There are three growing boys in the household of Sarah and John Sangmeister, all of them still in school but big enough and hungry enough for racing Finns. While the youngest, Will, waits his turn, the older two, twins Peter and Jack, are rostered as 2023 Transpac crew for the Andrews 68 Rock n’ Roll. And it’s not their first rodeo.

Then there is boat partner and longtime shipmate Justin Smart, who is also bringing two sons, 20-somethings Cooper and Harrison. For the sons, this is a first big offshore race. Smart, who had great rides in the days of IOR maxis, says: “I didn’t get a chance to introduce my boys to sailing. I was too busy racing, and they had other sports, but it’s always gnawed at me.”

And suddenly, four years ago, there had to be a new boat.

OK, reader, that’s a ­bootleg turn, so hang on. We’re going back two Transpacs to make sense of Sangmeister’s description of the Rock n’ Roll program today as “the junkyard dogs of yacht racing.”

A few hundred miles into the 2019 Transpac, with the family’s much-loved Santa Cruz 70, OEX,back in the fold after a time in other hands, the rudder bearing failed. The load it then released onto the rudder shaft leveraged the bottom open, and the boat swallowed the Pacific Ocean. The good news in the bad news turned on the advantages of being on a sea populated with other boats. Not to make light of a sinking, but only half an hour after a mayday call, a rescue began. Soon enough, all nine OEX crew were on deck with the skilled crew of Pyewacket, owned by Roy Disney (grandnephew of Walt), whose father sailed a record 15 Transpacs and took him on his first at age 16. It’s a family thing, remember.

Enough time has passed now to make it a laugh line when Sangmeister relates the radio call with Transpac officer Tom Trujillo in which Trujillo suggested the boat must not have sunk “because we still have you on the transponder.” At which point Sangmeister looked at his trusted crewman Ryan Breymaier, who pulled the transponder out of a pocket and deadpanned, “I figured you’ve lost the boat, but at least you can get your $150 deposit back.”

OEX was “much loved” as one of the boats campaigned in a different day by Peter Tong, grandfather of the boys and father of three-Transpac ­veteran Sarah Tong Sangmeister. Losing that legacy was a lot to absorb, but a lengthy search for a replacement led eventually to the California Maritime Academy, a donated Andrews 68, and a lease-to-own ­agreement. Like most of the existing West Coast “sleds,” the boat had been around for years and gone through a number of names and ­configurations. The first Andrews 68 was launched in 1991, the first Santa Cruz 70 in 1994. These boats soldier on. This one has since been stripped to the bone, painted inside and out by its crew in a hazmat kit and refitted throughout. Replacement gear includes a pair of Harken 99 winches off a Mod 70 and two Harken 65s off one-time world-speed record holder Hydroptere, with a new, thinner (used) keel and a new, thinner (used) rudder. “I’m hoping we can surf sooner and longer,” Sangmeister says. “We’ll be the lightest sled by 300 pounds.”

Add repurposed sails too, but don’t go picturing a cheap-out operation; rather, it is optimized at the lowest possible cost for an inherently expensive undertaking. “I still have three kids to put through college,” says Sangmeister, who operates popular restaurants in Southern California. Boat partner Smart is an executive at a large real estate firm, a job related to his years aboard Kialoa IV, a ­linchpinof the heyday of IOR maxis. For someone with Smart’s offshore experience, it is ironic that 2023 will be his first Transpac. “But we were always on some other ocean with Kialoa IV. Transpac has been on my mind because the other races were mostly upwind slogs. They had their appeal, but it’s time for something different.”

As a 17-year-old packed with self-confidence and a lot of sailing under his belt, Smart talked his way onto Heath’s Condor for the 1977 Whitbread round-the-world race with Peter Blake as his watch captain. He became the youngest sailor in the history of the race, 18 at the finish. That led later to his role as first mate and trimmer aboard Kialoa IV, which is where he met and mentored his future boat partner. Sangmeister recalls: “I was paired with Justin as a grinder, and I told him I wanted to learn how to trim. He would say, ‘Slide down here and look. We’re going to add halyard tension.’ The visible result was dramatic in a big sail.

“Kilroy ran an essentially amateur crew on his Kialoas. If you were part of the core crew, you were all friends and generous with each other. The ‘pros’ brought an expertise like rigging or sailmaking that paid their living. It wasn’t like today, where a true pro might worry about getting bumped by the next gun in line.”

Now it’s 2023, 117 years beyond the 1906 inaugural Transpac, and consummate professional Breymaier is back as much more than a “gun,” having missed only one Transpac with Sangmeister since 2013. He admits to wear and tear, traveling back and forth from his home in France to work long hours on Rock n’ Roll. He might do better with a different program closer to home. But this is where he wants to be, he says, “as part of this biennial Sangmeister pilgrimage to Hawaii. Justin and John have a tremendous depth of experience. That makes my job—managing the technical aspects—a lot simpler than it might be. And I’ve known John’s boys since they were little. I’ve watched them grow. They’ve been sailing on boats and working on boats all their lives. In the last race, after Jack spent eight days grinding, on the last day I asked him if he wanted to drive. He was casual about it: ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then he was driving just fine. When I asked why he hadn’t spoken up to drive before, he shrugged and said, ‘It’s OK. Maybe next time.’

“That’s why I’m here. For the family. To be part of it. This race is John’s way of measuring time, space and honor.”

Leaving the dock for his first Honolulu crossing in 2017, twin Peter remembers: “I had never raced overnight, so I had things to learn, and I found myself in positions I had never experienced. But I was completely comfortable on OEX because I had been there so much over the years. Now we have enough short races planned that Cooper and Harrison will have a bit under their belts before we kick off for the West End,” the western end of Catalina being the only mark of the course between the starting line and Diamond Head Buoy.

“The other value,” Peter says, “is that collectively this crew has dozens and dozens of Transpacs, and we have Ryan who races Ultims, and he’s raced around the world. Ryan is the one who always wants to push a little harder.”

Dad is meanwhile feeling good about stealing a line from George Griffith that the purpose of the race is to end up better friends than when we started. That happens in 2,300 miles, not in a 600-mile sprint where everyone is grinding it out.

