Pacific Cup 2014 – The Fun Race to Hawaii
For those that know what it means, the name probably gives it away. For those that don’t know, Pacific Cup is a biannual race from San Francisco to Hawaii (Oahu). I’ve been dreaming about this race for more than 20 years. In fact, when Chris & I met, I had just bought a boat, a Sonoma 30 named The Edge (interesting story there). One of the reasons I bought that boat was that it would have been a perfect boat for racing to Hawaii. Our first “date”, as it were, was practicing on The Edge to do some double-handed Jack & Jill races in Seattle. We’ve been together ever since. The Edge was traded in on a boat we could live aboard. We tried “living on The Edge”, but you know that was a little tough to do day in and day out. Ha! The new owner raced The Edge to Hawaii twice. Then out of blue I heard that just a few months ago, The Edge, renamed Cowabunga, sank in between Kauai and Oahu while returning from a local race. Bummer deal. Sad to think about. Fortunately, the crew was rescued with no issues.
The Edge, back in the day. Yes, that’s us, circa 1995.
So, back to the Pacific Cup. It’s just over 2000 miles from San Francisco Bay to Kaneohe Bay. That’s about 400 miles less than the distance we sailed from Cape May to Horta, Azores this summer. Pacific Cup generally has 45-70 boats racing and they have Double-Handed divisions, so of course that’s what we are going to do! A J/120 like Shearwater is really a great boat for this sort of thing and now that we are moving back to the US, we’ll spend the next year or so “training” in Corpus Christi and putting the finishing touches on getting the boat ready to race. Fortunately, our prep for the Atlantic Crossing means the boat is quite far along in preparation. Our biggest need is to get at least one new spinnaker, since Pacific Cup is all about going fast downwind. We also need a #3 jib to get away from the coast, but that is a sail that was missing from our inventory regardless of whether we race or not.
With a little over 18 months until the start of the next Pacific Cup, now is the perfect time to start preparing. I’ve spent the weekend reviewing the Sailing Instructions and the Offshore Race Rules, making a list of what items we still need to take care of to pass the safety inspection, learning to use a new free routing software program called qtVlm from virtual-winds (it is a French website, so a little tricky to figure out), figuring out how to get better polars for out boat (iRegatta coupled with our iAIS, and NMEA output from our NKE instruments should do the trick), watching some of the Pacific Cup Academy videos, and watching some youtube videos from boats that have done Pacific Cup in the last few years.
Our biggest task will be to do lots of sailing in the next 18 months. Practicing driving in big breeze with the spinnaker up and practicing taking the spinnaker down in big breeze. With only two of us onboard we will need to have these things down cold if we want to do well and avoid problems. Fortunately, Corpus Christi is known for its great winds, not so unlike SF Bay or Hood River. Hopefully, the 2000 miles of sailing we need to do this spring to get Shearwater to Corpus Christi will be good practice as well. Other than that, not much going around here.
– Life is not a dress rehearsal
Wow…..big plans and more adventures!! How long will it take to have Shearwater shipped back to the states?
Mom – thanks for the note. The ship that we are looking at would be able to transport Shearwater with the mast up, and the estimated transit is approximately 4 weeks. They have windows of time, so we’ll have to be ready to get the boat to the pick-up area and then when it arrives, hustle down to Fort Lauderdale to move it up to Texas!