Tips on Sailing to hawaii

Video Transcript

"The speed the boat will be going and how many days you think it takes to get there, from San Francisco to Hawaii. Yeah, our boat has a whole speed of 6.3, so it will only go that fast through the water out there. We are trying to average; if we can average six knots we will probably do it in sixteen days. It's about 2100 miles from San Francisco to Hawaii. We are going to try to average six knots; if not five will do. That will get us there in about eighteen days. It's quite a ways over there. Then we are planning on staying there two weeks, then resting up a little bit and then coming home. Coming home would be the same thing as there except instead of mainly going down wind being on a broad reach we are going to be beating towards the wind. We'll be coming in close reaching, maybe beam reaching working our way up wind. If there is a high sitting out there then we'll probably have to go a little further; meaning that we'll have to head up towards Oregon, maybe Washington depending on how the high sits off the coast and then attack it and come on back down. Most of the time coming across out there it's a good nice warm sail until you get two to three hundred miles off the coast of California. Then it gets nasty and cold and a lot of times you hit some bad weather coming across, maybe a storm. So it can get real nasty and cold. So Ed, when you sail from San Francisco to Hawaii do you go in a straight line from here to there? My old boat will probably have to go the rhumb line, which is a straight line, down there because we can't afford; our boat is slow and we can't afford to be falling off for speed. Meaning they'll go a little further, stay on a broad reach, we'll be mainly on a rhumb. Some boats would go south a little more. Some boats would head further south and pick-up some speed there, because they have the speed there where they could come on back and make up the ground where we're not fortunate enough to be able to do that. Some of your bigger boats, which we call rockets will probably make the race over there in maybe six to seven days because they are going to be averaging fifteen to twenty knots, maybe faster. They'll be flying spinnakers twenty-four hours a day, day and night. No matter how fast the wind blows they will be flying those spinnakers. Spinnakers are a real light sail. It's a big balloon like sail that flows out in front of you. They're the real pretty sails that you see out there on boats. We'll be flying our spinnaker just during the day, just for safety reasons and because it's just my wife and I at night. If a storm comes up, which most of your squalls do; they come up at night, so we'll be ready and prepared in case something happens up there. We don't want to be running forward in the middle of the night trying to drop sails. That's one other reason why I ordered my spinnaker with a sock. Which means that when I raise it there I pull on a line there and it raises up, uncovers a sail and sits up on top. Then when I get ready to close it I just drop the sock and it just loosens up all my lines running to the spinnaker and it kind of just folds up there and I just suck it into the sock."