“I love this race,” he says. “It attracts the pros but also the people who just want to be out there. It’s billed as a downwind race. The reality is that it’s 60 percent reaching, and then you run. It’s probably light to moderate at the start and rounding Catalina. Once you hit the outer coastal waters, you’re close reaching, taking spray, and it’s cold, and you’re wondering where those golden trade winds are. But the key is to pick a lane and be in the hunt when you pick up the trades.”

The purpose of the race is to end up better friends than when we started. That happens in 2,300 miles, not in a 600-mile sprint where everyone is grinding it out.

With the calms of the Pacific high-pressure zone straddling the rhumbline—usually—and the trades circulating clockwise around it, the Transpac game is to sail south of rhumbline as far as you need to for wind. That adds miles while adding speed—but not too far south, adding too many miles. Round-the-world navigators play the same game, skirting pressure zones in the Southern Ocean under a lot more duress. An elite handful of navigators call the Transpac good practice.

In an earlier generation, when Honolulu was smaller and farther away, and mainland visitors were special, the arrival of a Transpac fleet was a showstopper. The town would turn out. Now not so much. But arriving boats still receive an aloha welcome, aloha meaning much more than hello. Aloha to a true islander is the force that holds the universe together, bringing peace and mercy to human life.

And so, shifting to life at sea, we find Sangmeister observing: “About day five, people are tired and maybe grumpy. You have to pay attention to morale, but 1,000 miles out is an experience you can’t have otherwise. Sunsets reflecting off thunderheads. Colors you don’t see anywhere else. The horizon, or is that really the horizon? It’s a profound view of God’s majesty.”

And the air gets warmer, and the sea gets bluer until the islands rise ahead, and the wind and whitecaps build for a final crazy rush down the Molokai Channel “to what might be the most spectacular race finish of all.”

Come 2025, young Will gets the ride. It’s a family thing.

The post Transpac In Their Veins appeared first on Sailing World.

It was 2 a.m., about 1,800 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, beneath a pitch-black sky. The 2003 Andrews 77 Compadres had about 700 miles of Pacific Ocean left to cross in the 2021 Transpacific Yacht Race to Honolulu. 

David Dahl, who, like most of the crew, was sailing in his first-ever Transpac race, was asleep belowdecks. Also aboard were his 23- and 28-year-old sons, and six of his closest friends.

A horrendous bang jolted him out of his berth. It was the kind of sound that left no confusion: Something was very, very wrong.

Dahl raced abovedecks. He could see the boom vang’s hydraulic fluid spilling everywhere, turning the top deck into a potentially deadly Slip ’N Slide. The motion of the boat was completely off-kilter too, making it even harder for everyone to stay upright.

He didn’t know it in the moment, but a 2-inch-thick stainless-steel bolt that held the boom vang in place had somehow cracked in half. The boom had then shot upward, with nothing supporting it in its usual spot. Then it started swinging to port and starboard, weakening the mainsail.  

“It becomes an all-hands-on-deck emergency situation,” Dahl says. “The number-one thing we must do is get the boat under control.”

For Dahl, who is the CEO of Whittier Trust—a company whose history includes involvement with the Transpac race dating back to the 1920s—the episode was an adrenaline-pumping reminder that in any major undertaking, a lot of what ultimately happens comes down to preparation, people and equipment.

Whittier Trust specializes in wealth management, which means anticipating and reacting to all kinds of market shifts, not to mention ever-shifting news of the day. As with sailing, people making investments need to understand every possible element of the endeavor. They need to be trained for all contingencies, often with knowledge that has been passed down from generation to generation. They need to show commitment to the effort, along with creative thinking, passion and teamwork. And they need the tools and equipment to make the best possible decisions, even in the worst possible moments, because every situation or crisis moment is bound to be different from the next.

A boom vang is one of a sailboat’s most necessary elements, with only the mast, boom, sail and wheel arguably greater in importance. With the boom vang out of commission, the Compadres crew found themselves in one of the worst possible situations that training can prepare anyone to think about.

Which, of course, is a whole lot different from actually having to live through the moment and prove that you’re ready to handle it.  

With the merciless darkness offering no help in terms of visibility, all 14 members of the crew acted without hesitation. They had been cross-trained in all of the onboard roles. They’d spent 18 months preparing for the Transpac race, sailing in various offshore races from California to Mexico, such as the Newport to Cabo San Lucas Yacht Race and the Newport to Ensenada International Yacht Race. And while they hadn’t run any drills in anticipation of the boom vang breaking, they had done plenty of practice runs that included putting their experience and creativity to work.

Everyone moved to their assigned positions on deck. They quickly but methodically dropped the sail to slow the boat’s motion. That helped with getting the boat back under control, but they knew that it wouldn’t be enough. 

So they rigged a temporary boom vang, spending hours lashing ropes and lines to the mast and deck to hold everything in position.

“It worked,” Dahl says. “You no longer are necessarily in competitive-race mode, but you are in safety-mode to make it to shore.”

The way the Compadres crew proved their mettle was a continuation of Whittier Trust’s legacy. The company was the Heritage Sponsor for the 51st biennial Transpac Race, which the Whittier family sailed in 1923, when racing resumed after World War I. The boat, the 107-foot Poinsettia, had its sails blown apart in a two-day storm, forcing the crew to turn back. 

Dahl and his crew—temporary boom vang and all—went the full 2,225-mile distance. And even despite the emergency, they still managed to have a whole lot of fun along the way.

“Racing the Pacific, encountering whales, 20-foot swells, and windspeeds at night with families on board lives up to the Whittier history and tradition of being prepared to handle anything, just like with investments,” Dahl says. “It is a test of the human spirit. Like chess, and our work, our strategy is multifaceted. We are also rewarded with being part of a team and the thrill of the experience.”
To find out more about Whittier Trust and the wealth management services they offer, visit whittiertrust.com.

The post Is Your Team Ready? appeared first on Sailing World.

