I was reading Chris' post about lessons learned from doing the race. I started to write out a note about how I've managed the LongPac, as it might provide ideas for other folks. There has rarely been a LongPac race seminar, unlike the multiple TransPac seminars, and it's a lot of work to organize a seminar. It might be worthwhile to start to accumulate a (managed/edited) LongPac Guide that could substitute for the seminars for purposes of the LongPac race.
My list would be slightly different than Chris':
Know your goal in the race (what's the purpose/expectation in doing the race)
Bank sleep, rest, and food (take care of yourself)
Navigation, weather (point the boat in the right direction)
Sail the boat as well as you and the autopilot can
Preserve equipment and yourself (minimize breakage and damage)
Communication - while fun, isn't essential
I believe that the LongPac is an excellent qualifying tool - the course is long enough that it forces the skipper to sleep while the boat continues sailing (something I normally would never have done), the course is entirely within what is usually the worst conditions found on TransPac, and coming off the course skippers often have a raft of new ideas or things to alter to the boat or their approach to the race - and that makes the race a great learning tool.
Know your goal in the race
My goal in the LongPac has been to sail the boat as well as I can, and if another skipper sails their boat better and beats me, that's fine by me. There have been specific boats that I wanted to beat on corrected time, and it's always fun to have a skipper to pace and see if you can outfox them. Doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's fun.
For LongPac, the initial goal for me was to complete my qualifier in order to enter TransPac. I've never viewed LongPac as a race but more as a rally. When using LongPac as a qualifier you 'win' when you've completed the required 400 miles on the ocean. It doesn't matter if you've actually finished the event, as the qualifier only requires 400 miles nonstop in the ocean. Just getting around the course is enough of a workout, no need to kill yourself to try and beat everyone else on corrected time.
After completing my first TransPac qualifier, the next LongPac event is for fun. I love it out on the ocean, there are whales and albatross and critters to see, just watching the boat zoom along through big rolling seas is great, and when the water turns that cobalt blue color it's amazing. Some years the sailing has been magnificent, some years the sailing has truly sucked and I've turned around rather than beat up myself and the boat. One year I did turn around and learned later that several boats that carried on ended up putting the masthead in the water - ouch! As I didn't 'have' to qualify, and I wasn't out on the course trying to prove anything to myself, I had no problem in looking at the grey sky and building seas and watching the breeze climb from 6 knots to 30 and saying, 'This is going to be no fun, there's no reason to crash out another 140 miles to then turn around and crash right back through it all again as conditions deteriorate; let's go home.'
I like to know why I'm going out on the race, know what I want to accomplish, and know my risk level. I don't like to break the boat and I don't want to break myself.
Sleep & skipper management
Each boat/skipper combination has their own unique approach to staying rested. My goal is to bank as much sleep as possible, as when I pop up on deck after a sleep I never know if I'm going to be back in the bunk in three minutes or five hours.
For me, the approach that has worked is a 20 minute nap, pop up to see what's going on, if nothing is going on, hop back down for another 20 minutes. I can keep this up for four days running, and then I'll crash out and sleep for 2 hours and go right through my 20 minute alarm clock. Repeat to the finish.
Each person has to find an approach that works well for them. There are sleep management coaches and doctors that can work with an individual to determine the skipper's sleep patterns, though I've never met one. I just go with trial and error, and found 20 minutes is enough rest to wake up refreshed - as long as I never let myself get rundown.
The LongPac adds its own weirdness in that the course has been just the wrong length for me: I'm usually coming in from offshore about the time I would like to get some real sleep, but once the Farallones are close (say, 8 hours sailing at current conditions) then I want to stay up all the way through to the finish. There's lots to hit as you get closer (like, say, the Farallones, weather buoys, shipping) and I don't like to sleep in close proximity to that kind of stuff. Worst LongPac in this regard was a light air drifter finish and three of us (Alchera, Xpression, and Beetle) spent the whole night drifting around in dense fog in no wind around the Potato Patch. To stay awake we kept calling each other on the VHF radio to keep each other up and talking, discuss proximity of ourselves to the shore vis-a-vis radar, the relative merits of color vs black and white chart plotters, and anything else we could think of... and that really helped me a lot in terms of staying focused and awake through the night and to the finish.
