by Bugs Baer
Tempest passed through a stretch of unexpectedly light wind on Wednesday afternoon, but by night she was back at full speed. During the day, a full-court press by the whole crew fixed her broken sails and brought her computers back to snuff.

Will Hubbard caught the spirit of the operation. "On the upper deck, we have reacher repairs. On the lower deck, we have the spinnaker loft. The doctor is holding sick bay, and Ashley Perrin is taking orders for bags made from Tempest's torn sails." Tomas Mark and his team of staplers and staple-pullers ran the industrial sewing machine on deck. Ashley Perrin and Kevin McMeel cut and glued spinnaker patches below. Then the spinnaker team got its turn on the sewing machine, and during the afternoon the big sail went up again. The spectra luff rope was changed to nylon line which would stretch with the spinnaker cloth and there were no problems with the sail again.

We are treating the spinnakers carefully. We constantly watch the relative wind meter. When the heavy chutes see relative wind over 16 knots, we bring them down. The wind has been cooperative, often coming up to the top speed, then dropping back. We have been seeing 11's and 12's on the speedo all through the night.

Our on-shore weather forecasts have been nearly perfect, but this afternoon we ran into a wind hole. For several hours it was far short of the predicted 25 knots of true wind, and we wallowed along at boatspeed of less than ten knots. You know that somewhere else, your competitors have wind and are moving, and you can't do anything about it.

Our navigator, Michael Lawson, rebuilt the boats computer while the boat rolled, bounced and dripped with moisture. The low point came two days ago when the broach that broke our preventer overturned Michael's coffee mug right into his laptop. Coffee oozed between every key, and the screen went dark. Now he went to work on the laptop -- taking it apart, wiping surfaces dry with paper towels, then using the boat's hair drier to dry the rest. And lo and behold -- it didn't work! All the rest of us would have been stumped. Michael has all the navigation programs, the computer maintenance programs, and the weather programs on his machine. Neither Kevin McMeel's laptop, used for downloading satellite images, nor the boat's computer, used for this email and other boat management programs, can do what Michael's computer can.

So what did Michael do? He went to the fourth computer, the one Ashley had tucked in her sea bag. He loaded all the programs on to hers and we are running again. Our course is now aimed at a narrow band of strong winds between two weather systems, and our information is flowing. I wonder if somewhere, tucked away, there is a fifth computer.

The news comes in that Mari-Cha has passed the first finishing line at The Lizard and has broken the record for this race. The second and final finish will be at the Isle of Wight. In general, the bigger boats are benefiting more from the heavy wind than the smaller boats, Tempest being the one small boat doing well thus far. We hope our winds stay strong.

At midnight our watch went back up for its four-hour hitch. As we barreled along at full speed, Max Hutter, standing near the companionway, noticed a discoloration around his feet. It was oil, spurting from the hydraulic system of the mizzenmast. Another equipment problem to be fixed. What else is new?