July 18th, 15:15 pst – lat 26 21 N, lon 126 11 W

Everything malfunctions, it’s all good!

This morning about everything that could fail failed. Not the sailing part. That always works. And we were down to the sails and the good old compass. That actually felt good. Richard is one of the great dinghy sailors and I sail mostly dinghies these days. So we were back to basics. One steering while the other was trouble shooting. Eventually we found all the faults. I think that we must have made 10 sail changes during the night in trying to get out of the hole that we dug ourselves into. There is not much that we could do. I was steering and running things while Richard took a nap. I felt the rain and by the time I realized, I was happy, the wind was peeking to 18 knots and we were zooming down the track. Then a bit more rain. Then the wind got sucked out of the air and it was dead calm. And then we battled to get out of our wind hole. In the process, all electronics on the boat decided to reset themselves to factory settings and be completely uncooperative. The good news: we’re back trucking South. The bad news: that record looks pretty tough right now, but the adventure is fantastic. We’ll work extra hard to make up the miles. We really like our position.

Where no iPhone has gone before!

On a fully crewed boat it’s hard to agree on a soundtrack. That’s because music is such an emotional and cultural thing for all generations. And we get a full mixture of generations in sailboat racing. We’re double handed – Richard has an iPod and I have an iPhone both packed with music. So we alternate. That makes our soundtrack for a great adventure. Yes, we have a stereo, and yes, it’s running as long as we’re not sailing in light air. Richard loves U2, Dave Matthews and all sort of Canadian bands and I like all good music but carry mostly straight ahead Jazz and classical music, the kind that I like to play. So we shuffle the songs and we shuffle the iPhone and the iPod. Now I bet this is a first for the iPhone: racing on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific. The iPod that is ‘inside’ the iPhone is great!

Where no iPhone has gone before!