‘Kahoots’ Prepares to Sail the Pacific Cup
With 2026 being a Pacific Cup year, Latitude 38 is previewing the race from San Francisco to Hawaii with profiles of the some of the teams and sailors who will be making the crossing. In this edition, we check in with Greg Mitchell and his team aboard Kahoots.
The Kahoots program started as some chatter among the volunteer coaches for the Richmond Yacht Club (RYC) Winter Junior program — basically a bunch of dads who were working to educate our kids and others on how to sail. But 16 Sundays a year, and kids in the program, build friendships too, and we all wanted to sail a Pacific Cup.
With Miles Englehart’s help, I started looking for a boat, and found Kahoots on a mooring in Newport Beach Harbor in 2018. Kahoots is an Andrews 43, a first-generation IMS design built by Dencho Marine in 1990. The basic idea was two Pac Cups: 2022 and 2024 with some of us dads, and some of the kids.
2020 was delayed due to COVID, which wasn’t awful for us as it offered us the opportunity for a full rebuild. We did everything: dropped the keel, removed all deck hardware, and fixed some core issues here and there. Instruments, repowering — it seemed endless. Sadly, one of our group, Dick Loomis, had a recurrence of cancer and passed away before the 2022 race.
Miles and I, with fellow RYC instructors John Amen, Mark Phillipps and Jim Wheeler, sailed with two 17- year-old RYC juniors: Chase Englehart and Portia Brown. We brought Dick with us and had a memorial/scattering at the halfway location, and then another after arrival in Kaneohe Bay. Of course our families met us in Kaneohe, and now that Chase and Portia had done it and were all smiles, our younger kids expressed interest in the 2024 race.
In 2024, we sailed “Dad’s and Daughters” — Miles, Jim, Mark and I with Abby Mitchell, Jenna Englehart, Amanda Wheeler and, returning for another go, Portia Brown. While 2022 was all about the race, 2024 was all about the experience. The four young ladies, from 17 to 19 years old, went through a season-and-a-half of OYRA racing to get ready, and took over for Spin Cup 2024. That was our real test, and they came through great. In the actual race, we found out that young eyes and balance skills more than made up for experience, and I would say they were the best drivers at night; they just kept plugging along. And how many crews had a mani-pedi day on the crossing?
After some time passed, two of the girls wanted to give it one more shot, and focus more on the results than just the experience. So we’re going again. Miles and I, with our daughters Jenna and Abby and three-time repeat offender Portia, will be joined by two of Kahoots‘ other core crew, Rosanne Scholl and Gabe Serafini. Since it’s our third Pac Cup the prep seems a little less onerous this time around, but we do have a few projects underway: spreader tip replacement, a couple of sails, updating some of the running rigging, and a few other changes like Starlink instead of Iridium GO! Will we have another mani-pedi day?