The Cone Returns Home

We all followed The Cone of Silence (R/P 30) during their (aborted) Transpac effort. Those that have seen and sailed on it have raved, and we've liked the boat from day one as well. Here is a bit of a post mortem from The Cone's owner James Neill. Enjoy.

The Cone is back in Sydney. ANZDL shipped it back with no hassles.We are going to do a few mods to make the Jet doors idiot proof and also to reduce a bit of weight as we have been carrying some water in the jet drive tunnel. We will probably be back for Transpac 2005 – wiser.

We never realized how cold, windy and rough the first three or four days would be. Our bowman didn’t even bring oilskin pants. No one had thermals.

One funny lesson we learned; One of our crew had this great idea. Freeze all the bottles of water and use it like a freezer to keep food cold. We did. Froze 60 gallons of water in bottles. It kept the food frozen beautifully. It also made getting inside the boat like getting into a refrigerator.

As you know when it’s blowing 35 outside and waves are breaking onto the deck, there can be a certain reluctance to get out of your bunk and do your watch at 3.00am. Not on this race. It was so bloody cold down below, when the watch changed everyone was out of their bunk and onto the deck as quick as a flash ….. to warm up.

I have not seen any good stories on the tactical side of Transpac 2003. Rod Skellet (of Krakatoa) tells me that he spent a lot of money on the best private pre-race forecasting and it turned out wrong – he ended up biting the bullet and throwing his pre-race strategy out the window after 4 days, gibing onto port and heading almost due south for 18 hours to get to where the breeze and the leading boats were – by then he was well behind on handicap and could never make it up. He also says he spent a lot of the race on port gybe which is very unusual.