Captain Brown Pants Reporting for duty sir.

Friday 7/11/09 9:30PST

As I learn bits more about life, I keep coming back to two things that are becoming truths for me:

1. Things aren't always as they seem.
2. There is always more to the story.

That being said, where do you want to start?

How about last night. Sailing along dead at Hawaii, big running kite up,moon & stars... All good right? About 5 minutes later with little on the horizon we get hit with a sustained 22-26 knot puff. More big boy sailing. I mean the real stuff because what you don't know is that we are now in asset presevation mode as we had a little fender bender yesterday and trashed a kite. Not a huge deal accept we only had two big 2A kites (our work horse) and now we have one. And we'll need it for this to end up right.

So what do you do, send someone forward to spike the tack and go for a take down or grit it our knowing it could end REALLY badly in a matter of seconds. The really pisser is all the clean you have after a crash. Other things often get broken and you don't notice until sun up or you perform another manuveur. Trust me, going forward to spike the tack at 17 knots, loud wind and water, hopefully your crew is watching and ready to do there jobs, driver is hyper engaged... and oh ya, it's always 2 in the morning.

We gritted it out.

One the thing I've learned too

All good sailboat racing stories start with one of two things or maybe
both.

1. Dude, trust me this is no shit...
or
2. It was 2 in the morning when...

More later,

Joby

We're about 450 miles out.