We are ready to race to Hawaii on Plus Sixteen for the 3rd Time.  We finished 2nd in 2006 and 2008.  Maybe this is our year.  We have two new spinnakers, a new jib and new electronics.  We start the race at 1130 near the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco.  We expect Golden Gate summer weather consisting of cold fog blown about by strong winds.

We hope for a good coastal wind to fill our sails and take us the the warm trade winds far to the southeast.  We should sail into into Kaneohe Hawaii in 19 July.

We begin the event with a Richmond Yacht Club send off party on 2 July for the 17 member boats in the Cup.  On 3 July we attend the skippers meeting and bon voyage party also at Richmond Yacht Club.  July 4th will be provisioning day ending with a quiet dinner in San Francisco.  July 5, we sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. Our progress and race standings will be available at http://www.pacificcup.org/2010.

        

Hey Folks,

Well... Team Plus-Sixteen have been pretty busy during January preparing for the 2010 racing season that leads up to this years Pacific Cup race from San Francisco bay to Kaneohe Bay Yacht Club on the beautiful Hawaiian island of Oahu. Since the Pacific Cup is a 2000+ mile ocean crossing you can imagine how important the need to be properly prepared is.

Since this is our third Pacific Cup race as a team, much of what we need to cross an ocean we already have, or has already been done to the boat. With that said I will admit this years list is a bit shorter than in past years and focuses more on tasks that don't seem so daunting as many of the major project of past races. However, there is still plenty of preparation and we started getting that underway in January.

The first task was getting the boat to the yard at KKMI for a haulout. This takes some degree of coordination. Eric Aarens from the Richmond Yacht Club, a good friend and supporter of Team Plus-Sixteen, was kind enough to help Paul sail the boat over to the travel-lift. A line had wrapped around the propeller shaft so motoring was not an option. He also helped undo all of the rigging so the rigger could remove the mast from the boat and begin working on it. Way to go Eric....Thanks!

The Rigger examined the mast for any damage or signs of stress. Several recommendations were made, but most of it was in pretty good shape. The critical recommendation was a repair to the top of the mast where a block mounts on a bail (bale?) for a spinnaker halyard. I know many of you reading this are not sailors so I will explain this. A block is a pulley, a bail is a stainless steel ring, a spinnaker is the big kite-like sail, and a halyard is the line used to pull the sails up to the top of the mast and hold them there. You can see this is a critical system for a sailboat. If it breaks one of us has to haul the other up to the top of the mast to fix it. At sea this is serious high-risk business, we know from having to do it during the 2006 Pacific Cup race.

Once that system was fixed, Paul and Tony decided to run the halyard back down to the deck on the inside of the mast rather than leave it outside. Doing so will help reduce the likelihood that it gets twisted and requires one of us (read Paul) gets hauled up the mast to untangle it. At night and when we're really tired "twist happens." The Riggers were very helpful and offered several useful suggestions for how to do this. We finished the mast by also repairing a halyard roller, replacing the forestay tang, and relocating a new vhf antenna onto the side opposite the bail just to keep it out of the way.  

The bottom of the boat was also prepared with a fresh coat of bottom paint after the propeller shaft tunnel was repaired from where the entangled line wore into the fiberglass.  Paul had the yard brush the bottom paint rather than roll it in the hopes that it would wear more evenly than in years past. Once the propeller and shaft were reattached, and the rudder inspected, the boat was ready to go back into the water and have the mast reinserted. Good thing too, because we planned on racing the Three Bridge Fiasco the next day.

Watching a boat on a travel-lift is always interesting if not a bit unsettling. The operators are pros and know what they are doing even though the boat looks a bit vulnerable hanging by two slings as it slowly makes its way across the yard and out onto the steel frame where it is lowered back into the comfort of its natural environment.

Once in the water a few additional checks on the engine, then the charging system, and we were ready to put the mast back in. Unfortunately, the whistle blew and the crew went home for the night. We decided to cleanup, both the boat and ourselves before we went to have some dinner. We then decided to just sleep on the boat so we'd be ready to go at 7:30am when a travel-lift operator came back to work.

Dropping the mast back into the boat went smoothly and in no time we had the rigging reattached and the boom back in place. The final task was adjusting the forestay length by a half an inch to accommodate the new tang. One of the riggers took a few minutes to do this and showed us how. We were on our way back to Richmond Yacht Club where we began our preparation for one of the funnest races of the year, the Three Bridge Fiasco. 

Be sure and visit our blog again soon to read (2 of 3) about how we finish in our Three Bridge Race fiasco......uhm, strike that. I mean Three Bridge Fiasco race.

        

Both Paul and I were lounged comfortably under the cabana shade of Kaneohe Yacht Club on the windward side of Oahu. A sweet tradewind breeze kept the tropical heat at bay as we enjoyed a refreshing brew and contemplated the previous year of preparation and the last two weeks of ocean crossing. As we looked over at PlusSixteen sitting in the pale green water, fresh memories of exhaustion still racked through our bodies. At that moment we both swore up and down we'd never do 'that' again.

Of course we also said that very same thing after the first race. But, this time we really meant it,... so we thought. We announced it to both of our wives, Kathy Poloni-Disario and Barbara Porche. Both had looks of relief on her face as if to say "thank goodness these two knuckle-headed-adventure-junkies have out grown that phase." 

It still took a few months of recovery from the 2008 Pacific Cup race last summer, but then some how each of us separately concluded that neither has had enough. After a few gingerly worded conversations with Kathy and Barbara, and a few months of dropping hints, we thought we were being sly about working our way up to our announcement.....but those two knew long before we admitted it.....Yep, after double-handing two Pacific Cup races in a row on Paul's Olson 911SE we've enter 2010 Pacific Cup to make it three in a row!

Preparations are already well underway so visit often and please feel free to give us any feedback you think might help improve our blog.

Cheers!
Tony