Finally, no land in sight. No other boats either.
Fighting light air like the rest of the fleet, but when it dies from the back in the evening, we get creamed.
Good start, tacked early, caught a lull behind Catalina, spent a long night trying to keep the boat moving in the calm.
SSB worked perfectly for morning check-in. Had a scare with the engine not starting, probably because I got the RF and DC ground systems crossed.
-Jon
Daily corrected standings and weather are now on the transpac website: www.transpacificyc.org. Shanti’s in 3rd! Thanks Shana!
cheers, Heather
This website: http://trackinfo.fistracking.com/tp2007 will give you the latest reported positions in the race. Shanti is in Division 6, and once you are at the site you do have to click the ‘boat selector’ button once to pick the boats you want to see, and then again to get them to show up on the map. Be warned, the site is addicting.
cheers, Heather
I wanted to write a quick thank-you post. Just getting to the starting line (and well prepared) has only been possible due to a lot of effort and good will of a lot of folks:
My awesome wife Heather. Not just another member of the crew (obviously), but really our co-skipper. None of us would be going to Hawaii without her.
The crew: Bob, Colin, Garth. For making it happen.
Dave Fain, for selling me the best 30′ boat in the world.
KDP, the fifth crew member.
Shana Bagley, Jerry O, Charlie Pick, Al Sargent, Paul Disario, Eben Marsh, Steve Eberly, Dan Leonardi, and Jim and Brian Coggan, for invaluable advice, assistance, support, gear, and advice.
Mike and Kevin and the crew at KKMI. Andrew and the team at Quantum Sails. Jeff and the crew at WM Sausalito. All true pros and true believers.
Thanks all.
I got a bunch of “hey where are the blog posts?” voicemails, so I guess our friends are following along. Sorry for not posting more often this last week.
Inspection: The safety inspection went incredibly smoothly on Wednesday. I had everything laid out on the berths, the whole thing took less than 30 minutes. I suppose that all the (well-documented) fretting paid off.
Spinnaker net: The one piece of gear that everyone experienced recommended was a spinnaker net. We bought one from the Spinnaker Shop, who had it made by UK sailmakers in Alameda. I wasn’t impressed. It was really expensive (i.e. more than my storm jib) and consisted of about 40 feet of webbing and the cheapest possible 3-strand laid line. Oh well. It will probably work just fine.
The weather: This seems to be shaping up to be a “weird” year. The pacific high formed up quite nicely, but has subsequently been broken into a series of smaller systems seperated by flukey and light winds.
The course: We don’t want to give anything away, but suffice it to say that we will not be A) Going North, or B) Taking a Flier away from the fleet. We are adverse to sailing extra miles, but we have our eyes pretty squarely on the gribs and wfax charts, and they indicate that we need to punch through the adverse and variable winds that the local low has produced and get into the synoptic breeze (and stay there) as quickly as possible. This will likely mean a southerly course during the first 1/3 of the race.
The race: We rate about 290 on the TP race rating scale. That means that we are the slowest rated boat in our fleet (there are some bigger Aloha class boats with slower ratings). The rest of the boats (Cal 40s, an x119, a j100, etc) all owe us between 13 and 53 hours.
The events: The entire crew went to a TP-specific US Sailing safety-at-sea seminar on Saturday, which had portions (especially the weather section) that were extremely valuable. I went to the Skipper’s meeting today, which was really a cut down version of the same thing, with more administrative details around the start and finish. We all went to the Aloha dinner tonight, and I picked up the TPYC race burgee. As Bob pointed out, that’s one you can fly with pride anywhere you sail.
This is really about to happen.
After the coastal cup, this feels like tempting fate, but I’m really hoping for strong winds on this race. One of the competitors just got a tow into the harbor this morning. Reading their posts, they seemed to suffer from light wind all the way to LB from Hawaii…
Although we are officially the smallest boat in this years race, (apparently, it’s us on one end and Pyewacket on the other) there are several boats that are actually lighter–like the Hobie 33 and the Columbia 30. Without some wind, our rating won’t matter, we’ll just get clobbered.
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.
No posts for a while, since I’ve been spending full days at the yard, and trying to get my “day job” done too. A quick post, now that the boat is in the water, with the mast in. Amazing what one day can bring.
I got so much done. The KKMI guys were great, letting me do most of the work myself, but being there (and being experts) when I started to get in the weeds. My dad came down for a week and installed two bilge pumps, an emergency rudder system, and a backup freshwater system. We also got the bottom painted, shaft bearing replaced, the keel/hull joint faired, the SSB installed, and all new standing rigging and lifelines. And he dealt with me in full pre-race frenzy with his usual calm.
When a sailboat is on the hard, it’s just a cramped mobile home. When it’s in the water without a mast, it’s just a slow motorboat. When the rig goes in and the shrouds tuned and the lines run, it absolutely transforms into a something that dreams are made of. I literally teared up with joy when I saw Shanti back in the water, crammed in between a brand new 40′ Beneteau, a brand-new 45′ catamaran, and a 60′ powerboat. She looked ready to levitate up, hoist the chute on her own, and start reeling off the ocean miles. I wouldn’t have traded her for any other boat in the yard.
Still wouldn’t.