Category: Decisions

Spadefoot Returns – 23 Days Adrift

July 4, 2017

There are bits and pieces of this saga on Facebook and sailing forums, but I thought it would be good to put all of this in one place for easy reference.  I’m not aware of many/any other boats that had been abandoned, drifted for so long, and were brought back to shore in good condition

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Pacific Cup – What Went Well and What Didn’t

August 3, 2016

For those of you thinking about racing across an ocean this might be a helpful: What went well for us – The Jet Boil stove with gimbal worked perfectly. Only 2 small canisters were needed. Freeze dried meals for dinner were “good enough”, and one packet was more than the two of us could eat.

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Rudderdundancy…

April 12, 2016

First, the backstory… Ordered emergency rudder from Competition Composites in Canada.  It shipped UPS and we redirected it to the UPS warehouse in north Austin because it required a signature and we wouldn’t be home to sign.  Rudder arrived at the warehouse Monday morning.  Monday evening we spend an hour poking along in rush hour

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Yeah, it’s got a Hemi!

March 20, 2016

We’ve had many great weekends for sailing and racing this winter, but this week and next have been reserved for off the water projects to get Spadefoot ready for Pacific Cup in July.  First up, was a big one.  We’ve had Spadefoot for 1.5 years and the boat came with a nice trailer, but up

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The Winter “To Do” List

January 19, 2016

It’s winter and Pacific Cup starts in 6 months.  That means it is time to get serious about the To Do list on Spadefoot.  It is so much easier to get things done on Spadefoot with the boat only 30 minutes away versus the preparing Shearwater for crossing oceans when the boat was 3-5 hours

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Safety at Sea – Lessons Learned

November 10, 2013

Last weekend Chris & I attended a two-day Safety at Sea Seminar hosted by the San Francisco Yacht Club in beautiful Tiburon, CA. The course is accredited by US Sailing and is a requirement for Double-Handed crews entered in Pacific Cup next year (or 30% of the members of a fully-crewed boat).  Even though it

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Virtual Winds & Weather4D Pro

March 16, 2013

Next weekend we fly to Porto to move Shearwater down the coast to Gibraltar.  It’s roughly 500nm to the rock and a nice chance to try all of the changes we’ve made to Shearwater since arriving in Porto last summer.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are already watching the weather given my

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Pacific Cup 2014 – The Fun Race to Hawaii

December 17, 2012

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

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There and back again

December 16, 2012

Oh yes, it’s Hobbit time and like the good fellow Bilbo Baggins we are about to embark on a memorable journey.    After a few months of maybe here, maybe there, we got the official word this week that I am transferring back to Austin, TX.  But hey, I got a promotion so…  That does put

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T-minus one month to blast off!

June 4, 2012

Side note: If you can read this blog post then we were successful at testing out posting via the XGate email service that we will be using in conjunction with an Iridium 9555 satellite phone. We just passed the one month to go mark for our planned departure from Annapolis. I thought it was interesting

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