Welcome to the Team Green Room Graphics blogosphere. I’m Jake Kohl, owner of Green Room Graphics LLC. I’ve been racing catamarans for roughly 15 years all over the country and met a lot of incredible people and made a lot of friends in the sailing community during that time. I’ve also been fortunate enough to have been racing with my best friend for the last several years, Ted Bogardus, on a double handed Formula 18 catamaran. Ted and I have primarily been racing short closed course buoy races for the last several years but are opening up into some of the more substantial distance racing in 2015. This blog is partly inspired by our near future participation in the Florida 300 where you will meet the other people that make up our team. My wife Bonnie handles the live race updates here as well as the tricky logistics of distance races (a new hotel every afternoon!). Tim Owens, the man with the smile, will again be our team manager. Tim has been a big part of our racing team ever since I started racing under the Team Seacats name sometime around 2002. In addition to making sure we have our heads straight for the race details like start times and the finer details in the race rules, Tim is also our first line of defense when things go wrong and we need to spend a late night on an emergency boat or sail repair (which happens pretty often in distance racing).
This blog will chronicle more than the distance racing too and will be the landing spot for any of our team happenings – which includes some pretty detailed composite work. Our boats are relatively light and complicated with a lot of controls. I enjoy the challenge of redesigning and improving everything from control systems, information systems, and storage (important for safe distance racing). We’ll chronicle some of those new things here including some of the products that we can offer to you at Green Room Graphics. We have a number of big projects coming up in the short term including a new carbon fiber compass mount for the boat as well as a major structural repair that is needed before we hit the water again. So, welcome! I hope you will stick around and check in periodically!
In the meantime, here are some photos of our team in action (don’t be confused by the names on the sail in the first couple of photos – we had just taken delivery of a lightly used boat at that event and kinda enjoyed masquerading as our opposition)