Interviews with Grand Illusion crewmembers
Conducted and transcribed by Debbie McGraw and Janice Eagle

John Sweeney

Q. What were the highlights of the trip?
JS. I've never been on a Transpac before, so this is the first time, and I was lucky....

Q. Your dad said you've been sailing since you were six...
JS: Yeah. I just haven't done Transpac before, and I happened to get on with a great group of guys who had really good spirits...and we got tons of squalls that came through, and we just happened to hit it right. So, we got a lot of really fast, high speed rides......broke the spinnaker, broke the mainsail, didn't break any people...

JS: It was pretty uneventful actually, It was just a lot of hard work. So, I'm pretty tired. I don't even know how many days it was...no idea. .I know we set the record...we won the whole thing overall...won our class..not bad for our first time...

Kiernan Tarbet- Watch Captain

KT: We had an absolutely fabulous time. First time in Transpac, first time on the sled...we had so much fun....a couple of hairy moments, but other than that...nothing. It just went really, really well...Actually, I'm thinking of moving here!

Patrick O'Brien - Navigator

My third or fourth Transpac. Third...no, fourth...
Highlights? We got the wind and the surfing...good breeze, good waves, so really good surfing... Torn mainsail. We didn't fix it...we just left it...just babied it all the way to the finish...we were flying...We were in contention for first overall, so we didn't want to lose any time.

Roland Brun

Q: We heard from a couple of people that you were the secret weapon on the boat.

RB: No, everybody...it was a team, all great people, a strong team, we came together all along and did what was necessary. It was really a great, great team effort. Everybody worked together..nobody getting angry..we just all did our jobs...everybody was really cooperative. I think we were really lucky also. I was just so busy.. but when we got into the trades it got warmer and it's kind of an intense experience. We looked and there was Molokai... it was really great.

Hogan Beattie - Bow Man

No, my second Transpac. We seemed to get more trades at the end. I had to go up the mast a lot of times 'cause we were jibing so much and changing spinnaker's a lot. The wind was going up and down really a lot. We were changing between our heavier and lighter spinnakers. A lot of work on the bow...lot of jibing the last half of the race. We started jibing early and that was one of the reasons we were able to lay the islands out on a good angle..and hung in there close to the bigger boats. Our mainsail ripped n half about 10:30 last night and we sailed the rest of the way with the main ripped in half... cords on the mainsail held it together well enough so we didn't have to put up another sail and take the time to take it down and repair it...we figured we'd lose to Pyewacket if we spent the time to fix it. It was holding together enough where we thought we could keep going.. And, if it broke we were going to put a jib up over the top of it and keep going cause we didn't have time to turn upwind to take it down. Cause you can't take it down when you're running...Pretty sedate...normal trip...it wasn't bad. Windy the whole way.

John Sweeney -- It is so very important to credit Patrick O'Brien with his brilliant navigation that saw Grand Illusion win not just in class but overall and set the fastest time ever for a stock sled. If you remove the Turbo sled hype, and take a look at our accomplishment, you will see that we had to sail a near perfect race to set the new record. It was a medium breeze year with arguably the least modified sled around and we still did better than any Santa Cruz 70 ever. Patrick again proved that he is in a class of Rudiger and Honey. This was my rookie try at the Transpac, but what a way to start. This was the greatest sailing victory of my life.