Mark,

The F18's certainly were racing the 20's.

For the most part, the 20's weren't racing the 18's. From my post yesterday on my site:

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While I can certainly understand why people chose to compare the platforms, thats not what this race is about. I know that I wasn’t racing the F18’s. I didn’t care about them once we were racing. If one rolled over me to windward, thats fine, I’m not racing them. My competition was more than stiff in the class alone. When I spoke to Steve Lohmeyer on the beach at Fernandina, I asked him what he was going to do today. ”Just keep Trey within 17 minutes of us, thats all we need to do”. I found it particularly telling that Steve, multiple time OVERALL winner of this race, and by any means an accomplished catamaran sailor with an impressive resume, didn’t say something to the effect that “we need to finish an hour in front of Mischa to win.” Whether Steve was being realistic with his goals for the day or he simply didn’t care about racing against the F18’s, I don’t exactly know - but I do know that he finished the overall race in front of Trey.


I think an F16 could do the race. I really do. I do also think that you'd be experiencing some pretty challenging conditions outside of canaveral. There are some serious waves out there that are pretty hard to describe. The warning buoy's that we have to go around out there are yellow balls the size of volkswagons. I've NEVER seen one in my 3 roundings of the cape. You have to be right up on them to see them since the swells are so large, things just disappear when you're in the troughs.