Transpac Race day 1

Dear all,

The 2,200-nm (2,535-mile) Transpac race from San Pedro, CA to Honolulu, HI has three starts from slowest to fastest rated boats: Monday July 1, Wednesday July 5 (Fast Exit start) and Friday July 6. Each start is at 13:00 PDT.

The progress of the boats can be viewed on Yellowbrick via Transpac\Watch. Yellowbrick is a transponder on the boats relaying boat GPS coordinates, speed and direction to that website every 15-minutes with a 4-hour delay since competitors have the same information (last 100-miles without delay).

The entry list, or scratch sheet, shows Fast Exit as the smallest and slowest rated boat in Division 3. Being at one extreme or the other in a division often helps. For example, it would help us if the breeze strengthened after the lead division boats finished, who owe us 24-hours). The scratch sheet shows that some of the most spectacular racing boats in the world are entered, such as Comanche(100-foot carbon fiber monohull in Division 1 who owes us about 4-days if they complete the race in 6-days, potentially a 5-day 14-hour record run if wind gods smile. In 2016 she set the monohull 24-hour speed record of 618-nm!) and Phaedo 3 (70-foot carbon fiber trimaran and rating TBD, and will be trying to break the 3-day 8-hour record run by the 105-foot Lending Club in 2015 if the wind gods smile; note the trimaran 24-hour speed record is 790-nm!).

Attached is today’s optimized routing solution via the navigation software Expedition, which shows us completing the race in 10.7-days under the present wind forecast (possible to get below 10-days if wind increases). Expedition is a remarkable program that takes into account the boat’s performance for any given wind direction and strength and meteorological forecast from NOAA for the next few weeks. We will be updating the optimized routing recommendation via satellite phone connection four times a day when the new meteorological forecasts come out from NOAA. That includes downloading the Yellowbrick positions of all competitors, so we can follow them relative to ourselves on Expedition as well.

In 1977 the 70-foot yacht Merlin, set an elapsed time record of 8 days, 11 hours, which would stand for 20 years. Since the 40-foot Fast Exit is capable of a 9 to 9.5-day Transpac race under the record conditions, it shows how far yacht design has progressed in 40-years.

The boat has a satellite phone and email address separate from below. If you know either, please do not use that information unless a real emergency as it will slow down data transmissions to a crawl and be very expensive.

Thank you for your support,

Credit - John Raymont