of our primary kites for the moderate air. So we had to be careful with the other kites to make sure we conserved our assets.

We are all tired and looking forward to some rest and nice meals.

We are in the final stretches of the race. We hooked up with a nice squall last night that picked up to about 28 knots of wind speed. It was all hands on deck to get the weight moved aft and all the crew weight. We gybed and have been aiming from Hawaii. It’s a very close race with Magnitude right now.

Everything becomes a little more difficult when we are trying to figure out where they are with a six hour delay on the tracking. They have been doing a good job to use that delay to their advantage and sneak away from us. The outcome of this race will probably be decided in the next 12 hours depending on wind direction and strength. The boys are working really hard on the handles and the drivers are taking every wave they can. The boat is settled into a nice groove right now and the off watch is trying to get some rest before a bug push tonight. We have ETA of tomorrow morning. Wish us luck on this last push and hopefully the next update will be from land.

By the way, the tracker will go live when we hit 100 miles from the finish. So west coasters, get up early and check it out! And east coasters, enjoy a nice breakfast while we make final gybes down the Molokai Chanel and into Diamond head!

http://live.adventuretracking.com/transpac2011

Thanks,
Doogie