Tucked in safely in San Fernando....

Congratulations to our mates on Antipodes (Geoff Hill) and Moonblue 2 (Peter Churchouse).  Antipodes has secured the double: Line Honours and first on IRC Overall.  Moonblue 2 has secured first in Premier Division and 4th IRC Overall.  Results here.
Meantime, not all are quite "tucked in"... there are still 13 boats out there, battling wind holes of various sorts and positions.  This morning there were three boats about 40 miles out going round in circles in zero wind (been there, done that...).
There are still some of those doing well and headed to SF, but a couple clearly suffering in local wind holes and almost zero boat speed.  We feel for them and wish them wind filling in!
Here's the 17:30 screen shot for the record:

Three Divisional leaders still on the water (those with crowns): from bottom:
Red Kite 2 (IRC 2), Hedonist (IRC Cruising, most westerly) and, Northeast,
Wonderwall (HKPN).  Tom Wiesinger's Allegro is most northerly.
The most SE are Premier Cruisers Tipsy Easy and Clove Hitch
17:30, 30 March

Moonblue 2 going great guns

Geoff Hill's Antipodes still leads on the double: Overall IRC and Line Honours
Pete Churchouse's Moonblue 2 is 65 miles behind, still leading Premier
Cruising (white w/crown), 3rd IRC and 3rd LH.  Peter Cremers' Shahtoosh is the red one north
of the rhumb, after tick-tacking north yesterday; 3rd PC, 4th LH.  The TP52, Standard
Insurance is second Line Honours immediately north of Antibodes.  She
tacked north early out of the harbour, and so was able to avoid the knock
and tacking back to the rhumb that the rest of the fleet suffered yesterday.
Talking Head still leads IRC2, and Crystal leads Cruising
09:30, 29 March

UPDATE: 15:00, Moonblue 2 and Shahtoosh now level-pegging on the water, both with 98 miles to go.  MB2 still first in Premier, Shahtoosh moved up to second, with Explorer, the new XC50 in third.  Meantime, Andipodes has less that one mile to go, still with the Line Honours and Overall Handicap double in hand. [probably finished by now, given the Race Tracker delay..]

Live on the YellowBrick Tracker here.  (I'm not sure how long these stay online; I wonder...).

Tactically the two front boats are in interesting positions: Antipodes is harder on the breeze, currently 40TWA, while Standard Insurance north is travelling freer, about 70 TWA, and has slightly better boat speed at last checking.  Distance to finish between them: 20Nm.  If breeze clocks right a bit more, will favour the TP, though it seems to be sailing into a hole (4-5 knots) that doesn't extend down to Antibodes. So should be interesting and maybe close finish sometime later today. [current rough estimates: they'll be two hours apart, Antibodes first..]

At last checking of tracker: Moonblue 2 doing 9 knots in 11 knots of breeze at a TWA of about 55-60 degrees, so clearly revelling in the light-tight reaching conditions.  Antipodes and the TP52 are both doing a touch over 10 knots. (Can't help wondering how Xena would be doing, as do G&A in a comment to yesterday's post).

Winds 070-080, 10-12 knots.  Wonder if there'll be the usual "Luzon Hole"?...

PS: sometime and regular Xena crew: "Bucket" is aboard Moonblue 2; Stevo and TC aboard Shahtoosh.

Wheeer's Xena? And San Fernando Race

Some folks have asked why Xena's been so long on the Hard.  Simple answer: Gear Box. On the way back from Phuket, 8 days out of Hong Kong, she caught a huge lump of fishing net, which stopped the propeller dead, and mashed the gear box.  It's taken all this time to fix: first to try to locate spare parts, then finding that one of the parts was going to take another 45 days to get to us, so we ordered a brand new gear box, which arrived just a few days ago -- from Australia -- and was only finally installed yesterday.  Today she's back in the water on her mooring at the RHKYC.
So.... even if we'd wanted to, we couldn't have done the SFR... Pity, really, as there's a good Premier Cruising Fleet, and the two Warwicks are having a good battle towards the front of the fleet: Pete Churchouse's 61' Moonblue 2, and Peter Cremers' new 75' Warwick, Shahtoosh. [Entry list]
Yesterday's race start, 13:30, from in front of the Club...

Cloudy, light rain,  5-10 knots start.
13:30, 27th March

Some screen shots [from Yellow Brick tracker].  Click "Read more" for the screen shots...