Big Ocean Small Boat

Posting from Rainbow harbor in Long Beach.

Bob, Shana, Heather, and I brought the boat down from Santa Barbara this weekend. It’s a 17 hour sail/motor. We motored out of the SB harbor, hoisted the sails after about an hour (mostly 10-15 under the spare 3/4 oz that Charlie gave us), and took them down at about 10PM when the wind died. We motored into LB, arriving at about 4AM. It was really exciting navigating for the first time in through the harbor at night (busiest commercial harbor on the west coast, I believe), but I’m really glad to have had a full moon and a good chart. It’s like the Oakland estuary, only 3 times as big and 4 times as busy. Coming in reminded me of flying to a new airport at night.

Rainbow harbor is in the back of the main harbor, just across a channel from the Queen Mary. It’s quite different than Santa Barbara. It’s like mooring in fisherman’s wharf, with lots of cutesy shops and chain resturaunts, baby strollers and matching his/hers tracksuits. And, unlike FW, 90-foot custom Maxi racers just down the dock.

Bob flew his 182 down on Friday night, so after we drove the rental car back up to SB, everyone had a nice flight back up to the bay area. I picked up the truck and came back down for the final week of pre-race prep. And the waffle cones.

Apologies to Lenny Kravitz.

And to Brian, who looks like he got a lot of sleep while the rest of us had brown trouser time at the tiller, which was just the way the video worked out (and not even close to reality).

Update: A better version on Vimeo.

“You’re a little too deep, Garth. You were waaay by the lee there for a while…”

Love it.

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.

Garth and I dropped the boat over at KKMI and spent an hour reviewing the job list with the supervisor. Nice little sail over from SFYC. It reminded me of the day I bought the boat, when I realized just how sweet she drives in 12 kts or so. It’s good to be reminded that sailing is about being on the water, not at West Marine.

The boat has Micron Extra on the bottom, and they are recommending multiple coats, especially on the foil and hull leading edges where the diver’s scotchbrite pad wears through extra quickly. They will turn the re-rig estimate around in a couple days.

In addition, we got the old bent boom off in anticipation of the new Ballenger boom, got the final tether points and lee cloth tie-ins installed, and cut the cheesy ronstan mini-shackles off the spinn halyards. The splice was just big enough to luggage tag on the older, bigger shackles.

Welcome to yet another blog. This one was suggested by Jerry, the first person to tell me that boat polars were actually useful below 66′ latitude.

Hopefully this blog will help me keep track of all the tasks, both huge and small, that I have to complete for the 2007 Transpacific Yacht Race, AKA, the transpac.