Cape Disappointment, at the mouth of Oregon’s Columbia River, is a lonely place in late winter. It can be windy and the water is always cold. Air temperatures hover near freezing. Fishing boats are the only vessels you’re likely to see plying this remote piece of the North Pacific. But on this day in March there’s a dark blue Santa Cruz 70 heading south at pace. It’s Pied Piper, owned by 41-year-old Jack Jennings. The youngster and his crewmates are San Francisco bound and then Los Angeles for the start of the 2021 Transpac Race in Los Angeles.

“We stuck out like a sore thumb,” says Jennings. “Nobody sails around there, especially that time of year.”

En route to San Francisco, they would cover 300 miles in one 24-hour period, which is really fast for a SC70—especially one built more than three decades ago. “At night it was 30 degrees, and you could see your breath down below,” Jennings says. “That’s when I knew these were the guys I wanted with me on the Transpac. I didn’t really care what the results were going to be because that type of stuff—the challenging delivery, bringing these guys together and having that kind of adventure—I loved that part of it.”

Four months later, Jennings and his crew would sail Pied Piper to first in its class and third overall in the Transpac while recording the fastest time for a traditional sled and breaking the old record by three hours. Yet, the journey and bringing people together—what originally motivated Jennings at the outset—and successfully complete—this project—is the real story here.

Jennings purchased the boat from Orange Coast Community College in 2019 with an eye toward getting it in shape for the 2020 Pacific Cup and the Transpac the following year. He had it delivered north to Portland because, “It was the cheapest place to put the boat, and it was where we could afford some decent housing,” an essential he and his crew would need, given the boat’s condition.

Formerly Holua, the 70-footer had languished for three years dockside in the California sun, used only for an occasional charter. “All the rigging was shot, the electronics were toast, and the [sail] inventory wasn’t so hot,” Jennings says, “but it had good bones—mast, hull, good keel, rudder, everything we needed to get started.”

When the hard labor began Jennings knew what he was getting into. He cut his teeth on his father’s SC70 of the same name on the Great Lakes—the boat that set a Chicago to Mackinac Race record that stood for 10 years. That boat was sold after his father, Dick Jennings, died in 2011, but Jack never lost his affinity for the design—or the love of sailing, which his father clearly inspired. “Every time I go sailing, I think of my dad,” he says. “That’s why all the boats I sail are called Pied Piper. It’s a big motivation and legacy to keep that name going.”

RELATED: Moving Targets For Transpac and Others

The name, of course, is a nod to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin who saved a small town from a rat infestation, and to the family’s Chicago-based company, Smithereen Pest Management Services.

The idea of a run at the Transpac Race came to Jennings while attending a Finn clinic in Valencia, Spain, in 2019. He recalls sitting by himself at the yacht club one sunny afternoon, waiting for the sea breeze to appear, laptop in front of him. Peter Thorton, who owned the Volvo 70 Il Mostro, on which Jennings had been a regular, had been donated. He realized how much he missed sailing with others. “I was bummed that a lot of the friends I had made sailing on Il Mostro weren’t going to be sailing together anytime soon. I wasn’t really interested in doing a Mac race on a SC 70 again. I’d already done that. I wanted to go to the ocean and do something different.”

For Jennings, the Transpac presented a new set of challenges as well as the opportunity to reunite a lot of his mates. “One thing that really made this possible is that Andy McCormack (Smithereen’s Vice President), and I had worked really hard to make our company do well.”

So financially, the Transpac was within reach.

“I didn’t know it was going to be a SC 70, nor did I know that the team I would eventually form would be a mix of guys who sailed with my dad and those I sailed with more recently.”

His father’s SC 70 crew was of a slightly older generation, and some of the old guard hadn’t sailed for almost 15 years. Il Mostro’s crew always included a handful of professional sailors who brought with them state-of-the art approaches to everything that makes a boat go fast. “Getting as many of those people together was the whole impetus for finding a boat,” Jennings says. “As luck would have it, most of the guys had signed on to sail before the Covid pandemic hit. The schedule kept changing because of regatta cancellations but we kept working on the boat and sailing on our own until we could race again. It just happened that the first race was going to be the Transpac, so at the end of the summer of 2020, we made that our focus.”

After finding Holua, one of his first calls was to McCormack, who in addition to being his right-hand man at Smithereen was his father’s first boat captain, as far back as when Jennings was a little kid. “I said, ‘Andy, I have this idea, but I want you to be the manager, taking care of logistics, organizing the crew.’ It was obviously a massive effort to move this boat around, getting everything lined up and all the pieces in place.”
McCormack agreed, and the ball started rolling in what became a two-year process.

In late 2019, a small crew sailed Holua to Portland with an eye toward being ready for the 2020 Pacific Cup, a race from San Francisco to Hawaii. McCormack’s brother-in-law, Jamie Schwarz, who also worked as a boat captain for Jennings’ father, had just quit his job as a carpenter in Montana, and McCormack asked if he’d like to get involved in this project. “He literally sold all his stuff, moved to Portland and started working on the boat,” Jennings says.

Schwarz worked on the boat for a year in anticipation of the 2020 Pacific Cup until the pandemic pulled the plug on that event. The emphasis then shifted to the 2021 Transpac. With Kevin Miller, of North Sails Santa Barbara, and naval architect Greg Stewart, they optimized Pied Piper for the race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Among other things, they added lead to get the boat sitting on its lines better, as well as providing a ratings advantage, and a couple of power reaching sails so they could run a triple-head rig.

“We were able to do some things with the sails that we couldn’t do 10 to 15 years ago, when I last sailed a SC 70,” Jennings says.

More importantly, he continued to recruit people he knew would be good teammates. There was trimmer Jonathan Swain, a pro sailor who had done a stint on the TP 52 Heartbreaker while Jennings was aboard. “I learned a ton watching him when we first sailed together on Il Mostro,” Jennings says. “I was a grinder, so I had a front-row seat to watch how he trimmed and handled sail changes.”

Navigator Matt Wachowicz joined the Il Mostro crew when they were having trouble with the boatspeed readout. “Other navigators came aboard and couldn’t figure it out,” Jennings says, “but Matt did it in about 10 minutes. I knew he was the guy to handle putting a new instrument package on the Pied Piper.”

