On the road tomorrow!

We are off tomorrow morning to head down to FL for the Tybee 500. The plan is to be there midday Thursday and in Islamorada for Thursday night. Unfortunatley school is getting in the way for Brendon, he will be flying down Saturday morning. Todd will be picking up team manager Bret Sullivan in NJ and the two will be driving down from there. Sometime Thursday we will be picking up our other road crew, Angela, the coolest chick ever!
We have been busy practicing up in Newport, RI for the last month. Barry Moore was gracious enough to loan us his boat as ours is in South Florida in the enclosed trailer. Despite 40 degree water, we got some great practice days in. Almost everyday was 15-25 knots, perfect practice!We managed to only capsize once and of course we chose our first day which was by far the coldest. Maybe if we pretend the water during the Tybee is only 40 degrees we will make sure we stay upright! In all fairness though, as I write this the water temps in Newport are a toasty 48 degrees so we did get spoiled a bit towards the end haha. Team Moose-Burd also joined us for our last week of practice, those guys are looking good and with that big dumb animal in control of the front of the boat you can be sure they will be pushing it to the limit.
Stay tuned for an update at the end of the week from Islamorada!
The above picture was taken by the friendly Race Committee of the local Laser frostbite fleet on April 5th.

Unofficial Tybee 500 Teaser

With the 2009 Tybee less then a week away what a better way to get excited than with a little video action.
A little something I put together using footage I took soon after the start of last years race.

Sponsor Spotlight: Kinder Industries

Team Adrenalin is purchasing a Nacra F18 infusion the day after Tybee.
In order to keep it nice and clean on the drive back from Pensacola (where we are picking it up) we purchased some hull socks from Kinder. 3 other guys from the Northeast also purchased them and Kinder set us up with a great deal! I picked the covers up today and they are sweet! Really well built! If you need anything for your boat I highly reccomend these guys... they have the pattern for almost any boat out there or can get it.

New Sponsors: Glowfast Marine & Bluestorm

Glowfast Marine:
It's been a concern of mine for some quite time that we will be sailing the Tybee with a black spinnaker and if we end up sailing in the dark how that would play out. I was wondering "how will people see us?" "how will we see our spinnaker?" we will most likely be too tired to hold the flashlight on the spinnaker. I tried going to local sailmakers here in RI but no one had anything that would work well enough.
A great solution came across when Glowfast Marine was featured on the main page of Sailing Anarchy. Glowfast's glow in the dark sailtape was featured as draft marks and chevrons on a bigger boat. I immediately called Jason at Glowfast and he agreed to send me a 10 meter sample. There is a cool history that is tied to A-Cup stuff on their website (click logo at right for link). In addition this stuff glows for 20 hours after just 10 minutes of light exposure! I tried it out in some dark rooms and it was really neat.We stuck the chevrons on the other day and they look really cool... I just hope we don't actually have to find out how well it really works! I'll be sure to let you all know how it goes if we do.
Bluestorm:
In order to compete in the Tybee, a USCG approved lifejacket is required. I got rid of my last one a couple years ago when I switched to using CE approved buoyoncy aids. When I saw this in the sailing instructions I wondered what I was going to do as the USCG approved ones were usually so bulky and obnoxious to wear. Luckily I found Bluestorm! I went up to their warehouse which is housed in Massachussets based MTI, s msrine technology company that offers gear to paddlers, fishermen and etc. Bluestorm is their new line to cater primarily to sailors. When the amazingly friendly and sailing experienced staff at Bluestorm brought out their products and let me try them on I was psyched! The Spray lifejacket was the most comfortable USCG approved lifejacket i've ever tried on! In addition, all the rest of their gear spraytops, infltable PFDs, jackets, and etc was all spot on... these guys know how to design a great product! Check out their website by clicking the logo at the right.

Day 2 Steeplechase.. FINALLY!!

So it’s May and we are about to leave for Tybee and I still have not posted the day 2 story from the Steeplechase. To be honest, I wanted to wait until right before the sailing season started to give everyone something to get pumped up over! Haha That’s my best excuse and I’m sticking with it!
Day two of the 2008 Steeplechase was almost identical to day two of the 2007 race (and I’m assuming many others) the start was a downwind run off the beach to the channel 5 bridge where it was became an upwind beat in 15-20 with some nice jib reaching towards the end. For all of you that haven’t done this race, day 2 is the most challenging part of the race, it’s a journey through the southern Everglades National Park. The leg consists of sailing through narrow channels, over sandbars, through tiny cuts and mangroves, in between all that there is some great flat water sailing but unless you’ve done the race a lot of times (we haven’t) there are still plenty of shallow spots to discover (we found out the hard way).
We sailed the leg pretty similar to last year. The main difference was that we had a new jib that wasn’t so blown out that we had to foot off 5-10 degrees below our competitors. This made a huge difference in keeping us ahead of the boats we got ahead of at the start and passed through other opportunities, usually when they run aground! However, when a boat ahead of you runs aground you usually take precautions not to do the same. As we ran aground 3 times we lost a couple boat including Team Davis Island who we had been battling with pretty much all weekend. They sailed by us as we attempted to navigate through a NARROW channel, ran aground, and backed the boat up almost taking out a channel marker piling in the process. Luckily all of the bottom we hit was soft sand and we didn’t do any damage!
The final few mangroves and bays saw the strongest wind of the weekend reaching almost 20 knots. Even cooler, the third to last bay was a very quick jib reach in which our self tacker track decided to explode (not the cool part). Brendon quickly hopped off the wire in an attempt to tame the flogging jib but it was impossible and the boat shook violently as we reached across the bay at around 23 knots towards the next mangrove. We were able to jury rig the jib in the mangrove and were set for the final few miles mostly upwind sailing but we did get to pop the spinnaker in one of them and gained a bit on the boats ahead. Spinnaker sailing in the mangroves is always a bit sketch as you can’t see the wind coming and you run out of ground FAST if you have to bear off. We later found out or buddy Jim Zelmer from Vermont capsized in one of the last mangroves while doing the same. They got stuck in the brush on the side for quite a while apparently… poor Jim.
We finished up 11th of 21 overall but very close in time to the 4 Nacra 20s ahead of us and we can account for that time in silly mistakes. We felt good about how we sailed and it got us very excited for Tybee!! Bring it!
It’s hard to chose which is more fun, a 50 mile spinnaker run down the ocean side of the keys on day 1 or an obstacle course inside the keys on day 2. Either way, this race is incredibly fun and totally worth all the effort of traveling 1,500 miles to get there. If you are on the fence… just do it… you won’t regret it. I’d say this is my favorite race of the year.