Interested parties need to pace themselves. Seven days, ten days?  Jeesh. That's a lot of click-click-clicking. That's potentially a lot of sleep-deprived calendar days –– even days set near Hollywood or  Waikiki. 

But I am happy to say there's a super-cool tracking site that shows all the boats in the several fleets.
Okay, super-cool –– but with a 4-hour delay, and the updates seem to come only every hour or so. So perhaps medium-cool.  

Anyway. It allows those of us watching the race to follow the track and to guess at the weather. Plus, the class leaders get a little crown over their name. Which is nice.

Here's the link.

For 100 years, sailors have been racing to Hawaii from Southern California.  Okay, probably ages longer, competitive spirit being what it is, but the 2019 Transpac marks the 50th anniversary of the 2250-mile sailboat race.  

Little did I know, this big race is one of Jeff's lifetime sailing ambitions.

Enter the wizard: Merlin is a 68-foot-long sled designed by Bill Lee. The boat was built in 1977, and promptly set a record** in that year's Transpac that stood for 20 years.  Tampa-based attorney Chip Merlin*** purchased the sweet sloop a year and a half ago and set about updating her and now, just like that! It's showtime.

There's been more than a year's worth of preparation, rebuilding, outfitting, refitting, and organizing logistics. I haven't documented it because –– in a parallel to nie moje malpy, nie moj cyrk –– the fiberglass dust, punch lists, invoices, and files of safety documentation have been a few states away from me.

The intrepid crew includes Chip Merlin, Brian Malone, Kat Malone, Mackenzie Cook, Keahi Ho, Mike Pentecost, James Clappier, Chris Watts, Adrienne Cahalan, variously from Florida, California, Hawaii, and Sydney, Australia.

The Transpac website will be tracking the fleet –– keep in mind, instant-gratification junkies, that the updates appear with a 4-hour lead-time. That is, the updates are NOT in real-time.

Boats are expected to finish in a week or two, depending on weather and what-not. Here's the link to the Transpac race site.

Here's the link to Merlin Racing (find a treasure-trove of videos on YouTube too!). And here's the Merlin Facebook page. 

Crossing fingers and knocking wood, next stop Honolulu. Laki maika'i, all y'all.


*Identify the literary reference, win a prize.
**8 days, 11 hours.
***If your family name is Merlin, I think you are more or less obliged live up to it.

My favorite line from the Declaration of Independence? 

It's not how "we hold these truths to be self-evident" –– even though that is one of the neatest summaries of all time (all are created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).

Nor is it how governments "derive their power from the will of the governed," which is likewise very elegant.

That initial section endures and continues to inspire.

​No, the part I enjoy most is where the reasons for the rebellion from Britain and its king are set out in full and querulous detail. It's a laundry list of offenses, including my personal favorite:

"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."*

This is just one of a couple of dozen of reasons that the 13 states agreed to start the Revolution.  You can feel the outrage and exhaustion –– though it was written mostly by Thomas Jefferson, the whole document was agreed to by committee.

Committee-approved!

Booyah!

Sadly, other complaints against the King (like this one: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or incur miserable death in transportation thither.") didn't make the cut. How different a Republic it would have been had that one made it.  

Committee-disapproved!

Sheeeeit!

​

*Don't recognize these lines? That's okay. National Public Radio broadcasts the Declaration in full every year and you can read the whole thing in a careful ten minutes or so.. Here's a link to our fantastic National Archives transcription.