Other crew members included Dave Jochum, who started the sailing team at Jennings’ high school and sailed on Pied Piper with him when he was a teenager; Matt Noble, a professional rigger whom he met A Class Catamaran sailing 10 years earlier and happened to be living in Portland when Pied Piper arrived there; Bill Wagner, another Pied Piper veteran who Jennings’ father taught to sail when he was 12; J.B. Kuppe, who delivered the boat to Portland right after its purchase; and pro bowman Ben Bardwell, a late addition and the only one Jennings had not sailed with before.

His only disappointment was the absence of Zane Gills, his former Star boat crew and teammate on Il Mostro. “He was one of the first guys I talked to about this,” says Jennings. “I told him we were going to get this boat and do the Transpac, and he was really keen on the idea.”

On January 1, 2020, Gills fell from a boat, struck his head and drowned. “He was a terrific friend and great offshore sailor. It was really unexpected, and I thought about him a lot during the whole campaign,” Jennings says.

When the boat finally arrived in Los Angeles before the race, the team spent the next three months, on and off, training aboard Pied Piper. “That training, along with the trip south from Portland, was key,” Jennings says. “We knew that when we got to the Transpac, there would be plenty of wind, but it wasn’t going to be 40 degrees. The fact that we were able to do that really showed our potential to work together as a team.”

Which takes us back to Jennings’ primary reason for creating this program. “All those people who came to the race had a shared experience,” says Jennings. “We knew what to expect from each other, we’d all been through the same challenging conditions, and all that brought the team together.”

His role in this hit home on that first night offshore, heading out from Cape Disappointment. “I had gone offshore a lot, but was always there for myself; someone invited me, and I was happy to go.”

But this was new territory for Jennings. “I never had trouble sleeping on a boat before, but that first night out of Cape Disappointment, I couldn’t. Here we are, the water’s cold, the air’s cold, it’s windy, and it suddenly occurs to me: this is my responsibility now. It’s one of those moments that really makes you stop and think. I knew then how my dad felt the first time he took a crew offshore.”

After Pied Piper crossed the finish line in the Transpac, McCormick pulled Jennings aside, put his arm around him and said, “Your dad would be proud of you.” Says Jennings, “I didn’t make a big deal about it, but that was always in the back of my mind.”

The post In The Piper’s Footsteps appeared first on Sailing World.

Close your eyes and imagine a 2,200-mile ocean race where you start out going upwind in light air. Not very exciting—yet. But within a few hours, you transition to a few hundred miles of brisk and sometimes rough close reaching across a chilly ocean under gray skies. Not fun—yet. Then, over the course of half a day, you go through the boat’s entire reaching sail arsenal until the wind is aft and you are surfing downwind in 18-knot trade winds for days. Now it’s getting good.

But wait—it gets better.

The wind builds into the mid-20s, and the swells stack up neatly. You’re shredding toward the finish as a full moon reveals dramatic volcanic peaks of an island chain, which is your final destination. You open your eyes to behold the iconic shape of Diamond Head crater on Oahu that marks the end of the race. That’s your Transpacific Yacht Race, the best point-to-point sailing adventure on the planet.

My first Transpac was 30 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I was just out of college and into an Olympic Soling campaign when I accepted Dave Ullman’s invitation to navigate a West Coast “sled.” This particular Santa Cruz 50 was one of seven Santa Cruz-built and Bill Lee-designed ULDBs entered that year. Thirty miles from the finish, we were side by side with a sistership, surfing huge swells in 25 knots while vying to be first to finish in our unofficial subclass of Santa Cruz 50s.

With a full moon providing just enough illumination to see dolphins playing off each side of our bow, and the Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam” cranking through the on-deck speakers, we slid forward wave by wave in 20-knot bursts to a two-minute margin at Diamond Head. Our elapsed time in that windy year was nine days and 15 hours, a respectable run considering the reigning record holder (the 67-foot ULDB Merlin) narrowly missed the course record by a minute with an eight-day, 11-hour passage.

Fast-forward to 2021. I’ve done my fair share of Transpacs, and even navigated a record-setter (Hasso Plattner’s 86-footer Morning Glory at six days and 16 hours), but I still got that tingle of excitement when Robbie Haines and Roy Pat Disney invited me to navigate Disney’s turbocharged Volvo 70, Pyewacket 70 (­ex‑Telefonica and Black Jack), in this year’s race. (Pyewacket is the name of a magical cat in a 1950s movie that was a favorite of Disney’s late father.) The Pyewacket 70 team is the preeminent West Coast ­offshore racing program, and it’s an honor to get the chance to wear the logo of the cat. The entire Pyewacket season in a Transpac year focuses on the July race, and we got off to a great start in March by setting the record in the Newport to Cabo San Lucas Yacht Race, which gave those of us who had not been around the planet lately a taste of what a turbocharged Volvo 70 was like on a VMG run in 20-plus-knot winds. Let me tell you, it’s fast, averaging over 20 knots, and very wet because the bow incessantly throws huge shards of spray over the deck as it catches up to the wave ahead.

After Cabo, a lot of preparation focused on getting the bow up (weight aft) and sealing all the little leaks that don’t seem little when there’s inches of water constantly running over the deck and into the cockpit. As the race date approached, it became clear that the coveted Barn Door Trophy for the first elapsed time was ours for the taking. The 100-footer Rio had withdrawn, so we had the fastest rating of the fleet—by a lot. Our closest rival was the Maxi 72 Lucky (ex-Bella Mente).

To get the fleet to finish in close proximity, the slowest boats started three days before the race’s big hardware, and a ­middle-speed fleet started the day before us. Unfortunately for them, an eddy spinning off Point Conception made for a painfully slow exit from the coast. The situation had normalized by the time we started, so we had an easier time getting to the synoptic northwesterly, which took us only a few hours to reach. As our meteorologist, Chris Bedford, noted on the morning of the start, race conditions looked to be “typical.” Transpac organizers handicap the fleet based on an average matrix of wind angles and wind speeds, and the models were looking just like the matrix. However, as Disney’s father used to say, “The devil is in the details.”

