In preparation for the TX 200 next week we intentionally capsized Reservoir Dog near shore yesterday. Within about one minute the tip of the mast was already a few feet under water--which leads me to believe it would have gone turtle had we given it enough time--but that was plenty of time to make a visual inspection of several things: the boat rode high on its side (perhaps the pool noodles in the bilge helped that?), there were no gel coat cracks or structural damage where the hull rests on the trailer runners (we've never been able to inspect that until yesterday), and the cooler lid in the port cockpit bench flew open when the boat was horizontal and we would have lost most of the contents had it been full.
When I began to pull down on the centerboard to right the boat, it popped up effortlessly within 10-15 seconds. I thought I would have to climb up and stand on the centerboard and perhaps have crew help out, but it was righted before crew could even get around to me. That is encouraging, but I don't how easy it will be when we have the cuddy loaded up with gear. As it was, we had approximately 40# of gear in the cuddy. For the race we will have significantly more, including 14 gallons of water, which we will do our best to secure to tie-down points in order to reduce massive weight shift to the lower side.
Just thought you would like to know.