TransPac Awards Dinner

[Alan H]

I actually wore a kilt to the Farewell dinner, but the flash on the digital camera was too challenging for my weak mind and the pics didn't come out. That's too bad, because Bob Crawford from "Black Feathers" wore his kilt along with the full PC kit...it was quite a sight.

Byt the time we got to the actual Awards, the sun had set and it was again too dark for the digital camera. However, we did get some shots of me talking with friends, and the final Latitude 38 Magazine shot has me wearing my Holyrood casual. so here you go.

This is me talking to Connie, wife of Bob Johnston, skipper on Ragtime!. Connie's eldest son is pretty interested in the whole Scottish thing. He grilled me about the Heavy Athletics, and we'll probably see the Johnstons on Saturday at Pleasanton, and also at Ben Lomond.



Here I am yakkng it up with Connie and Bob.



The combined skippers, at the end. I'm on the far right, crouching and chanting SPARKY, SPARKY for our friend and co-skipper Ruben Gabriel, who was dismasted 650 miles from Hawaii. Ruben is due in around 6:00 PM this evening, Hawaii time. He set up a jury rig and kept on going. The guy has some serious personal and physical and spiritual resources that I'm sure he never knew he had, before this.



I will bang together a little website about the trip in the next few weeks and make it available, but there won't be a lot of "kilt" stuff in it, so I'll put it in the "Off Topic" forum.

[TimC]

Once again, let me say congrats my friend!

-Tim

[Finn]

Looking good and I'm very glad you made it safely!

[michaelbeeman]

Congratulations, again, Alan! Those are some cool piccies. Can't wait for more!

(BTW, I used to work for Jeff L. at NBB! That's the first time I've seen him without a glass of beer or on a bicycle!)

[Alan H]

Just as an aside....the shirt that I'm wearing is embroidered with the SSS logo and was the swag for the 1995 LongPac race...the race I did to qualify for the 1996 TransPac. I discovered that the boat I had for the 1995 LongPac was not appropriate for a TransPac...and the story goes from there leading up to me sailing the course in 1996 but not completing the race, but that shirt sort of signifies the beginning of my offshore sailing life.

I wore it to symbolize how everything had come full circle....how 13 years after that first LongPac, and about 15-16 years since I first came up with the idea of doing the Singlehanded TransPac, I had finally completed my goal and closed the circle.

It also happens to look pretty good with the Holyrood tartan!

[hospitaller]

looking good!

now silly question...how do the boats get back to the mainland.

meaning, do you guys sail them back, are they shipped back by a separate crew, etc.?

[pdcorlis]

...now silly question...how do the boats get back to the mainland...

You know I never thought of that What a great question!

[Alan H]

You know I never thought of that What a great question!

OK, I answered hospitaller in the mailroom, but what the heck.

The bigger boats mostly sail back. Pretty much anything much over 30 feet and 6,000 pounds displacement sails back. Either the skipper goes solo, or sometimes they take on crew.... or they hire a delivery crew. Lots of people have the husband sail over in the race, and then the wife comes aboard in Hawaii and helps deliver the boat back to the West Coast. They treat it as a shakdown for cruising dreams. The biggest boat, Dogbark, invites a mess of friends and they just go for a 20 day sail back to Puget Sound.

Every now and then someone keeps on going! Jim Kellam did that. He left Hanalei in 2004, sailed to Honolulu to reprovision, then headed for the South Pacific and Australia.

Smaller boats are usually shipped back. We just sailed 2,000 miles mostly downwind, and that's hard enough. Sailing 2,000 miles UPWIND....no fun at all. So the smaller boats sail to Honolulu and get put on trailers and shipped back to Oakland or San Diego or Long Beach.

I priced out costs to ship back Ankle Biter. Cost, using my trailer, if it was roadworthy (it wasn't) to San Diego...$5,200. To San Francisco, either straight from Honolulu, or by ship to San Diego and then trailered up to San Francisco was $6,000. If the boat was any bigger than Ankle Biter I would have to pay for a crane to lower/raise the mast before leaving and after getting back. That would be about $400 more at each end. With my boat, I could have raised it at most yacht club hoists.

Anyway, $6,000 to ship back a boat that is probably worth $8,000 after I stripped off a lot of the gear, didn't make sense to me. So I sold Ankle Biter in the islands.