News Around the World
Designer Juan K’s Rambler 88 came alive when she reached England for the start of its European programme. Most impressively, the smaller boat gave the 100ft Comanche a very tough time of it in the Fastnet, at times leading the world’s most powerful maxi and proving slippier in the light conditions. In the end Comanche beat Rambler into Plymouth by just 4-minutes after 683nm sailed
time and again to get away from it all on a long Pacific sojourn. The pace of life on a boat in this race is not the stop-start staccato of sail changes, course changes and ugly episodes like reefing and heeling for hours or days at a time, soaking or sweating in your wet gear and dreaming of being dry again.
No, the Transpac is supposed to follow a well-known script: a 26nm fetch to the west end of Catalina, then close-reaching to the southwest through two to three days of overcast skies, cold air, colder water and big uncomfortable waves that arrive onboard unin- vited and determined to make you pay for your trip to paradise, then trading the jib for the blast reacher as the breeze goes aft, then the jib top, then the A3 kite, then finally the A2 as the sun starts to break through the gloom, and the wind and waves get warmer and tamer as the pounding becomes surfing. The proliferation of grey hair in the beards on the dock gives a clear indication that, unlike many trans-oceanic races, this one’s physical challenges are within acceptable tolerances even to us geezers. Yet what happens when it’s not a ‘normal’ race, when there are thunderstorms, rain and lightning at the start, the water is not its usual bracing cold, and the first tactical move in the race is to tack to port off the start to head north for wind, not south? Blame it on El Niño, when every few years there is a reversal of the equatorial currents in the Pacific that allows warm water to move east and north where it’s not normally found, there are pattern changes in the jetstream to affect not only the west coast but throughout North America, and tropical storms start creeping further north from their birthplaces off the central American coast. Yet it is precisely in these strange circumstances that Transpac records can fall, because there is enough wind at or north of the rhumbline to viably reduce the distance to Diamond Head.
It was in the El Niño years of 1977, 1997, 1999 and 2009 that
first Merlinand then Pyewacketand Alfa Romeoset course records. Roy Pat Disney had sailed with his dad Roy in numerous Transpacs, and reckoned that this year could fit this pattern given the severity of the recent drought and other El Niño-related effects seen on the west coast. But he needed the right platform for the monohull record, so he approached Bob Oatley for a co- charter of Wild Oats. Oatley agreed, the boat being modified with a lighter bulb and fewer blades in the ‘Swiss Army knife’ of appendages for this race. Syd Fischer must have had the same idea. He showed up in LA
20 SEAHORSE
with his Ragamuffin 100, the other 100-footer being Manouch Moshayedi’s fixed-keel Rio 100, vying for the fixed-keel record. So the stage was set but the weather was not reading the script. Not one but two tropical depressions suppressed the normal flow of air around the North Pacific High, making the rhumbline a risky place to go for the faster boats who started four and six days after the first group. Routeing software paired with grib files suggested two possible paths around what looked to be a hole in the middle: north towards the High, normally something to avoid at all costs, or way south to try to vault off the north sides of the lows like a pinball. Yet neither showed promise for the low distances and high speeds needed to match, much less break, the existing records. Seeing this situation, Renaud Laplanche and Ryan Breymeier on the 105ft trimaran Lending Club 2 (ex-Groupama 3) decided that they would withdraw from the race in favour of setting off three days earlier to attempt a course rather than race record. Good decision… not only did LC2add yet another record to their extensive 2015 collection, but they shaved off more than a day from the previous mark set by another maxi-tri, Geronimo, in 2005. A pace of 590 mi/day was no less than twice as fast as Bill Lee’s Merlinwho set her monohull record in 1977 in a mark that stood unbroken for 20 years.
For the rest of the fleet north route turned out better than south, but as usual those who hedged by picking the right time to come back into the middle came out best of all. At six and a half days Wild Oatswas fast, but still some 20 hours off the record. Under ORR scoring the overall monohull winner was from the class that remained first-to-finishers for over a decade in the 1980s-90s: James McDowell’s mid-80s vintage Santa Cruz 70 Grand Illusion. The Sleds were in the last starting group and pushed each other hard, with an interesting first night getting away from the coast that included fetching on port rather than starboard and even having spinnakers up for a while well before they normally appear. This was McDowell and team’s third win, having earned the honour in 1999 and 2011… not that many boats this age can remain competitive for this long but, unlike many of her rivals, GI was never sold to the midwest a decade ago before being repatriated back to her west coast roots. Grand Illusion has never stopped practising west coast slides and it shows. Dobbs Davis
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MARK LLOYD
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