The last planning meeting for the Bella Boys!  Go Alice Go

Thanks to Chef Chris for all his help.

Tomorrow is the day. We will start at 1 PM on our race to Hawaii. Our big competition for the first to finish will be Magnitude 80. Over the course, both boats are rated almost evenly. Only 3 hours should separate us at the finish. So that means basically a boat to boat race.
The team has worked incredibly hard to get to this point. Many thanks goes to Ryan “Nipper” Brown who has helped untiringly to get the boat ready. Tomorrow, it’s time to focus on racing. No more mods, no more tweaks. Soapy has been running weather models to give us an idea as what we are in for. Right now it looks like an almost classic Transpac.
There are sure to be some good times and some tough times for the next week. We will work hard to keep the boat going 100%. The next update will be from the boat.
Doogie

The boss enjoying a final day on the dock…

Tenderloins grilling for crew burritos.

We are on our way to Long Beach. We left the dock at about 8:30 this morning and will keep motoring up to LB until we find some useful wind. Our target is to try and find some decent breeze so that we can continue to see the boat and rig set up in the pressure. The boat is pretty much all packed and ready to race. The foul weather gear is on, sails are on, food is loaded and the whole crew is here.

Everyone is anxious to start, especially now that the first fleet started.

Doogie

just a short video of us hoisting the main and stacking the sails.

Hello again,
We’ve had a busy few weeks. We sailed for 5 days testing the rig and getting it tuned. We also tested out the various other systems on the boat. All checked out well. We then had 5 days to work on the boat and shorten the work list. We started at about 4 pages and now it’s down to just a little over page. Hap arrived Friday and we started sailing again. Most of the crew is here now and we are looking at all our possible sail combos. And there are lots of combos possible!
We have removed quite a bit of hardware in winches and hydraulics so we have been sorting out how to get the same jobs done with less. All this has been in an effort to get weight off the boat. We will sail again tomorrow in San Diego before heading up to Long Beach on Tuesday.
Doogie