As we close-reached away from the City of Angels with an easygoing 15-knot breeze, the challenge was to shift gears in frequent lulls and puffs. This sort of unstable and shifty situation continued for almost two days, until we finally made it through the ridge and got our VMG gear ready to deploy. No one ever remembers the first, cold-reaching part of the race. Surfing downwind in the trades is what makes the price of admission a real steal.

Pyewacket 70 had its ­grinding pedestals replaced in favor of a super-powerful hydraulic ­system a few years ago when it raced Down Under as Black Jack. Push-button sailing makes a Volvo 70 a much different ride, with halyards and sheets adjustable by fingertip. It’s easy on the body, but it requires the engine to run during all major adjustments. The engine, therefore, runs nearly 24/7 when the wind is unstable, as it was during the reach, revving with every button push.

Inside the carbon-fiber drum of a hull, it’s incredibly loud, requiring ear protection to sleep or navigate. The mainsheet winch can operate under battery power, and when you are running VMG on Pyewacket 70, that’s the only sail that needs constant trimming. Pyewacket 70 sails downwind in 18 to 20 knots with a triple-head rig. Our big A3 gets the first look at the apparent wind. It’s set off the tip of the bowsprit, but it’s not like any other downwind sail used by the Transpac fleet. Pyewacket 70 is so fast that the apparent wind is always well ahead of the beam, so our downwind inventory looks more like a fast ­multihull’s quiver. The A3 looks and trims like a jib, and inside of it, the J4 (our heavy-air upwind jib) and a small staysail add area and deflect the flow around the mainsail.

With this setup, steering the boat downwind is really a game of apparent-wind management. All those big takeoff ramps provided by ocean swells look tempting to turn down into and go for a big surf, but this boat wants to keep the wind flowing across the sails. As a result, all three front sails are normally cleated, except when adjusting to a windspeed (apparent wind) change.

Unlike every other boat I’ve sailed to Hawaii, where a trimmer and grinder play the curl of the spinnaker, on Pyewacket 70, the helmsman just keeps it ripping, and the main trimmer provides the balance and the pumps when appropriate.

The main trimmer has a wireless remote control close at hand to do all the grinding. So, for a boat with a six-person on watch, only two sailors are actively sailing the boat downwind, and the rest stand around behind the wheel, keeping their weight aft (since the weather rail is stacked high with all sails, as permitted by the race rules). From the back of the boat, you have to stand on your toes to see the horizon over the stack. Sitting down on the cockpit floor is OK in some conditions, but if it’s windy enough, the deck is so awash, it’s like sitting in a bubbling stream—even on the high side.

All this standing around comes to an end when it’s time to jibe. Everyone but the helmsman and main trimmer turns into a glorified moving-van crew, lugging the extremely heavy sail package (even our medium air jib weighs more than 200 pounds) from the windward side to the leeward (soon-to-be windward) side. One by one, the sails are moved with the help of gravity. By the end of the race, we had the system refined and could be ready to jibe in 12 minutes.

A couple of days out from the finish, it looked as if the right corner (looking downwind) was the way to go, which gave us an opportunity to go for Transpac’s coveted 24-hour record, which had been set by the 100-foot supermaxi Comanche, navigated by longtime Pyewacket navigator Stan Honey (my ­college roommate).

We discussed the pros and cons of committing to the record attempt within a race. It looked as if it would not affect our corrected-time position much, if at all, but it would mean that we would have to close our eyes when sailing through squalls and big lifts. Luckily, the wind stayed on forecast for the most part, and we had an epic port jibe for about 27 hours. It was long enough to shred Comanche’s 482-mile record by 23 miles. In a 24-hour period, we averaged 21 knots in 20- to 22-knot winds. All 13 of the crew made sure they had a bit of skin in the game by driving for at least one fun session.

We pushed the record run as far as we could until we were in danger of not laying the east end of Molokai when we jibed, and then went back to work shuffling sails. Once on starboard, we decided it was “two and in” to Diamond Head, so we watched Pyewacket regular Capt. Gary Weisman revive a tradition that the Pyewacket 70 crew celebrates on Disney’s much-tamer 68-foot sled, also named Pyewacket. A couple of bottles of nice red wine appeared on deck behind the helm, and soon we were all enjoying a toast together. It didn’t matter that the wine had a hint of sea-salt spray in the nose. It did the trick.

Of course, none of us will remember the first part—just our final sprint with the full moon illuminating Oahu as we ripped into the finish in the biggest puffs of the race, a bit overstood on the layline (blame the wine, not the navigator). We saw 29 knots for a couple of seconds in Molokai Channel, which was also our top speed for the race. The workhorse A3 in its triple-head configuration with one reef in the mainsail saw us into the finish line with an elapsed time of five days, 16 hours and 53 minutes.

Because we finished at night, Disney was kind enough to accede to photographer Sharon Green’s request to take the boat out and do it again in daylight. So, two days later, after a bit of a rest, the Pyewacket team headed upwind into the Molokai Channel with a double reef and a number-four jib to set up for another victory lap past Diamond Head. This time we had a helicopter ready to get the money shot. When we finally turned and burned, we all remembered why we love this race so much. Downwind is the delight.

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2017 TRANSPAC FINISH FINISH 71517

In the most recent meeting on Transpac Race planning, Transpacific Yacht Club rear commodore Bill Guilfoyle presented a 22-page draft plan, via Zoom, of course. About 40 minutes into discussing page one, Guilfoyle observed, “It’s a 22-page document, but it has 100 pages of work in it.”

What came through loud and clear at that meeting of the Transpac Board of Directors—which includes me—is that we’ll run a race unless we are prevented from running a race. But we need to get the word to skippers and crews that it won’t look like any other Transpac. There won’t be parties at either end unless they’re virtual. There will be testing requirements. And if that peels off any of the 58 entries now on the books, the sooner we know how many, the better we can manage our own risks, which include running the race at a loss. Which we don’t expect, but we’re willing to do.

Your takeaway is, we’ve been working on this for two years, and we’re planning to sail Transpac 51 this summer, Los Angeles to Honolulu, Point Fermin to Diamond Head, because the things that will be missing—the parties and an in-person prizegiving—are secondary to one of the world’s great boat rides. The Molokai Channel beckons.