Eating offshore, for me, is completely unlike eating at home. Offshore I tend to want things that are ready to eat, one handed, munchy style - no plates, no utensils, just fingers. And I'll nibble continuously rather than try to eat an entire proper meal. Things that can be prepared before the race are nice: hard boiled eggs, frozen cheeseburger (pre-made, just unwrap and let it rattle around in the sink until thawed), licorice, can of garbanzo beans (open can, insert spoon), and instant mashed potatos (though this does require water, a pan, and heat). The most fancy thing I tend do offshore is make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and if it's really cold I'll open and heat up a can of soup on the single burner SeaSwing stove. I don't bother pouring that soup into a bowl, I'll just eat with a spoon from the cooker. And making popcorn on the stove works, that is fun as it makes the cabin smell yummy.
Navigation and routing
It doesn't matter how fast you make your boat go if you point it in the wrong direction - that's why I placed Navigation and Routing as more important than sailing well.
There's not a lot of navigation to do once one clears the Farallones. What I'm mostly doing is tweaking my intended route based on weather information as it becomes available: WFax, GRIB, VHF WX broadcasts, buoy reports, talking to shipping traffic, and comparing current conditions (and current forecasts) to the route I had come up with before the start.
Prior to the start there's much more information that can be used, particularly NOAA and US Navy weather models that are freely available on the web. I start watching the models and forecasts two weeks before race start, and twice daily (morning and evening) will spend an hour or more looking at the new forecasts, compare to old forecasts, look at what changed in the forecasts, compare buoy reports to the old forecasts, and re-examine what I think is a good route for me and my boat. By doing all this homework, when I hit the start line I have a clear idea of what's going on currently, where systems were, and most importantly, where the systems are supposed to go as time passes and I move around on the race course.
So I spend a couple of hours each day while out on the course gathering weather data and reviewing my intended track against the most current forecasts and reports. That's a significant effort, in that it's a lot of time at the nav station to get the data, and then more time spent studying the charts and pictures and numbers on the laptop screen and trying to correlate the new information with my handwritten notes on pieces of paper.
That's also a great time for me to chit-chat on the SSB or VHF - I'm awake, I'm sitting in the nav station, and it's easy to grab the microphone and talk to someone.
Sailing the boat well
I like to sail the boat as well as I can, which can mean changing sails, adjusting trim, adjusting the autopilot, fairly continuously. I don't like to give something away in terms of speed or course or time, so when I get up every 20 minutes I will spend a short time evaluating the sail trim, number of wraps on the headsail furler, angle of the main, angle of the rudder, and see if there's something I can do to improve things. Usually there is, a quick tweak, and I'm back downstairs hidng below decks. Having the sail controls lead to the cockpit makes them easy to access and adjust (nothing worse than getting doused with cold salt water whilst on deck at 4AM adjusting the jib car).
I don't like to handsteer the boat unless conditions are perfect and I want some entertainment; otherwise the entire time offshore the autopilot is driving - this frees me up to do everything else I've got going on, such as sleeping to rest up for the next squall/sail change/weather report/check-in/eating dinner. Early on I decided self-steering was super important for getting to Hawaii, so I saved up and installed two large, powerful below decks pilots connected directly to the rudder stock, plus the Monitor windvane on the transom.
Autopilots are not as good at handsteering as a good helmsman (maybe not even as good as a bad helmsman), I think this is mostly because the autopilot always reacts and never anticipates. I'm a decent helmsman on my boat, but after three hours of hand steering I've learned the autopilot is a way better driver than I am.
