Crossing the Pacific with SV Happy Together
Hey Randy and Lennie, so great to catch up with you both. We’ve been following your journey via your YouTube channel, you’ve been on an epic adventure for the past few months. Where are you currently? How many miles have you sailed and how has the boat performed?
R&L: We are currently at home in Florida, where we are visiting family and friends for a few weeks. The boat is laying in the Tina Marina in Tahiti and we will be heading back to spend another couple of months sailing her to Fiji.
We have sailed about 7000 nautical miles from the United States Virgin Islands so far on this trip across the Pacific, and we’ve sailed 10,000 nautical miles on the boat so far. It’s a great milestone and the boat is performing amazingly well. We are punched out and there’s nothing like having something working as intended. We’ve also come to realize there most likely will not be another sailboat for us. This is state of the art and fits us perfect. We don’t need larger and we don’t want smaller.
KC: We love to hear that. How long have you been planning this trip for?
R&L: I started reading sailing magazines when I was 13 and back then the dream was to sail off to the South Pacific, palm trees, and sandy beaches. When I was 15, I had the chance to visit the kingdom of Tonga with my father where we chartered a boat back before this was a big thing and I got a taste of it for three weeks in 1978. Since then, I always talked about returning and Lenny and I have been together 28 years and we’ve always talked about the South Pacific. After deciding on a performance cat and selecting the Kinetic we knew we would head west.
KC: There is a lot to prepare and plan for on a trip like this, I’m sure you could write a book on it by now. Any advice?
R&L: Planning to cross the Panama Canal and visit the Galapagos on the way to the South Pacific was more complicated than we thought it would be. There are a lot of logistics and regulations involved with the Panama Canal, and visits to the Galapagos that have to be arranged. Our advice would be to start this planning early. You have to align certain agents in Panama and Galapagos. You cannot just show up and check in. Also, there is a lot of planning to determine who your crew will be for these long passages. We chose to hire a professional chef to assist with the provisioning, which is quite a feat for so many days at sea. Getting the boat ready is also a chore as far as safety gear, back up systems such as a spare Watermaker, all the spare parts you will need to keep generators running, and sailing gear and systems. These passages put a lot of wear and tear on a boat and it’s expected that things may break or fail - you have to be able to resourcefully have spare parts and tools and know how. It also helps to have Starlink, that has changed the game when I’m trying to fix or understand something I simply go to YouTube and get a tutorial.
KC: You took this on with a crew you had not sailed much with. I’m sure you all had to learn how to manage the boat in new ways. How’s that been going?
R&L: Our crew has lots of ocean miles. Mike has sailed with us for years, and Carolina our chef has over 100,000 miles, but neither had sailed on a boat like the Kinetic. So there was a break-in. We all got along great and it was like a really fun vacation/party day in and day out, but it did take them a few days to get used to the boat and how it handles and the rig. Fortunately, the boat feels like a tank although it’s light and nimble, so it feels very safe and it was fun to teach them the rig. I would say within a week we were all in lock step. It’s also fun to see your crew watch the boat perform. They just couldn’t believe when we would be sailing 10 to 13 kn all day long - they were in awe.
KC: Let’s talk through the rig setup and sail plan. How has it performed?
R&L: As far as the rig goes, it has been great. When we first started sailing the Kinetic we thought we bit off more than we could chew just due to the pressures and the handling and the complexity of the rig. After you get used to it you realize it’s possibly the easiest rig we’ve ever sailed. Most of our set up is push button as you know, and the sail plan is great. We use our electrically furled jib for anything inside of 60° and from 60 to 110 we use our roller furl J0. These two sails are always in place so it’s easy to jump between them as the wind shifts or your course shifts. Our main sail is roller furling and has four specific reef points which gives us great flexibility as well. We generally would put one reef in the boat at night, but after we realized we had no squalls we left it up full and we were full speed all night long. We’re loving the rig and we’re continuing to learn about it.
KC: What was your primary sail used for the trip?
R&L: We used the main sale and then switching back-and-forth between our A2 spinnaker and our J0. We never flew the spinnaker at night although there were several nights where the crew had serious meetings about whether we should. In the end we took it down each night before sunset and we don’t regret it, but when the boat is pumping along at 13 kn you really don’t wanna put it away.