The hard-working souls planning Marion-Bermuda share that outlook. Bermuda is their island over the horizon. Race trustee Ray Cullum says, “I work on this every day, and every day there’s something new that we hadn’t thought about. The planning docs get longer and longer. But if we can run the race, we will.”

That much is simple. Nothing else is.

“We have three races all on similar timelines,” Cullum says. “The logistics between Marion-Bermuda and Transpac are 95 percent the same. That’s why we’re talking to each other. When I pointed out to Bill [Guilfoyle] that the big difference is, we’re sailing to a foreign country, he came back that what’s the same is, we’re both sailing to islands, and oceans are helpful barriers in a time of pandemic. It’s important that Bermuda wants us, and they are very willing to work with us. They had a PGA tournament a while back, but they’re strict. You get tested upon arrival, and again four days later, and four days after that.

“Like Transpac, Marion-Bermuda will have no group gatherings,” Cullum says. “We think we’re touching the right touchpoints—we’re working with an epidemiologist and a public health official—but the touchpoints keep changing. We know what we need to know about the now, but we don’t know what we’ll need to know at First Warning on June 18, much less what we’ll need to know as April slips by and the situation is either clear or it’s not, and we have to make a go/no-go decision. You look at Marblehead-Halifax, and with Canada on lockdown and lagging, maybe their prospects aren’t good. Our criteria for Marion-Bermuda include a vaccinated fleet, but vaccination rates in Massachusetts have been a bear. We’ll need a testing site ahead of the start, but what does that look like? We probably don’t send a few hundred people over to a public health facility, and what about kids under 18? As an OA, we’re not responsible for each skipper’s crew and operations, but we can’t send a fleet to Bermuda without meeting Bermuda’s requirements.

“In our group, it’s the doctors who would have pulled the plug already,” Cullum says, “but things keep changing and opening up, so we’re holding onto our optimism.”

Meanwhile, it’s not lost on anyone that the 2020 Newport-Bermuda was cancelled, and so was a 2020 Tahiti race that would have included the hottest fleet ever to race to les îles Sous-le-Vent. There is a big difference between 2020 and 2021, however. This time around there are opportunities to overcome the obstacles, “and we’re well on our way with that,” as Guilfoyle is quick to point out. The trends are favorable, but does Covid have more tricks to play? Are we fighting the last war/pandemic? We’ll get back to you on that.

Transpac has had to wonder, will sponsors commit and follow through? What about cutoff dates for reserving hotel space, a convention center, trackers, media contracts? Can we count on the usual, generous volunteer turnout in Honolulu? Per tradition, there will be a warm Aloha Mai Tai for every finisher, whatever time of the day or night they finish, but those large group arrival festivities on the dock will—not—happen.

But did I mention? The Molokai Channel beckons.

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Due to wind conditions veteran navigator Stan Honey described as a “surprisingly strong breeze,” both the multihull and the monohull first-to-finish race records have fallen in the 2017 Transpac. Over a 2225-mile course that starts from Pt Fermin in Los Angeles and ends at Diamond Head in Honolulu, H.L. Enloe’s ORMA 60 trimaran Mighty Merloe crossed the finish line first at 5:02:30 PM Hawaii Standard Time (HST) for an elapsed time of 4 days 6 hours 32 min 30 sec, a full 26.5 hours faster than the previous mark set in 1997 by Bruno Peyron and his team on Commodore Explorer.

Racing with Enloe was a highly-seasoned crew of offshore sailors, including Steve Calder, Jay Davis, Artie Means, Loïck Peyron, Franck Priffit, Will Suto and Jacques Vincent.

In crossing the finish 3 and 6 hours later, respectively, even the next two boats to finish, Lloyd Thornburg’s MOD 70 Phaedo and Giovanni Soldini’s MOD 70 Maserati, also broke this record.

The next boat to come over the eastern horizon into the Molakai Channel towards the finish was Jim Clark’s 100-footer Comanche, and at 11:55:26 local time, they too decisively established a new course record for monhulls with an elapsed time of 5 days 1 hour 55 min 26 sec. This new record is half a day faster than the previous mark set in 2009 by Neville Crichton’s R/P 90 Alfa Romeo II.

Skipper Ken Read had high praise for the team, saying “This was the perfect boat with the perfect crew. We did a lot of work to mode this boat to the lowest safety limits of stability and to minimize the weight wherever possible.” This included crew, with only 15 on board (“one for every handle on the grinders”), and sails, which is ironic given that Read is President of North Sails: for this trip the inventory was reduced to a main, masthead Code 0, three jibs two staysails, and – amazingly – only one A3 spinnaker. For an offshore greyhound of this size, its several crew and sails less than normal.

“This was another proof of concept for this boat,” he continued. “we can adapt it to be competitive in any race around the world. We are all just stunned at what this boat can do.”

For navigator Stan Honey this was his 7th first-to-finish achievement in Transpac, and the 4th time he has helped win the Elapsed Time Record Trophy (aka The Clock Trophy) as navigator. The hands on the clock on this trophy will now be set to the new record time.

In addition to Read and Honey, racing on Comanche was Nicholas Burridge, Richard Clarke, Justin Clougher, Julien Cressant, Shannon Falcone, Warwick Fleury, Ryan Godfrey, Kelvin Harrap, Anthony Mutter, Louis Sinclair, Casey Smith, Peter van Niekerk, and John Von Schwarz.

Meanwhile, blogs from boats a little further from Hawaii have been entertaining us ashore, with the content coming now at greater breadth and depth since the boats are more flat and the conditions more benign. Here is an example from John Miller’s Beneteau 46 Tropic Thunder, who started on Monday last week with Division 7 and gives us a slice of life aboard:

“We have been sailing 7 straight days as of 1 pm today. Yet another day of grey skies and grey water. So far we have seen One. Single. Star. We’ve had some glimpses of the moon but only briefly. The Fantastic Four watch say they saw the full moon but we on the A-Team watch are skeptical. During the day we have all caught sight of this strange glowing orb through the clouds in the sky. We have not yet identified it. At least there has been no rain and no squalls.

