Our commissioning and outfitting was contracted to Todd Rickard and his team at Sound Rigging and Yacht Services in Seattle (now Yachtmasters Northwest and the Offshore Store). Our priorities in 2000 were to get the boat ready for comfortable day and weekend sailing on the San Francisco Bay. With this in mind, SR&YS added an Inverter-Charger, VHF Radio, GPS, Radar, AM/FM/CD Changer sound system, and TV/VCR to the boat. This provided an ideal set of systems for bobbing around the bay on weekend cruises.

We expected several years of Bay sailing before outfitting for cruising, but in 2001, decided to ready the boat for a possible 2002 summer shakedown cruise. This left us with the desire to perform final "cruising" outfitting sooner than we had anticipated.

In the summer of 2001, Todd and Chris — one of Todd's crew — came down from Seattle to Alameda to perform the final outfitting for cruising. They added a genset, SSB/HF radio, watermaker, new AGM batteries, and rewired in preparation for a new engine alternator. He accomplished all of this in 2 weeks, with about 3 days of prep work performed at Svendsen's Boat Works in Alameda. Dave at Svendsen's built a great platform (for the genset) and a shelf (for a separate auxiliary engine start battery) in the engine room, and added a couple of thru-hulls. While the boat was out of the water, we also had Sven's clean and paint the hull. It was ready for the installation work when Todd and Chris arrived from Seattle.

In February 2002, we had some final work done at Easom Rigging & Racing at Brickyard Cove in Point Richmond. Scott and Kevin at Easom Rigging helped us get some final running rigging work done prior to leaving. Although primarily racers (Scott Easom is a Pyewacket crew member), Scott had spent 3 years cruising in his youth, so he does understand cruiser needs -- primarily in the areas of running rig strength and anti-chafe. These guys performed great work in record time, then took us out to test sail with the revised rig and our new gennaker. If you have any interest in how advances in yacht racing technology can help cruisers, talk to Scott Easom (and it was not as expensive as we thought it might be). Most of the cost was in materials -- the labor was reasonable and these guys worked VERY fast, but with great attention to detail (i.e. quality).