No Ka Oi has successfully finished her first Pacific Cup! We crossed the finish line at Kaneohe Bay Sunday morning at 0507 after only 12 days and 16 hours. What a blast of a trip!

It went really smoothly and without any major equipment failure - except for one exciting incident – a little involuntary stop: No Ka Oi was the first out of four boats that had the pleasure of running into a whale without its nav lights on. This happened just a few hours before our halfway mark - what a great spot to get into trouble! It was a very, very scary incident to say the least. We were cruising along nicely with the big kite up when the boat suddenly came to a stop with a major bang. The watch crew yelled out “Whale… we hit a whale!” And the off-watch tried to scramble out of the bunks to run (or swim) for their lives after such a horrifying wake-up call. (Except for one unnamed crewmember who slept through the whole incident and had to be woken up by dragging him out of the bunk - we later determined that he is not a good candidate for singlehanding a boat.)

The good news is that there was no real damage to the boat and the crew was all safe, and as far as we could see the whale was fine too. The adrenalin was definitely pumping while we kept on checking the boat for damage and monitoring the bilge, and we kept a close look-out since we feared ‘Moby Dick’s revenge’ - we imagined the giant coming back to hunt us down like what happened in 2006.

It's for sure a whale of a tale that we will keep on talking about for a long, long time.

- Edda Rottscheidt, crew aboard the Gib’Sea 43 ‘No Ka Oi’

For results and more from the Pacific Cup, see http://pacificcup.org