Those who still don't think sailing can be exciting must have missed the 39th Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii--the windiest, fastest and one of the most colorful Transpacs of all.

After three of the 38 starters lost their masts and four others turned back for reasons ranging from seasickness to broken rudders, six boats beat Merlin's 20-year-old record of 8 days 11 hours 1 minute 45 seconds.

The first was Bob Lane's Medicine Man from Long Beach, which made the most of a three-day head start on the sleds. The Andrews 56 hooked into constant 20-knot trade winds to clock 8:06:31:00 with a wow! finish, surfing past Diamond Head at 19 knots. But 2 1/2 days later came five maxi class turbo-sleds to beat that time, led by Roy Disney's 70-foot Pyewacket in 7:15:24:40 (average 12.1 knots), giving the vice chairman of the board of the Walt Disney Co. his first "Barn Door" trophy after two decades of campaigning in the Transpac. The Barn Door, a 3 x 4 1/2-foot slab of hand-carved Hawaiian koa wood officially called the Transpacific Perpetual Trophy, is awarded to the monohull with the fastest elapsed time.

But it was a bittersweet triumph for Disney. He broke his leg in a car crash in Ireland in May, was unable to sail and could only wait to greet son Roy Pat Disney, navigator Stan Honey, primary helmsman Robbie Haines and the rest of the reduced nine-man crew at Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor. "I'm a nervous wreck," Disney said.

Also beating Medicine Man's short-lived record were Hal Ward's defending champion Cheval, Mike Campbell's Victoria, which had a record 24-hour run of 337 miles; Tony Sessions' Luna Barba--a two-time winner as Silver Bullet--and Merlin, reconfigured with a canting keel and chartered by a syndicate.

Bruno Peyron's 86-foot catamaran Explorer, co-skippered by Cam Lewis with Skip Novak as navigator, brought international attention to the race and shattered Lakota's 1995 multihull record by 31 hours in 5:09:18:26 (average 17.2 knots). Steve Fossett followed in Lakota, a 60-foot trimaran, in 6:00:30:46.

Jerry Montgomery of Long Beach chartered John Latiolait's 18-year-old Santa Cruz 50 Ralphie, set no records but sailed well beyond the boat's rating to win the King Kalakaua trophy for best corrected handicap time overall, beating even Medicine Man in Division III. It was the second fastest CT in race history.

Sidelights included two all-woman crews led by Linda Newland of Alameda on Pegasus XIV, a boat built by her husband, and Betty Sue Sherman of San Diego, skippering the Long Beach entry Bay Wolf in the absence of co-skipper Linda Elias, who had emergency surgery five days before the start. Both pressed on to finish after struggling through early breakdowns.

Rob Hudson's Get Challenged organization of Ojai chartered the Nelson/Marek 56 Learjet, renamed it Survivor and sailed it with 11 mostly inexperienced HIV-positive males as crew and the names of 170 AIDS victims on the hull. They finished in just over 10 days.

Three boats that lost their masts included two new creations, Magnitude from Long Beach and Zephyrus from San Diego, and Bob Hanel's catamaran Double Bullet II. Another new boat, Vicki, returned after sustaining a compression fracture at the base of its mast.

Fred Frye of San Diego sailed his Tayana 52 Salsipuedes hard and well with a crew of six over-50 friends to win the new cruising class by two days. Given a four-day head start on Medicine Man, Salsipuedes held the lead until the last 10 miles of the 2,225-nautical mile race. Afterward, Frye, a retired pediatrician said, "It's always been a dream of mine to do the Transpac. Now I don't have to do it again."