"There could have been a picture for the Speed contest, but we weren't ready to click.
At least, I have the story."

Here we are, my brother and I, racing the 1998 Rolex Giraglia Race and she is #86 "JustanotherKISS", ITA 13092. We started at noon, going doublehanded against crews to test our new boat and ourselves (the race is three days offshore, but we are used to race doublehanded. We did it even with our father's J 44 and it was far more tiring).

Too bad we ripped from side to side our spinnaker first night and could not keep in touch with our opponents (the spinnaker is the beauty in the picture, a few hours before exploding. We collected every bit and it recovered its best shape). When we decided to quit we were 80 miles offshore our home port and the wind kept blowing stronger and stronger the right direction to push us home quickly.

So we turned our stern to the wind (now S) and headed NE (home). The wind started pushing us quite hard and among the waves, by mid morning, there were some 8 footers saying hallo. We had great time surfing with full main and jib, and hit 12 knots many times and a couple of 13 knots. Then, all of a sudden, a "small" (may be 7 feet) vertical green wall hit our stern with a puff of wind. My brother, which had just got the stick from me (lucky) swiftly jumped down the wave attempting to ride. It was the longest surf I ever experienced, and it was without spinnaker! Wind puff was around 30 kn which is not that much but we could not see blue water around the boat for seconds, only surf and spray and from the mast to the bow the boat disappeared under the boiling sea.

Then the boat landed somewhere and we where out from Hyperspace. We had to stop laughing like idiots to go check Vmax on the display. It reported 17.4 (yeah, it's seventeenpointfour) knots of max speed.. Our instruments are carefully calibrated and never returned, in years, unreliable values so I actually think the boat could have reached such a speed, for a split second. It wasn't a power ride, since we were underpowered. It was more a waveride. It does not account for any records, but it was really fun. And the boat performed flawlessly, as usual. Anyway, I like the picture (I use it as Windows desktop wallpaper).