You think that's smokin'. I believe one time when I looked they were traveling close to the speed of light.

Mike Hill
H20 #791

This just off the TB web site.

"TommyB just had a spinnaker blow out - ground crew is on the way with a replacement."

Oucha ouch ouuuucha. If is stays downwind that's going to leave a mark. Nigel looks at Alex slyly, "Did you pack the backup chute?".

Mike Hill

The situation with the Sunnucks team deciding to trailer their boat to the next stop, even though they had replaced the damaged hull, is interesting, and it illustrates why the Worrell 1000 rules kept evolving over the years to cover various situations.

In the Sunnucks case, I have heard that they are going to be given a time penalty for trailering their boat to the next checkpoint, and the penalties range from a high of 8 hours to a low of 30 minutes, depending upon who you talk to. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

It will also be interesting to find out exactly what they hit that caused their daggerboard to split the hull open.

And it will also be interesting to find out whether the hull sank as a result. Early reports on this kind of thing are unreliable, so maybe it was just a little crack in the hull rather than "ripped wide open." Let's wait to get the whole story before jumping to conclusions.

As I said in my Hotline this morning, Rick has all the information about the damage to the Sunnucks team's F18HT and he will have a story about it later today, prior to the finish of the race, when he gets set up at Tybee Island. It's VERY interesting.

[color:"green"]Leg 6: Fernandina Beach, FL - Tybee Island, GA (Finish)
scheduled start is at 5/17/2003 10:00:00 AM EDT
straight-line distance of the leg: 87.662 n. miles

Tommy Bahama last position is 30.6384, -81.435917
reported at 5/17/2003 10:00:00 AM EDT

They've sailed [color:"red"]2.010 n. miles at 0.132 knots since 5/16/2003 6:49:37 PM[/color] EDT with 87.662 n. miles left to Tybee Island, GA (Finish).[/color]

And, during the night, Alex and Nigel made some more progress. Creepin' up the beach prior to the start

Always be careful what you ask for. You asked Rick for bigger pictures. Well, he just put on our Tybee page a whole bunch of pictures taken by Team Mezzo -- they are clickable thumbnails. When you click on them, they are SO big they are about twice the width of my monitor screen. You want detail? You got it. But you might want to skip the first couple of pictures unless you want to see the world's biggest teeth.

He says he made them too big by mistake. It has been taking a very, very long time for all those pictures to load, but most of them are working now.