Yesterday we had a great run under the spinnaker, dousing at sunset just to be cautious. Steve set the jib up off a block on the end of the boom which allowed us to keep decent speed through the night, and before dawn he and Rick relaunched the spinnaker. The sailing is absolutely great right now, enough breeze to keep us moving through the water at 8+ kts, light seas. It's also amazing to look at the last few hours of wind speed and direction, it is absolutely rock solid, with almost no shifts at all. It's a bit foggy, but it is not as cold as it has been. All in all we are very happy.

Today Coyote (and Steve) passed the 4000 NM mark for the roundtrip. That's all in the span of about a month! Very impressive, and neither Coyote nor Steve seem phased at all by the fact that they have been at sea for the entire month minus a few days partying in Hawaii.

Already talk has turned to 2012 and Steve & Rick's possible plans. Just to make it clear, Julia and I are highly available for the race portion of this trip (hint hint:). We figure it's a great sign if we can still be underway and have interest in doing something like this again. Often you don't start having fond feelings about things like this until well afterwards when the memory isn't quite so sharp.

Our current goal is to catch up with some of the boats ahead of us. I think we have the advantage in that Steve is crazy enough to still want to fly the spinnaker even though the race is long over. Many of the other boats on the net don't seem to have the energy for it, and we've been slowly picking up miles on people. Steve wants a drag race under the gate.

We got word that the satellite tracking site has been taken off-line. Don't worry, we're still out here.

Lat 38 00.026' N, Long 132 35.255' W
Wind: 13 kts NW
Seas: 1 m NW
Speed: 7 kts
Dist to go: 478 NM

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