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Photos of the DayDecember 11 - Sea of Cortez, Mexico It's been our good fortune to have visited many of the best sailing areas in the world, and there's none we know of that has better sunsets than the Sea of Cortez. They are spectacular! And the sunrises aren't bad, either. Check out this one captured by Mike Miller of the Vanguard 32 Uhuru as he was leaving Agua Verde to sail across the Sea to the mainland. |
Here's Mike later in the day, singlehanding in pleasant breezes. |
Big Yard for Really Big BoatsDecember 11 - Richmond The facilities will provide docking for boats up to any length - over 200 feet - and a draft of up to 34 feet. That should take care of most sailboats. While not a boatyard, the facility has a large crane to facilitate the stepping and unstepping of masts, the loading of engines and cargo, and that kind of thing. With an increasing number of large yachts being built worldwide, and more of those visiting the West Coast, San Francisco Bay has been one of the more difficult layovers because of limited deep water berthing. |
Photos Latitude/John Arndt |
Sydney to Hobart HealthyDecember 11 - New South Wales, Australia |
Bentley's Opinions No Longer Needed by VolvoDecember 11 - Sydney, Australia Apparently, the piece got Amer Sports Too skipper Lisa MacDonald - whom Bentley had accused of wasting time on cooking rather than running the boat - bent out of shape. According to dock talk, MacDonald - after enlisting the help of Nautor, which has two of the seven boats in the event - immediately began to lean on the Volvo Race to do something about Bentley. She was apparently successful, for Bentley, despite having excellent nautical journalism credentials, has been sacked from the Volvo editorial team. Not for anything he wrote for the Volvo site, mind you, but for what he wrote for madforsailing.com. Assuming that all the dock talk is accurate, this is a major gaffe and embarrassment for all involved, from MacDonald, to Nautor, to Volvo to madforsailing.com. The real irony is that many people - including some of the crew aboard MacDonald's boat - think Bentley was correct. Two months ago we published an excerpt of a letter from Melissa Purdy of Tiburon and Amer Sports Too, in which she expressed displeasure that they were sometimes "sailing like girls." And in an interview on the Volvo Web site last weekend, our old friend Emma Westmacott said that in the last Volvo (then known as the Whitbread) the women aboard EF Language pushed their boat harder. "I'm quite a pushy person," said Emma, "and Lisa often says 'chill'." Westmacott says she would have liked to have seen Amer Sports Too pushed harder in the Southern Ocean. |
Fossett on Full BoreDecember 11 - St. Malo, France "The weather wasn't quite ideal," said Fossett. "Especially at the start when we had a 10-kt NE wind that meant we were slow out of the Solent jibing eight times. We only averaged 16 kts for the first hour and so spent the rest of the trip catching up to the record. But the mild sea state and average winds of 18 knots meant it worked out well in the end." |
YOTREPSDecember 11 - The Pacific Ocean and Cyberspace Who is out making passages in the Pacific and what kind of weather are they having? Check out YOTREPS - 'yacht reports' - at http://www.bitwrangler.com/yotreps/ |
Weather UpdatesDecember 11 - Pacific Ocean San Francisco Bay WeatherTo see what the winds are like on the Bay and just outside the Gate right now, check out http://sfports.wr.usgs.gov/wind/. California Coast WeatherLooking for current as well as recent wind and sea readings from 17 buoys and stations between Pt. Arena and the Mexican border? Here's the place - which has further links to weather buoys and stations all over the U.S.: www.ndbc.noaa.gov/stuff/southwest/swstmap.shtml. Pacific Winds and PressureThe University of Hawaii Dept. of Meteorology page posts a daily map of the NE Pacific Ocean barometric pressure and winds. Pacific Sea StateCheck out the Pacific Ocean sea states
at: http://www.mpc.ncep.noaa.gov/RSSA/PacRegSSA.html.
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Latitude 38 Publishing Co., Inc.