Soaking It Up at the Kaneohe Yacht Club
Soaking It Up at the Kaneohe Yacht Club
For more than a third of the 2012 Pac Cup fleet, the race is over and recovery underway at the Kaneohe Yacht Club. While results are not yet official, the clear winner this year is Andy Costello’s J/125 Double Trouble, finishing in 7 days, 23:42:44.
The victory is particularly sweet for Costello as it’s his first-ever Pac Cup. He was stoked to reap the benefits of two+ years he’s put into optimizing his boat. Costello also hand picked a crew with the right chemistry to get the job done - fast.
“We sailed to Hawaii in under 8 days on a 40-footer,” Costello said, “That’s pretty good! I know it’s an extremely fast time for the size boat. It was really windy and the conditions were really suited for the boat and of course Skip (McCormack) called a perfect navigational race. We had five extremely good drivers - at night there was no horizon, no moon and plenty of clouds so you’re not driving by sight - it’s all feel and you had better know what you are doing. We didn’t have to slow down; we just went as fast as we could possibly go during the night. We were changing our drivers out every two hours so there was always someone driving the boat at full capacity. It keeps the pace on. We got to the point about 2-3 days before the end of the race where we felt good enough that we could put it into a slower gear or we could have probably finished the race 8-9 hours faster. But there was no need to break anything or blow the boat up before we got here.”
Costello said they had breeze in the lower 20s for most of the race, and for them, that was based on putting the boat in the right position on the course.
“I think a lot of the guys who stayed higher than us didn’t get as much breeze as we did because we dove south and because of that we were able to stay in the pressure and get around everybody. We sailed a lot more miles than everybody else but we still got here faster. It was awesome. Warrior is another J/125; we beat him by 250 miles - just shows that we’ve done everything to get the boat going like this. Trevor (Baylis) has designed the sails for the boat - the spinnaker is not like a normal sail - we really developed everything to make the boat faster and faster over the past few years. It’s a whole other level and I think we can win some more races with it.”
The other two crew on board Double Trouble are Jody McCormack and Matt Noble.
