July 7 Daily Report- Gale Warning!

by Race Committee, July 7th, 2014

NWS Forecast for Offshore California waters: Monday night, Tuesday Gale warning Winds N to Nw 20-30 kts. For most boats, it is time to head for port. For the Vic-Maui fleet, it is just what the doctor ordered. The front of the fleet is about 400 miles off the California-Oregon border.

All competitors have all picked up good NW winds along the Oregon coast and are making good time. The Yellowbrick ETA’s have changed from mid-August to mid-July with boats closer to shore finding a bit more wind. And now that the forecast has a promise of more wind, boats will quicly move down course.

Longboard and New Haven has spent the afternoon on a broad reach at speeds over 11 kts and have started overtaking the boats ahead. Just behind are Kahuna, Anduril and Jam. Kahuna has edged to the west and is closer to Hawaii, but moving a bit slower.

Of the earlier starting boats, Turicum, Turnagain, Passepartout and Losloper are all roughly the same distance away. But there are different strategies. Passpartout took a long port gybe to closer to the coast and more wind. Turicum is much closer to the rhumb line and going a little slower in lighter winds. Turnagain and Losloper are side by side in the middle ground.

Who is Leading? – That depends on how you look at it.

Turicum is the closest to the finish in Maui with 1860 miles to go.

But the Yellowbrick Tracker looks at a boat’s current position and calculates how much distance remains to Maui and divides that by boat’s VMG - the speed in the direction of Maui (or the cosine of boat speed for the trigonometrically inclined) over the last 4 hours and makes corrections for boat handicaps.

Based on a bunch of math, Yellowbrick currently puts Jam as the fastest boat to Maui, but Kahuna is in the lead on corrected time, about 9 hours. But this is a volatile calculation and it will change frequently. For the best information stay tuned to the race in real time on the Leaderboard and Race Viewer at www.vicmaui.org .

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