July 9: During morning shift change we saw and passed a sailboat on the horizon. That was a pleasant little surprise. In the afternoon, Aaron went up the mast again. For some reason, Beneteau thought square ends on swept back spreaders was a good thing. We started getting a pretty significant dimple in the main. Aaron went up again and applied a patch with a jury-rigged hard plastic center as well as duct tape and chafe guard to the spreader end. The winds for the day built up and there were a couple sail changes to try and optimize boat speed. Trimming and driving was active and challenging. A symmetric kite sure would have been useful.

Overnight we flew the genoa. Wind and wave angles were odd and challenging. The crew was pretty wiped out from the all the effort throughout the past day. The slight down time was much needed.

July 10: At morning watch change the A2 went back up for better speed and boat angles. We are sailing a little higher now due to the wind but still making way. 183 nm 9 am to 9 am.

Today we had our Half Way Celebration. Dinner was pork loin and pineapple with young potatoes and carrots. Dessert consisted of warm lava cake and bad Hawaiian music. It was absolutely delicious. Mother Nature decided to bless us with an actual visible sunset to cap of the day.

Having a blast out here somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In corrected time standings based on current positions and rates of speed, leaders in each division are the same as yesterday and include: Mighty Merloe in Division 0, Frank Slootman’s Pac 52 Invisible Hand in Division 1, Roy Pat Disney’s Andrews 68 Pyewacket in Division 2, Tim Fuller’s J/125 Resolute in Division 3, John Shulze’s SC 50 Horizon in Division 4, Larry Andrews’s Summit 40 Locomotive in Division 5, Chris Lemke and Brad Lawson’s Hobie 33 Dark Star in Division 6, and Rod Pimentel’s Cal 40 Azure in Division 7.

The post Records Fall in 2017 Transpac appeared first on Sailing World.

Congratulations to HL Enloe and the crew of the ORMA 60 trimaran Mighty Merloe, the first to finish in the 2017 Transpac Race, and new holders of the multihull Transpac Race record elapsed time! Mighty Merloe has been racing just about every west coast offshore event for the last few years, often with no multihull competition to measure themselves against. Getting the opportunity to welcome Phaedo3 and Maserati to the west coast, go head to head against them and come out on top is a dream come true for Enloe’s team. We’ll hear more from them shortly.

Enloe sailed this year’s Transpac with his team of Steve Calder (Main Trimmer), Jay Davis (Bowman), Artie Means (Navigator), Loïck Peyron (Helm), Franck Proffit (Helm), Will Suto (Grinder), Jacques Vincent (Co-Skipper).

Mighty Merloe crossed the finish line under helicopter escort at 17:03:30 (HST) on Monday, July 10th. Their elapsed time of 4 Days, 6 Hours, 33 Minutes, 30 Seconds beats the 20 year old record of Bruno Peyron’s Commodore Explorer by more than a day, previously set at 5 days 9 hours 18 min and 26 secs.

The post Mighty Merloe Smashes Transpac Record appeared first on Sailing World.

New Records for Comanche

Comanche‘s 24 hour run (0800 roll call to roll call) was 484.1 nm, a new Transpac record, a 20.2 knot average speed. The previous record of 453 nm by Wild Oats XI in 2015. Previously, it was set at 431 nm by Alfa Romeo II was set in 2009 when they set the monohull course record which still stands (for now). Alfa Romeo II‘s monohull course record time from 2009 was 5 days, 14 hours, 36 minutes, 20 seconds. Comanche will need to finish by 12:36:19 AM (Honolulu time) on 7/12/17 to break the record.

Interestingly enough Stan Honey, navigator aboard Comanche is looking to break a record he helped establish, as he was also the navigator aboard Alfa Romeo II in 2009. Stan has said what’s key is not necessarily having a windy race but just having the wind be consistent.

Around the Fleet

La Sirena

Wind laid on all day today, topping 25k true on occasion, and averaging about 16k. We dropped the asymmetrical sail this morning and hoisted a robust traditional spinnaker instead. Boat speeds improved nearly logarithmically to steady 9s and 10s, with numerous forays above 12 and a daily high of 15.3k by Fraser (shattering my short-lived 13.6k record). Crew has been in high spirits with much shouting and boasting about one’s individual skills at the helm. Sea state has varied from moderate to burly, but the wave angle to the boat has been perfect. This is the type of weather we hope to ride the rest of the way to Honolulu. It’s sailor’s conditions all the way.

Raisin’ Cane

Raisin Cane is charging downwind in a deep, cobalt blue. ocean, her A2 running spinnaker, straining at her sheets, skipping from wave to wave in a sailor’s dance till she reaches the sun baked white beaches of Hawaii. Cane’s crew has settled into their hourly watches and daily routines, focusing all their efforts to race across the Pacific. Sailing has been steady with good winds. The fleet is now in the trade winds for the most part, sailing westerly to the Islands with the winds at their back with a little over 1200 miles to go.

Invisible Hand

Last sked (12 noon) from the 2017 Transpac yellowbrick delayed tracker was incredible. Here we are on Frank Slootman’s new Pac52, Invisible Hand, fully lit up on the step with A2 spinnaker and Spin staysail. Pushing the boat hard; blasting through waves — water everywhere; streaming down the deck and sloshing around down below. Pro drivers and trimmers eeking out every last bit of speed. It’s loud, athletic and extreme. You can’t imagine us going any faster. I’m getting launched around the nav just trying to look at the screen.

Kinetic V

Different day, same weather. Moon, sun, wind, clouds. Sailing within visual sight of Mr. Bill, a seventy footer. A7 max speed now over 22 knots. Changed from A7 to A2 spinnaker. Sailed deeper with the A2 for many hours. Then changed back to the A7 and a hotter angle. Wind angles continue to be reachier than would be ideal for us. At these angles, we are probably getting waterlined by the longer boats.

The post Records and Race Updates: Transpac 2017 appeared first on Sailing World.

