Inspected!

Oceanaire had her official Pacific Cup inspection on Sunday. All went well. We laid out the gear, opened hatches, and filled out forms. I'm pretty sure we passed with minimal items to correct. A lot of hard work paid off.

I've written about that on my Pac Cup Blog. What I want to talk about here is the inspector and some comparisons. He's raced the Pacific Cup before and it was very obvious he had a different experience than we expect to. His first words upon seeing the boat were, "you're going to have a comfortable ride." In fact, he said this a few times.

He told us about his landing in Hawaii and casually mentioned "after 9 days at sea" and commented again on the "comfortable ride". Somehow waterline came up and he asked about our top speeds, he then very casually mentioned "low 20s".

I had to ask. It turns out he raced on a Santa Cruz 52 (or 50)...a downwind surfing machine built for racing to Hawaii. It got me thinking about the range of boats we're racing. There are a few Santa Cruz 50s, a Santa Cruz 70, a Mull 83, a TP52, an RP45, and an Antrim 40 on the fast big side.

There are also fast small(er) boats, Express 27s, a Henderson 30, Moore 24s, and my favorite the Dogpatch 26. There are boats in our division, big heavy cruising boats...a Valiant 42, Pacific Seacraft 44. It's going to be fun starting first and watching some of these guys zoom by and having some of the guys starting with us stay behind.

You can bet some of them had different inspection experiences. Oceanaire was built for comfortable blue water cruising, you can tell as you walk up to it. Some of the smaller boats have a different use for the "stout" buckets they're required to carry. You can be certain that the biggest fix recommended wasn't "securing the freezer lid".