TransPac Awards Dinner

[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.