The second wave of three starts to the 49th edition of the 2017 biennial Transpac Race left Pt Fermin today in a pleasant 8-10 knot Southern California seabreeze, en route to a finish line awaiting them 2225 miles away at Diamond Head in Honolulu. The group of 16 boats in Divisions 3 and 4 were today faster and more lively than the cruiser/racers crossing the line on Monday’s first start, with plenty of action and even one boat over the start line at the gun.

With a slight pin end favor to the line set perpendicular to the course, John Schulze’s SC 50 Horizon timed it perfectly to win the pin with speed and jump out to an early lead. Horizon is one of the perennial favorites among the competitive Fast 50’s in this race, having earned herself top prize in this class except for last year when Eric Grey’s Allure beat her by less than 3 minutes after nearly a week of racing.

Steve Sellinger’s SC 52 Triumph set up early on the line, luffing her headsail to modulate her speed, but got caught when the fleet converged and kept her above the line at the gun. So PRO Tom Trujillo and his team raised the X flag and called her back, a small hiccup for a race lasting several days ahead.

Another early leader in the pack was Naomichi Ando’s R/P 45 Lady Kanon VI, powered up, heeled over and going fast even in the light breeze.

The next generation of Transpac racers was well-represented in the fleet this year, with numerous young sailors on board boats headed west. For example, today Chris Hemans’s Rogers 46 Varuna had his daughter Gray on board, listed as Spinnaker Trimmer on their crew list, and on Monday’s start Ross Pearlman’s Between the Sheets had Rob Vandervort’s son Bill also on board. Both Gray and Bill are active in the junior sailing scene in Newport Beach.

“We’re really fortunate to have strong interest from our members in passing on their love of this race and offshore sailing to young sailors,” says TPYC Commodore Bo Wheeler. “I expect to see a lot of interest this in the next cycle for the 50th anniversary edition in 2019.”

For more information, visit the event website at 2017.transpacyc.com

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Lassie came home, and now, so has Merlin. It took a while, but who doesn’t love a warm and fuzzy reunion story? When Bill Lee and his classic ultralight displacement boat hit the starting line of the 2017 Transpac, together again, it will be 40 years on from Merlin’s record-­setting race that rocked West Coast ocean racing.

If you weren’t around in 1977, you can’t imagine the controversy. The bar talk. The arguments. Smaller, light-for-the-time Bill Lee designs had won the Transpac, from Los Angeles to Honolulu, in 1973 and 1975, and now the Transpacific YC’s handicappers were trying to hold the line. The “establishment” took it for granted that the ULDBs were not weatherly and might even be unsafe. Lee was a lightning rod, and his mechanical engineering degree received no credence; neither did his defense industry years performing stress, trim and weight analyses on designs for amphibious craft and submarines, nor the fact that one of his proof-of-concept races, in the world’s first 68-foot ULDB, was the inaugural Singlehanded Farallones Race, consisting of 25 miles upwind and then back to the Golden Gate on a day that blew a gale. He was first home, of course.

Lee shrugged and went his own way. His signature line was some variation of “It’s more fun to sail fast than to pick up trophies.” He called himself “the wizard” and wore a cape and a magician’s hat, not a blue blazer, for Merlin’s launching. His layup shed was a former chicken coop situated ridiculously high up a sometimes-muddy road. The coop famously embodied an alternative yachting style in the California coastal town of Santa Cruz, known for alternative lifestyles period. The sign on the door read, “Bring a six-pack.”

The 1966 Spencer-designed Ragtime helped inspire Merlin’s narrow beam, but Lee also says, “Our building had a 12-foot ceiling, and we needed to turn the boat over, so we kept the beam at 12 feet.” The ratings committee of the Transpacific YC didn’t like any of this. Had you right then bet the bookies that Bill Lee would eventually have his turn as commodore of a new-look Transpacific YC, proudly running races dominated by downwind flyers — and that he would emerge as a trusted sage on rating rules — you’d now be rolling in dough.

Lee’s lightweights won races and kept on sailing. Santa Cruz 70s and Santa Cruz 50s came after Merlin, and today — with new fins and new rigs — Lee’s production boats form the backbone of an enduring West Coast ocean fleet. “They’re reasonably priced, and mere mortals can sail them,” he says. Meanwhile, California’s alternative lifestyles went mainstream, and more than one West Coast commodore has memories, however hazy, of time in Bill Lee’s hot tub. Merlin hit the starting line of its first Transpac in July 1977, the same month the Apple I personal computer kit went on sale for $666.66. ULDBs were segregated into a new Division II. Navigation was by sextant and dead reckoning. There were no freeze-dried meals and no pros as we know them. A hastily built and slightly bigger rival copy had been rushed to completion for the race. Drifter, in that Transpac and in races to come, would often show well and occasionally win, but would never spark the magic of Merlin. Going into the race, Merlin’s crew knew her as part submarine, knifing through waves without slowing down. Her forward hands developed techniques to cope, laughed at green water on deck, and recited Lee’s mantra, “Fast is fun.”

Three days into the race, with Merlin reporting 150 miles ahead of Kialoa, the legendary designer of another generation, Olin Stephens, said of Merlin’s navigation, “Those people are hopelessly lost.” But far from lost, Merlin arrived at Diamond Head in eight days, 11 hours, leading Drifter by 17 minutes. The crossing lopped 22 hours off the record of another legend, Windward Passage, and two hours off the unofficial record of Eric Tabarly’s trimaran, Pen Duick III. The year 1977 was not the first year that party animal Bill Lee attended the dock celebration of every Transpac finisher that followed him in, but it was the first year that he made every party. Merlin’s Transpac record would stand for 20 years while the boat plowed through first-to-finish races, always a contender, and set course records in San Diego-Manzanillo, Vic-Maui and the Pacific Cup.

Lee sold the boat in 1982 and bought it back in October 2015. He is the first and eighth owner. For next year’s Transpac, he has removed a previous owner’s canting mechanism, and he’s fitting a bulb keel and high-aspect ratio rudder: 1977 meets 2017. Merlin is once again everybody’s favorite party boat. It’s known around Santa Cruz that “everybody” can fit aboard Merlin for an evening sail, and “everybody” knows that with the wizard, fast will be fun.

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