http://www.detroitoffshorerace.com
Directly in front of Hart Plaza and the Riverwalk. Free viewing.
Race Village, where the boats tie up between races, is at Riopelle & Atwater.
Race Village, 9am - 5pm;
Race 1, 12:30pm;
Race 2, 2pm;
Race 3, 3:30pm;
Awards Ceremony, 7pm
Here's an example (it's not perfect but you get the idea): https://youtu.be/gJgNjotnKf4?t=248
Especially in offshore racing (but not exclusively) the boat will frequently fly out of water suddenly leaving those powerful engines without a load and without coolant (AFAIK the engines use the water for cooling).
So... how do these engines survive these sudden shocks?
Not many people expected us to succeed in making it around the world. When we were in our thirties we gave up our jobs, bought the boat, and departed. I was a geeky software engineer and my wife was a mortgage broker. When we left, we had almost no blue water boating experience, and had never been more than 10 miles offshore. Instead of the expected sailboat, we chose a 43 foot (13 meter) trawler powerboat. Many people had no idea that crossing oceans on a small full-displacement (read: very slow) powerboat was possible and thought we were going to our deaths. Less than 10 power boats in the 40 foot range have ever made it around. We surprised the skeptics when we successfully circumnavigated the globe from 2007 to 2009, visiting 110 places in 34 countries along the way. We spent about 75% of the time in port, and the other 25% of the time underway at sea.
It was expensive, costing about $300k USD to do the trip, but it was no more expensive than doing it on a similarly equipped sailboat (many qualifiers here; the boat was the vast majority of the cost). It took all the financial resources we had. At one point the bank said if we had $1000 less assets they would not approve our loan on the boat. And this was in the days of getting easy loans. It helped we were in the right place at the right time in our jobs and the ecomony.
My wife and I had amazing highs and amazing lows on our journey. We crossed 3 oceans, transited the Suez and Panama canals, and mostly stayed in the tropics. We would love to tell you all about it.
Proof is in on our blog, the Kosmos Travel Log. http://kosmos.liveflux.net/blog/2013/07/05/reddit-iama-july-2013/
Hi Reddit, ask Christi and Eric anything.
Edit: 9:53pm PST. Heading to bed for the night, but we be will happy to answer questions in the morning. Poke around our blog for photos of our trip.
Edit Saturday 6:52am PST. And we're back. I posted a couple more answers to some good questions on piracy and advice to others. Christi and I have some chores to do today, but we will monitor for questions. Thanks for the fun so far Reddit!
Someone asked what it costs, but deleted it, probably because the quick answer is above. I worked up a longer answer than what was above, so here it is:
The main fixed cost part was the boat downpayment of 20% (~140k). After that for the 2 years it was the boat mortgage as the highest (~70k), then fuel (~40k), and then insurance (~22k). Other costs were comparatively less. It is pretty cheap to ea
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Who is taking their boat out to watch the races? Looking to raft up with some other boats to enjoy the races. 27 cc, my wife and I, plus 3 of her friends.
When I saw the Powerboats class, I was expecting purpose built racing boats to fill the roster. For all intents and purposes though, only two boats in that class are really that: the fictional Proto Offshore MKII and the Vector V40R. The rest of the boats while high performance are not true racing boats and are actually pleasure craft. The biggest offender of them all IMO is the Frauscher 1414 Demon which is more of a yacht: IRL it has a bedroom and shower!
It's a pet peeve I guess, but it's like if you combined the street race class with the touring cars and called it a class on its own: you would have street cars like the Abarth 500 alongside GT3 race cars. I know TC2 is far from the most realistic game out there, but I can't see how even heavily modifying a floating camper (The Demon) could put it in the same league as a true race boat like the V40R.
It's just there are a bunch of real race boats out there and I can gander a guess many wouldn't mind licensing out. Heck, they could have pulled what they did with the Jet Sprint boats and filled up the class with more fictional race boats. From there, I feel the pleasure craft like the Bladerunner 35, Demon, and M31 Widebody, could have been put in their own class, basically a nautical equivalent to the street race class.