KC: Let’s chat about performance. What’s the best you managed out of the boat in terms of speeds and distance covered in a day?
R&L: We had a 266 mile day and we almost couldn’t believe it. Our average was about 220, but what’s really impressive is not just the fast boat speed. We had several days where we sailed along from 10 to 13 kn, but what was most impressive was when we finished the trip and counted our mileage we had averaged 8.7 kn on the entire 3500 mile trip. We finished it in 16 days. We could’ve done it in 15 but we wanted to stop at an island, so it was a really fast passage.
KC: Any challenges along the way?
R&L: Ocean sailing has a lot of moving parts as you can imagine and we did have some failures. Our main sheet broke and although you’d think that’s a disaster, we simply turned the boat into the wind and tied our J0 sheets onto the back of the boom and were able to manage the boom with our primary winches. Kinetic sets this up on purpose as a back up and it worked like a charm within a day, I was able to fix the main sheet and get us back into normal functioning mode so I appreciated that set up. We also had a little trouble with our watermaker, but we were able to sort it out and it made water all the way to Tahiti without a problem. You’re always gonna have some problems with ocean passages, but with good tools and a little bit of engineering know how you can solve them as you go, and not only that but it’s fun too.
KC: What’s been your most memorable part of the trip so far?
R&L: The most memorable part of the trip is always the end, in this case when we saw land at our Nuku Hiva landfall. We realized we had accomplished what most sailors never will, crossing the largest nonstop body of water on earth in the tradewind sailing routes and with our alternative speed, we did it in approximately 15 days. Seeing land and Lenny and I standing there and giving each other a hug was emotional. We feel like we’re better sailors now and we’ve hit a new gear.
KC: We know you brought a chef along which is a game changer, did you leave it to them to manage provisioning?
R&L: We did hire a professional chef who also happens to be a very experienced sailor. She brought so much experience as far as provisioning that it was the best decision for us. It is unbelievable how complicated it is to provision for so many days with four people and keep everything as fresh as possible for the long ocean passage - she was amazing and quite a life saver.
KC: Any advice you’d give to anyone else looking to do this trip?
R&L: I believe there are a few hundred boats a year that do this trip in March, April and May, or maybe more - so it is relatively well documented and there’s lots of books and guides and YouTube channels that walk you through it. But here’s what they don’t tell you when you’re out in that water and you know that the closest human beings are on the international space station 80 miles overhead and the next closest land is 2000 nautical miles in either direction. You really are alone out there, and when the wind pipes up to 30 kn and the waves are 15 feet - this is not sailing in the Caribbean. You have to have experience or you have to bring experienced people. My best recommendation would be to start ocean sailing first, maybe Florida to the Caribbean or the Caribbean back to Florida. Go out and do a 1000 mile passage - do seven days including going through the night, etc. and really get your boat punched out and dialed in. Once you have a couple of these thousand mile legs under your belt you’re ready, but it still is a big accomplishment. I remember when we landed thinking to myself; this was a fun, great trip! And when you watch our videos, you’ll think it looks easy because the Kinetic KC54 is a great platform and we have lots of experience, but even with our experience, it was quite an undertaking.
KC: With what you’ve learnt along the way, would you have done anything differently?
R&L: Because we have so much experience, we can’t think of a thing we would’ve done differently. We had the right crew, the right boat, the right provisions, the right spare parts, the right weather router. We had the right month because you always want to be in the right ocean at the right time, and we had a successful voyage. There’s not one thing I would change
KC: How would you compare the experience in a carbon performance cat to your prior production cats?
R&L: All cats are great in my opinion - they come at different price points and they all sail flat and are generally fast and stable. But switching to a high performance lightweight carbon boat like this is a bit like buying a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. It is just not normal. It’s abnormal in a good way.
KC: How has the support been from the Kinetic team?
R&L: You may buy a Kinetic and sail away, but Kinetic never sails away from you. We have a group chat with the top 3 people at the factory and we use it constantly. I would say we were in touch with them every other day with questions and items to discuss about the boat and our trip, etc. and when we had a problem, we would video call and they would walk us through it. I think that when you buy a Kinetic, you’re not just buying the boat but you’re buying into a family of sorts - it’s a bit of a marriage and we’ve loved every bit of it.
- Follow the SV Happy Together YouTube channel to keep up with their latest adventures.