There are a lot of areas of improvement that would benefit this race. Most of the hotels were pretty rough with the exception of one or two, and the hotel on the last night might be one of nastiest places I've ever stayed. We don't need anything fancy but I would think with 20+ rooms on a block rate at each stop we could find better accommodations.

RC needs to get in sync. Questions regarding scoring, redress, and other things seemed to all be answered off the cuff, and no one seemed to know who the right person was to answer. We got beached for 3 hours during a big lightning storm and have video of lightning hitting so close that Jacob felt the shock go up his arm (the same strike that sent the Dutch running and consequently their boat sailing off). Out of curiosity we asked about redress and two days later found out that RC took Tavernier's time (who was towed in with a broken mast), added two hours onto it, and then used that as our time.

Two days later another F18 beached for an hour because a storm brought some big winds. For them RC subtracted the time they said they were beached for from their elapsed time. Redress is a difficult subject in these types of races and I think an electrical storm is different than a windy storm, but either way, if you're going to give it then you should at least have some consistency instead of making stuff up as you go.

I also have a new-found interest for increased safety after this race. I'm not sure what the right solution is, but anything that is better than what we had would be great thing. We had three straight days where we sailed directly into some very nasty weather. Lightning, hail, 30-35knt winds with cloud rotation (we thought a tornado was forming on top of us). It wasn't just a one-off, rouge weather incident--it was three days in a row and there were more moments than I'm comfortable with where I thought we seriously might be in trouble. It made me wonder what happens if the next storm is even bigger. I would just like to see some way where RC can notify sailors to get to shore if they see a massive storm cell coming that is about to wipe everyone out. I remember coming into the beach Friday just after genuine survival mode and hail whipping me across the face for thirty minutes and Chuck jokingly saying "hehaheha just trying keep things interesting for ya!" The Florida 300 race nearly lost Chuck in that moment. The Dutch team also said that after some of the stuff that went down guys from the Netherlands would have been ready to kick Chuck's butt.

We're ready to go for next year, but after the car ride home there was a unanimous agreement that the race needs to focus on overall quality.