Nice swell photo! For folks that spend lots of time in South Florida, take away the Bahamas, add a few thousand miles of fetch and you can get some large nicely formed waves. Cocoa Beach is famous for them. In the race from Jupiter to Ft. Lauderdale the waves usually shrink as you move south. It sounds like the reverse may apply in this case.
Regarding wetsuits, another consideration are Portuguese Man-O-War. If you go into one it is nice to have some neoprene between you and the tentacles. A minor contact and anaphylactic shock threatened a rider in the race to Bimini requiring him to be rushed back to Miami for treatment. Just heard an amazing story from Kent tonight about catching tentacles in his eye yesterday! I was at a loud reggae concert and couldn't catch all the details. I think it just flew up there from some spray. He is ok but was in a lot of pain, what are the odds?! I will get the complete story and post it with photos. Only in Biscayne Bay? Folks get drilled down there by needlefish too. Lots of us have tangled with Portuguese many dozens of times, still it is nice when the tentacles don't reach your skin. Especially when you're trying to go somewhere, 55 miles away!
AJ mentioned waterproofed cell phones, a great idea. Camelpaks, powerbars are also a good to have along too. BE SURE to tighten all your fastenings on your boards, someone always has footstraps or fins fall off. Again bad timing for something like that. I would check your lines to make sure they don't need to be changed out. Inflate your kites and leave them for several hours to make sure there are no leaks, etc.. Broken gear in the middle of something like this frequently happens but is always a pain in the butt. Pays to inspect to try to avoid it.
There will be some large breaking waves as shown above, perhaps a lot of them. Some of the best of us have been thrown off the falls and sushi rolled in line, not a good thing. Hopefully, there will be a few obvious break lines making avoidance easier to do. There's a story about a kiter getting pulling under in big seas at the link below.
http://fksa.org/showthread.php?t=543
As fun as these distance races are, in the more extreme conditions they aren't for everyone. In the first pre-race from Jupiter to Ft. Lauderdale in similar winds and perhaps slightly larger seas over 25% were taken out of the running one way or the other, see below. I took my time in the run, around five hours, sheez. Hey, I was touring. Spent a good portion trying to avoid getting grabbed and rolled in big breaking waves. So, if you've done similar runs, feel confident and able to have at it, go for it. If not, think it over, its all about fun after all.
http://fksa.org/showthread.php?t=248...light=pre-race
Hey Craig, you were there and at most of the other distance races that year too. What did you think of the pre-race?