In the last week we fought our way down the west coast of the United States of America. First we past Oregon before going down along the coast of California, past San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Meanwhile we have gone past all of them and are now sailing along the Mexican coast. The winds on our journey have been rather weak and changeable so far, making our progress slow and tedious.

Along the way we could secure a point in the Scoring gate, which we managed to cross in third position. After that we unfortunately got trapped inside a region of low winds, which allowed the other boats to pull away and put around 300 nautical miles between us and them. This hurts especially since catching up will get more and more difficult as the winds are predicted to decrease further. Since a few days their lead has at least not increased much further and we were even able to close in on a few of them.

The big question is how long we will have wind for and where the race will finish. The finish line is currently more than 2’500 nautical miles away. However, in the past few editions this race always needed to be called early. For this purpose there are six mandatory gates which each boat needs to go through. Either of them can be declared as finish line and used to determine the ranking. This means that the race could also be done in 1’400 nautical miles if the first gate was declared as finish line.

But at this point nobody knows where the race will end. Therefore, we can only do our best and sail as quickly as possible towards the next gate. And we are doing alright at the moment, although we miss our torn C2 spinnaker. The windspeed is currently at the upper end of the design range. Every so often we get a gust exceeding the maximum design speed of the sail. So far this has gone well and we manage to get good boat speed in mostly the right direction. Hopefully the risk pays off and we can get points from the sprint.

The weather is meanwhile a bit milder than anticipated. It has been pretty warm on those days with little wind and lots of sunshine. But the nights have remained cold so far allowing for decent sleep. For the past few days we have had an almost complete overcast. Without the sunshine the temperatures remain moderate even throughout the day. And the nights get very dark. The moon does not shine through the cloud cover for most of the time and it gets pitch black. Sometimes one can’t even see the horizon.

On the other hand we had a few sightings of wildlife. We have seen some of the inhabitants of this region including whales, seals, albatrosses, and squid. Apart from the squid, who ended up jumping on our deck the encounters were with enough distance. So neither side was impacted. We can thus enjoy the wildlife without having to worry about our boat or the animals.