What a race this weekend. Here’s a picture of us starting from latitude (in the background, upwind of the Moore 24).
On the other end of the spectrum, two of the smaller boats in this year’s fleet, Cookie Jar andShanti.
Photo Latitude / JR
© 2007 Latitude 38 Publishing
We actually ended up in the background of both of the online Latitude 38 race photos. Next year, we’ll try for a foreground shot. Here’s their initial race write-up.
The 2007 Coastal cup started during a small craft advisory off SF bay, and progressed into a gale warning–which is 35 to 47 knots of winds, as the pre-race committee weather reporter was quick to note. The heaviest weather, as is usual on the California coast, was off Point Conception (the “Cape Horn of the Pacific” according to Reed’s Nautical Almanac).
We finished in 50 hours, 23 minutes. Along the way, we had a couple days and nights of epic sailing, ranging from surfing like mad along under spinnaker and moonlight, fighting round-ups in 40+ knot gusts off P.C., and bobbing around in a dead calm in the Santa Barbara channel.
The crew was me, Garth, and Colin (3/4 of our TP crew), Eben from the O911 Elusive, and Brian from the Schumacher 40 Auspice. Everybody got plenty of white-knuckle tiller time. Even rockstar Brian quit smiling at one point when he was working us downwind through the breaking rollers. Our SOP was to have one person driving, one person trimming the chute, and one person facing backwards and calling the waves as they came in. Sleeping was not really on the agenda.
Several boats retired, there were a couple broken booms and a downed rig on a Cal 40. There were a lot of glazed-over eyes at the yacht club afterwards, for sure.
We made some navigation errors that really took us out of the running for any actual race performance (we sailed way too far from the coast instead of going “point-to-point”), and ended up 4th from last (of the boats that finished). But the boat handled it better than great, we all made it in one piece, and we all learned a lot.