San Diego to PV '08: Day 5 - What are we thinking???

Well, this day turned out to be much nicer than expected!!
It basically started with the 8am check-in as our wind died to nothing.
The check-in was good and bad.
- We are pleased that for two days good boats like Valkyrie and Blue Blazes have not extended much on us.
- The problems are that Velos has really put some good days together and we had really expected to gain on the other two
when they had to gybe out to us. The expected gains were mostly going to be the result of winds getting light on the lower third of baja forcing all of us to sail higher angles on Port. We were out far enough that we'd clear Cabo easily, but we thought they would have to gybe out to near our line to do the same. Looks like something else happened, so we've sailed some extra miles and are paying for it.
By the way, the sailing has really been excellent. It's warm now, shorts and T-shirts day and night. Clear skies tonight and millions of stars, etc. etc. The Southern Cross is up btw. You don't get to see that too often!!
So...our day. Initially forecast to be a day of no winds exceeding 7 knots and most in the sub-five area turned into a very nice day of sailing in aprox. 9 knots of breeze. All the forecast info that I've been able to track down has consistently been telling us that what wind we had would be from the NW. But, we've sailed all day in a breeze of about 278M. We are almost exactly dead upwind from the finish line.
So, why did we go the way we did today?? Well, when your forecasts are totally off in both wind velocity and direction, and you have no other strong data suggesting what to do, you fall back on history and....you stay on the gybe closest to the mark.
We wanted to be far away from Cabo since the prevailing NW breezes always leave a giant hole to the south of Cabo. Was it there today?? Who knows. Oh...I forgot you guys know. Anyway, all other things being equal, we stuck with the option that would take us away from Cabo, so lots of stbd gybe until we were pretty close to past the cape. Then we've spent the rest of the day from 4pm until now at 9pm playing the shifts...wind varies between 270 and 290 out here.
Now, I have new forecast info that actually agrees with what I see. Our routing tells us to spend some time getting NE and our breeze is pretty steady 10 knots in the 285 range so that's the favored gybe and our forecast agrees. Nice!! Maybe things will make sense.
Latest ETA is 6pm on the 29th. We are sailing faster than current predictions so perhaps an early afternoon finish on the 29th?? Probably way too much to hope for. But, that's what we do around here. Hopefully, we'll close the gap a bit with some of our competition, and perhaps get some help from the evening shutdowns that the wind experiences in PV?? Here's hoping that BB and Velos miss the wind window in front of us and have to spend some time waiting!!
That's all. Tell me what we did wrong someday.
Morpheus out!!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see:
http://www.sailmail.com