Getting ready for Pac Cup 2022!
Pacific Cup 2022 starts in just 9 days!
We are racing Raku double-handed and start on Tuesday, July 5th at 10:55am, just off of St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco Bay. Then it is just an “easy” 2070nm to Kaneohe Bay, on Oahu. Ha! It looks like around 63 boats will be racing this year, and 15 of those are double-handed. The smallest boats start on Monday, then a nice group of mostly 30-40 footers start in 3 divisions on Tuesday. The faster 40-50 footers start Thursday, and the crazy fast 50-70 footers start Friday.
We delivered Raku down to Richmond Yacht Club two weeks ago. It was a rather smooth delivery down one of more challenging coastlines in the world. The 800nm was just a tad over 4 days and a great final practice of our watch schedule, eating on board, sail selection, autopilot tuning, and downwind driving. A really valuable 4 days. Other than being chased for 10 minutes by two huge (>50′) sei whales, it was a pretty quick and uneventful trip. And we only used 5 gallons of diesel. We are back on Orcas now, with a nice block of downtime to recharge and prepare ourselves mentally for the race. Of course, that means a whole bunch of time looking at the weather and evaluating the routing options.
Just after the delivery we had Raku weighed for the race. 9,573 pounds. That seems pretty good considering the brochure and class minimum weight is 9,300 pounds and we have a few niceties onboard that push our weight up a bit. Considering Shearwater weighed 15,600 pounds versus a 13,900 brochure weight, this seems really good for a production boat.
This year has been all about preparing for Pacific Cup. In addition to a new spinnaker, code 0, and spinnaker staysail, we also replaced Raku’s rudder with a Paul Bieker-designed and 206 Composites-built rudder that has a 150% bigger rudder post and much better control downwind. On the sailing front, we’ve done 5 overnight races between 75 and 230nm plus the 4 day delivery to get ready for this 2000nm journey across the Pacific. There is always more that can be done, but we used as much time as we’ve had available to do what we can. At least we don’t feel like we have left things to the last minute.
We’ll be flying back down Raku and Richmond Yacht Club on Friday, the 1st and will check-in again with more information on how to follow the race.
Guys, we’re so excited for you and know all of your prep work will be worthy of a great performance on the part of Raku. Good luck and we’re with you all the way!