Monday, June 28, 2010

Whatever floats your boat...

Hard to believe, but the boat goes in the water at noon today. Bottom is faired and epoxied; bottom paint by 0800, then we have a whole six hours or so to load and stow five (six?) truckloads of gear. Straits Marine are A-one, and many thanks to Ocean Rigging for expediting their work on the mast. We'll try to get some photos posted before we leave, but after the race start, we don't have the bandwidth to upload photos on the sat phone. We'll be able to post some photos when we get to Maui. After a bite of dinner tonight, it's off to Victoria, where we hope to arrive about 0200. Most importantly, we'll be in Victoria in time for the dock party! Alo-ha!

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Maui here we come

WOW!!

We're going to make it after all.

Due to a fantastic job by everyone at Straits Marine in Steveston, we are going to be able to make the race.

In May, during a casual afternoon sail, we bumped a rock between Bowen Island and Hut rock.
I had been through this area maybe 30 times previously and was well aware where the rocks were but, even with the chart right beside me, I misjudged the distance.
It didn't seem like an earth shattering impact – more like hitting a log but we apparently did some significant damage.
We pulled the boat out to inspect it and it didn't seem too bad so we waited until our scheduled pre-race clean and paint.

When Turicum was pulled at Straits, we started exploring the damage and found that things were much more serious than originally believed.

The people at Straits have worked tirelessly to get us ready for the race and the job that they have done is extraordinary.
Turicum is now much stronger than original and we have the utmost faith in her ability to once again show the other boats the way to Maui.
We expect to be in the water Monday morning and be on our way to Victoria for the start and of course, the pre-race activities.

We will be trying to keep up a daily Blog to try to give people an idea of what is going on aboard.
Les will be our onboard “blogger” and we will be sending our messages to June who will be uploading them to our site.

You will also be able to watch our progress on the Vic-Maui site via the race tracker.

Cheers, from the Crew.
Gunnar
John
Les
Naomi
Tim
Don
Johan
Hale