I was at the Annapolis boatshow yesterday, and with all this in mind, I looked at the catamaran representation at the show from the mind's eye of what would be the impression people would get of Hobie and cat-sailing in general.

I would think that Hobie is a kayak company.

A slightly unfortunate location had things tucked away somewhat. The Getaway was tucked away, an FX1 was more prominant, but behind the kayaks. The salesman noted to customers that the 18 was discontinued, that it weighed 600 lbs, and that the much lighter FX1 was a completely different boat as it was a race boat that couldn't launch from the beach, and that it was not really for more than one person. Price on the FX1, after you added the jib and spin pakage was almost $14k without trailer. There was a Wave and Bravo.

When I was there, there seemed to be few people taking notice at all, but the interest was in the FX1. Little excitement, lots of kayaks.

But at least they were there - the only other small cat was the Escape. No Performance boats, not even the Isotope this year.

I would have liked to have seen the FX-1, but I was too busy having fun on Kevin's tornado.

What about the fx-1 makes it not-beach launchable? Give me one, I'll show them how to launch it off a beach :P

Come on out to a CRAC race, you'll likely to see one!

How did your ride on the T go? I'm guessing you might be hooked...

The non-beachable thing is more that you should float the boat on and off the wheels, not run up it on and sail it across the the beach like the 18 in Sharing the Wind...

Yeah I'm hooked.

I'm going to save up the money over the winter, and buy the boat hopefully sometime in early spring. I'm ready to make the step into the tornado world after my experience.

We launched, and immediately started heading out to the mouth of the river. We launched the chute (which, I have to say, the launching and retrieval system is truely ingenious) and headed down a bit. Kevin let me take the tiller... it was pretty amazing what a balanced, tuned boat feels like. I was perfectly comfortable driving the boat with the chute up, even though it was my first time doing so on any catamaran. Even in 8 knots of breeze we had the wild thing going on.

Unfortunately, the wind died on the way back, but that gave Kevin and I an opportunity to talk shop, which is always enjoyable when you're talking to a guy that has the unique talents of Kevin :P

We broke down the boat for the season, and put it on the tilt trailer at about 8pm. It was pretty impressive how the trailer worked, definitely going to have to get one of those.

All in all, a very delightful experience. I'm sold on the boat, and I just got my first full-time job yesterday, so by spring, I'll be in a position to buy the carbon boat. I'm thinking about keeping it up in MD and racing it around there with/against Kevin so I can pick up on his tricks and so forth, get some tutiledge.