As the leading wave of the fleet approaches Kauai, it is starting to feel like endgame as boats set up for their most favored jibes to finish. The scale of the race makes it easy to forget looking at the chart how far the race still has to run. For me, at 400nm from the finish, I still have the equivalent of an entire LongPac to run. And a lot can happen in that time and distance. Last night I experienced a pretty big lefty wind shift, which woke me with the banging of a near jibe. So I suited up, jibed, and got more on a VMG course, whereas before I had been cutting over north to hopefully get set up for a better angle on the extended forecast Easterly. Of course GRIBs are often not so accurate, and I make many mistakes in eyeball-routing off them. Wind now is light, about 15 kts. Other news from last night — not a single squall. Clearly we are in a different air mass. The sky was about 50% clear, it was nice to start seeing stars, and the moon is more than half full and waxing. I am so beat though that I slept through my alarm on three separate occasions — even using my new trick of setting up the alarm on the iPod and playing the alarm tone through my earplugs. I really should have found something louder or more violent, perhaps involving electric shock. For most of the race a simple kitchen timer has allowed my to wake up every half hour to two hours to check wind direction and so forth. It’s also getting pretty warm, and spending time in foulies is pretty uncomfortable. Some goretex rainpaints or other superlight wear would also have been a good idea. OK, off to see how I can get sailing faster.