About the Program

Lori Tewksbury and Cathy Meyer start the Pacific Cup at 1010 hrs PDT July 4, 2022, from St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco Bay to Kaneohe Bay on Oahu, Hawaii. We will be in the Double-Handed division, with 8 other boats including one other DH Express 27. 

We met through a mutual friend, Mark Werder, who connected the two specifically for this race. Lori was prepared to race Hang 20 in 2020, but the pandemic had other ideas, as the race was canceled that year. Lori and Cathy have done a handful of practice races and sails, getting to know each other and preparing the boat and themselves to check this off their bucket lists. 

During the race, we'll post updates as often as we can muster the energy, but let's be honest, it may be infrequent. Since it's just the two of us, we expect little sleep but lots of adventure. 

A little about the boat and the race: 

It's an Express 27 - an ultra-light displacement keelboat designed by Carl Schumaker, with simple systems and tight quarters. It has a fractional rig, 27.25' LOA and an 8' beam. We have no watermaker, diesel engine, refrigeration, head or galley.  

For those who don't know offshore racing, we have a ton of safety equipment, including an AIS transponder, a dan buoy, a life raft, an EPIRB, inflatable PFDs with personal locator beacons, strobe lights, and crotch straps, and we have backup systems for navigating and communications. 

Lori has done a ton of work preparing the boat. She rigged a makeshift sink with a pump for water - you can see it in the photo below. We'll use a jetboil to make warm drinks, noodles, and backpacking food. We'll bring the water we need, as well as the required emergency water which cannot be opened as long as we are still in the race - but it's there if we really need it.

We'll sleep in shifts in a pipe berth below the cockpit, making room in between naps for jibes, sail changes, navigation, and cooking. There won't be a lot of time for much else. 

We'll use Expedition software for navigation, with an Iridium Go satellite connection to download weather data. A typical year on a boat like this will take 12-14 days, but it's weather dependent. 

There are two links to the left - one is Lori's Garmin InReach, which until July 4 will show our qualifying sail from late May, and the other is the YellowBrick tracker the race organizers require us to carry but is not active yet. The YB tracker will be delayed on your screen by a few hours until we reach a few hundred miles from Hawaii. I believe the InReach is always delayed. I'll try to confirm these details later. 

Another helpful tip for the uninitiated: electronics can be finicky on the ocean. Glitches are typical. We will not be checking our emails or our phones during the race, with very few exceptions for communicating with the race committee. We don't know how often we'll be able to post, but we'll try to send an update here or there. We'll definitely send an update when we've arrived. 

See you on the flipside!

<3 Cathy and Lori