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TransPac '99 Race Summary

HONOLULU—The wind was up and the sea too rough, but for the few who were out there the ghostly image of Pyewacket's spinnaker bobbing and weaving its way past Diamond Head on a clear, moonless night was unforgettable.

Inshore were the dazzling lights of Waikiki Beach but offshore only the red flashing light of the buoy that marks the finish line of the Transpacific Yacht Race a mile out from the 100-year-old lighthouse. Then for a moment an invisible boat obscured the buoy, and then the race was over.

Actually, it was over four days earlier. That's when Roy E. Disney's crew, a minute after their daily 8 a.m. PDT radio check-in, jibed their new 72-foot Reichel/Pugh maxi sled to port and ducked south, leaving rival Zephyrus IV, a 75-foot R/P maxi sled, to continue due west into no man's land.

The next morning, Zephyrus IV learned that Pyewacket had turned an 11-mile deficit into a 12-mile lead that grew to 54. Only then did Bob McNeil and John Parrish's dark green machine also turn south, having lost not only first place to Pyewacket but second to Doug Baker's Andrews 70 turbo sled from Long Beach.

Those who said Transpac was a navigator's race were right, and Zephyrus IV and Pyewacket had two of the very best: respectively, Whitbread wizard Mark Rudiger and studious Stan Honey, a seagoing sorcerer in his own right. But what, everyone wondered, was Zephyrus IV doing so far north, while everyone else sailed the rhumb line?

Grant Baldwin, who has tracked most races since World War II, said from the communications vessel Alaska Eagle, "Here we have two very smart navigators and two very diverse opinions."

Afterward, Rudiger spoke of a "wall of squalls."

"Our plan really wasn't to go where we went," he said. "We were sort of forced that way by a weather pattern."

"I was kind of baffled that Mark let us get away to the south," Honey said. "Everyone on our boat knew then that the south was ours."

Rudiger: "We probably should have jibed and worked below them but maintain the leverage to the right. After we lost visual with them, a couple of squalls came through that night [and] they were on one side of it and we were on the other, and that's where the whole race was determined."

Pyewacket, shadowed by Doug Baker's Magnitude from Long Beach, held a stronger line to the finish before Robbie Haines turned the helm over to Disney at Koko Head for the last five miles of a 22-knot sprint to the end.

Pyewacket averaged 12.4 knots for the 2,225 nautical miles from the Palos Verdes peninsula. The time of 7 days 11 hours 41 minutes 27 seconds took 3 hours 43 minutes 15 seconds off the record set by Disney's smaller Pyewacket in the previous race in 1997. His son Roy Pat served as skipper in that one because the elder Disney, now 68, had smashed his right leg in a car crash a few weeks prior to the race and could only wait for his boat to arrive.

"I always told Roy Pat, 'It's your record,' " Disney said. "Then when we broke it, he said to me, 'If anybody had to break my record, I'm glad it was you.' "

Whatever, a Disney won the Barn Door for fastest elapsed time by a monohull, and dad would have the honor of adjusting the record time on the new trophy he commissioned.

Disney said, "The wind blew all the way, and this boat is incredibly fast."

Magnitude also broke the record, finishing less than two hours later, and claimed a record one-day run of 353 miles—overall a much happier result than an early dismasting in '97.

Honors for the overall best corrected time went to the 13-year-old Santa Cruz 70 Grand Illusion with an adjustment to 7:08:40:10, third best in race history.

With its Transpac handicap of 29.455 seconds per mile, the Lahaina YC entry saved its time on Pyewacket, a virtual scratch boat, by almost three hours.

"We pushed the boat pretty hard," skipper James McDowell said. "Maybe that's why we broke the main [sail]."

That happened late at night in strong winds about 150 miles from the finish. The boat was jibed to alter course and when the main sail slammed over on the new side a two-foot-wide gapped opened from the mast to the leech, right under the 97 sail number. But the leech cord along the back of the sail held together to keep the upper and lower halves effective.

"When Pyewacket finished we knew we had the time on them," McDowell said. "But to fix the sail meant stopping to do it, and to stop would have meant losing. We just said, 'Let's keep sailing.' "

As it was, when the wind increased in the Molokai Channel, Grand Illusion achieved its top speeds of the race in the low 20-knots range with a split main sail and spinnaker. Then it surfed downwind through huge waves to the finish line as spectators gasped at the separated sail.

Patrick O'Brien, Grand Illusion's navigator, kept the boat in steady winds, but McDowell played a daring game of chasing accelerated bursts of speed in squalls like a bird dog sniffing out quail.

"There was some resistance at first," McDowell said, "'but the best pressure is in front of the squalls, and when [the crew] saw the results we kept just kept looking for the next squall to chase."'

Other gripping tales of the race included a crash by Bob Hanel's 76-foot catamaran Double Bullet II in heavy seas the first night out, an impressive performance by Hawaii's own daring duo of Les Vasconcellos and Bruce Burgess on the Sonoma 30 Two Guys On the Edge, and the unsettling race-long silence of Bill Boyd and Scott Atwood's 25-foot Vapor from Alamitos Bay YC—-smallest boat ever to race the Transpac.

Hanel and his crew of five, which included two-time Olympic silver medalist Randy Smyth, were rescued from their turtled craft 188 miles offshore by a Coast Guard helicopter responding to their EPIRB. The boat later was towed back to San Pedro, still upside down.

Two Guys finished in 12½ days, faster than three larger racing boats and all eight Cruisers, and corrected out on 10 of the 22 larger racers. Vasconcellos and Burgess also survived a pitch-dark knockdown in 35-knot winds 20 miles from Diamond Head and were weary but cheery when an awed crowd greeted them at Ala Wai Harbor around midnight.

A few days later, as the trade winds gasped a sigh of relief, wayward Vapor-crippled by a broken rudder and silenced by a faulty radio--sailed out of a rainbow at dusk to complete the race in 18 days 8 hours 16 minutes and 40 seconds.

It wasn't the slowest elapsed time in Transpac history. That was almost 24 days (23:23:55:04) by William Merry's Viking Childe in 1939. But it was the slowest since 1961 when Phillip Johnson's Juego took about eight hours longer to sail the 2,225 nautical miles.

Transpac Publicity:

Rich Roberts
Phone: (310) 835-2526
e-mail: richsail@earthlink.net