27.15.290N 151.47.663W

Coming off midnight watch.

Quite a bit of stuff going on out here on the general intersesting experiences front, not so much on the race front, since your last update. Let's just get the race stuff out of the way. The boss has pulled the plug on the race. No official announcement has been made, but today was a stunning sunny day with wind on the aft quarter at 10-15 knots. Absolutely perfect spinnaker weather, but we sort of rolled along underpowered under main and #1 genoa all day.For my non-sailing friends, that's tooling down the racetrack at maybe 2/3 throttle. Not sure why the extreme conservatism, but it's his boat, so his call.

On the upside, and the upside is huge, we spent all day in glorious sunshine on one heck of a nice boat. During last night it became obvious that we were passing some underwater feature of note, because the previouslyt empty sea suddenly had fishing boats on it. We passed within a mile or so of two different ones durning the night, saw another in the morning, then finally came within a couple of hundred yards of being run down by one around midday. Had to call the guy on the radio and get him to change course. Coming straight at us at a range so close we could see him looking out the door of the bridge when we hailed. Yikes! Would've felt stupid having a collision with the only other boat in sight over 600 miles from land. Looking at the chart, we were passing over a series of seamounts that no doubt caused an upwelling that made the fishery. The sea floor for hundreds of miles has been around 12,00-14,0000 feet deep, and these mounts cut it down to more like 3,000. So not exactly a shoal, but a pretty signigicant bump in the bottom Speaking of fish, two huge Mahi Mahi came alongside and zoomed along with us about 8 knots for roughly a half hour. They were chasing flying fish and using us to help herd them, I think. Gorgeous fish with unbelievably effortless speed.

Flying fish all over the place, by the way The sea, even though it's all just water, really has a different look in different areas. We are solidly in the bluewater tropics. Tradewinds, flying fish, bnig bright gamefish, sparkling blue sky and water. It's a different look completely from the albatrosses and scuddy clouds of a few days ago, and the foggy California coast seems a world away.

Well I gotta be on deck again in a few hours.

Whiskey Delta Bravo 2898 VALIS out.