To help the autopilot drive the boat I like to run with a small mainsail and larger headsail; running the boat under main alone puts lots of stress on the steering system, as the boat isn't balanced and the mainsail loads are continually trying to turn the boat to weather. In heavy air reaching conditions I'll put in the third reef in the main and unroll perhaps five feet of the headsail, just enough headsail to help hold the bow down so we stop rounding up.
I've learned, through trial and error, which sails the boat and autopilot like under which conditions - that's just time on the boat. There exists quite a bit of information about sail selection for racing to Hawaii, and LongPac uses the first two parts: getting out the gate (upwind pointing ability), and the second part (heavy air reaching). Synthia (Eyrie) and the Corenman's Pacific Cup Handbook go into this in detail.
Preserve Equipment and Yourself
I don't like returning to port after a big offshore race with a broken boat, that to me is relatively poor seamanship. As my goal has never been to win at all costs, I don't mind reefing early, being conservative, unloading systems when possible. I'd rather be slow than break the boom or blow out a headsail. Rounding down while under spinnaker while doing crazy speeds surfing down a wave is a great way to pull down the rig, break the pole, or shred the spinnaker - that would ruin my enjoyment of the race, so I tend to never run DDW or even close to that with a spinnaker up. If the boat's going to crash, I want it to crash to weather.
I do carry enough tools and spare parts to fix things as they break. I'm not sailing an ultralight, and while every pound counts against me, I have a lot of tools on board - perhaps not as much as Mike "Snap On" Jefferson, he may carry a welding set on his aluminum boat. I've had to fix all sorts of little things: replace stuffing box material when the engine shaft starts leaking severely, batten cars on the mainsail, blocks that explode when shock loaded, belowdecks wiring when all the lights went out in the middle of the night, repair roller furling drums after the screws stripped, that sort of thing. Most of those aren't show stoppers at all, but I'm out there on my own and if I didn't bring it then I can't get it.
On TransPac I've had bigger failures that required forethought and preparation: I did break a rudder going to Hawaii and finished under emergency rudder, and I did have a headstay stem fitting break and release the headstay but fortunately not taking the mast with it, tension was applied with kevlar line (low stretch) through blocks back to primary winches - both of those were huge problems that completely altered the race for me, as the goal shifted from sailing well to simply getting to the other end.
Upshot is a significant part of my race goal is to finish the race with the boat in the more or less the same condition it started in. That keeps me from taking what for me would be too much risk in powering the boat up just to go as fast as I possibly can. I like to go as fast as I want to, which is usually way less than the boat could do when sailed with a full crew.
Communication
I like to talk on the radio when I'm out on LongPac; there's a bunch of us doing the same thing, tackling the same problems, and it's fun to hear the solutions other folks come up with. I also like to send notes back to shore, and installed an SSB with Pactor Modem and I can send/receive email via SailMail. I have a decent Icom VHF radio in the nav station with the big thick antenna cable that minimizes transmission loss to the 3' Metz whip at the masthead. The Beetle Laptop lives in the nav station, it interfaces with the SSB - I use this stuff a fair bit, especially for bringing on board weather information.
Talking with competitors on LongPac is fun, and for much of the race fleet is within VHF range unless everyone spreads out too much north/south and the faster boats will move off to the west and out of range until they turn around and come back. The SSB is mostly a novelty on LongPac, but the VHF does get a work-out.
AIS is a great tool for knowing where the shipping is. I installed a Class B AIS transponder, so I can tell the shipping where I am as well. I figure they're looking at their AIS display more often than I am, and it's easier for me to see them out my window than for them to see me out their window. I do think of AIS as a communication tool; it certainly doesn't help the boat go faster.
The most valuable part of talking to the other skippers is keeping morale up. I find it easy to get depressed or angry when things go wrong, somehow being sleep-deprived and working your way through weather systems you don't control while fixing the boat tend to accelerate my high and low emotional state - and there's no value in beating myself up if a decision turned out to be stupid or wrong. That's when it's nice to talk with someone else and hear that they are doing fine, and realize that you're doing fine as well.
- rob/beetle
