Spadefoot!

It’s time to pull this all together. Some of you know, some of you don’t. Last year, right after Pacific Cup, we bought another boat. It’s a one-off custom Schumacher 28. You can read all about the boat here – Spadefoot.

For a time we thought we’d just use Facebook to cover our shenanigans on Spadefoot, but after trying that out for a few months, a proper blog and website feels better. With our Shearwater webpage already up and running it was too easy to just add a section for Spadefoot and carry on with the same blog. The Facebook page is here – Spadefoot Racing. We’ll probably still use that to post links to this blog. The Spadefoot videos will be here as well – Videos.

So what’s the deal? Well, after finishing Pacific Cup in 2014, while still in Hawaii, we started talking about what we would do differently. Oh yes, there would definitely be a next time. The biggest thing we wanted to do differently was drive more. We relied on the autopilot far too much in 2014. It was comfortable, but not as fast as we should have been. We also, reasoned that hand-steering while standing up for hours was not ideal and Shearwater requires standing for steering downwind. Finally, while a J/120 is an amazing boat for almost everything, the one thing it is not great at it is VMG running in strong breeze. I talked to a sailmaker recently that has done Pacific Cup 8 times and he mentioned he would be scared to race a J/120 to Hawaii. Why? Because it doesn’t plane. As the breeze goes up, the loads just keep getting bigger, but the boat doesn’t go faster. So, in a perfect world we wanted another boat that we could sail regularly, with a tiller, that planes. Enter Spadefoot. The perfect solution, that checks all the boxes.

That brings us to today. Spadefoot is entered in Pacific Cup 2016. We joined Austin Yacht Club and we’ve been sailing and racing the boat as often as possible here in Austin, on Lake Travis, for the past 15 months. In May we will trailer Spadefoot to Richmond Yacht Club, race Spinnaker Cup from San Francisco to Monterey and then Pacific Cup starts in July. Bonus – we can put Spadefoot on a ship to bring her back from Hawaii.

Here’s to 2015 and exciting things to come in 2016!