We stayed at the Kane'ohe Yacht Club; Med moored only feet from the beautiful lawn, pool and club house. After securing our boat we watched, along with our neighbor Cadence, as a sailboat full of inept young sailors tried over and over again to place their boat between us. They were probably tired and I'm sure copious amounts of beer played a part in it. I really got worried though when the young man at the helm told me he was afraid to back the boat up. They were finally successful, but in a very ungraceful manner. After a brief recovery they proceeded to party loud and hardy into the late hours.
This did build a relationship between us and David and Beth on Cadence. They have sailed to Hawai'i several times from Newport Beach, CA. David is a long distance swimmer (they travel all over the world so he can swim things like the English Channel). They graciously offered to drive us around in the SUV they had rented for hauling his surfboard around. David swam every day in Kane'ohe, as well as surfing at Waikiki, and told us that he had seen a baby hammerhead shark which was about a foot from eye to eye. We were latter told that the area around the Kane'ohe YC is a hammerhead shark nursery. Early on our last day there we heard a very loud crash beside our boat but couldn't figure out what it was. Later that morning while standing on deck I heard it again (like someone jumping into the water) and saw a large bubble-like disturbance next to Cadence. Several people saw it but no one knew what caused it. I think some large fish had just had his breakfast.
We left on Wednesday July 6th and had a rough first 24 hours, 8-10 ft seas, but we made 150 miles. The second day wasn't any more comfortable and we found out that Cadence had had a terrible passage to Kaua'i and had broken their wind vane. Their return home would be delayed. At 1pm we were hailed by a Coast Guard plane and advised that the military was going to do missile exercises in our area and wanted to know our intentions. We thought it was pretty obvious but I didn't get smart with them - they had missiles! We were on a NNW course and they told us to change our course 5-10 deg to N. Not comfortable but we did it. They were trying to contact another boat but weren't successful. They hailed us again and told us not to go west of our current longitude. "This will insure your safety". Great - that meant that we were going due north until 6pm. It was horrible - but hey, we didn't get shot! In fact, we didn't see any planes, boats or missiles. My guess is that they couldn't contact the other boat so they made us line up with them so we were easy to shoot around.
On my watch last night the wind hit 33 knots and Comocean was screaming along at over 10 knots - a little scary. If all goes well only 18 more days of this.
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At 7/8/2011 9:53 AM (utc) our position was 24°35.80'N 160°02.86'W on course 318T at 6.8 knots.
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