Olson 34 back in SF Bay
After 6 weeks at sea solo-ing around the Pac High I finally got back. Quite an experience actually. The trip home was full of large floating objects, somewhat alarming, given I could not watch out for it all.
The ride down was thrilling, terrifying, sleep deprived, and exhausting. One's mind is constantly occupied with tactics/weather/boat issues/sail sets and sleep is hard given all that consumes your thoughts.
The ride back a bit more relaxing but saw an overturned 20' skiff, hit two rather large encrusted logs, and sailed past far too many pieces of homes or offices/buildings that I assume were part of the Tsunami. Things like parts of walls, a refrigerator, endlass plastic bottles of various sizes, and of course glass net balls (see attached).
It is quite thrilling, in some insane manner, to put up a 3/4 oz kite on day 4, turn on your trusty AP, and hit the sack. For something like 7 days I ran with the kite up night and day sleeping until either an alarm sounded (AIS/RADAR) or the boat woke me up complaining about it's course/wind angle.
So what failed ? Both spin guys are now about a foot shorter due to wear. One spin halyard was shortened, jib halyard now needs to be shortened, broke topping lift on final 24 round down, and tore 1 kite to bits in same round down. RM AP LInear drive unit gave up its plastic gears after driving about 2000 miles of the 5000 I traversed. The hydraulic unit I installed did the bulk of the hard driving and still runs just fine. I only had to add about four tablespoons of fluid over the entire course. I have to say in the windier segments and the heavy sea segments the power of the hydraulic ram with a type 1 pump was outstanding. Both the my own electronics ,the BB model 1 gyro based AP. and RM AP brains did great jobs of driving.
The combination of AIS and Radar gave me lots of confidence in reasonable safe watch keeping, probably unfounded confidence, but it was a single handed race. I had a really loud electronic alarm that I kept next to my head. I routinely would sleep through it after the 3rd day! The boat would wake me if conditions changed much and an indicator of how constant it can be out there was me sleeping 5 hours beyond the alarm setting at least 3 times. THis was in the middle portion of the race, when winds were in the 15 to 20 range. The boat would just hum along and the AP would sing a soothing tune.
I won't bore all of you. Two photo's are attached of a) day one out the gate and b) glass net balls are really out there.
Brian