Transpac's fastest boats ready

by Rich Roberts on 17 Jul 2005 The fastest boats ever to sail the Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii start their 2,225 nautical mile contest of speed and wits off the Palos Verdes Peninsula at 1.00pm Sunday, following a ceremonial send-off of the Centennial event from Rainbow Harbor in downtown Long Beach.

Highlighting Long Beach's summer-long Sea Festival, The Mayors of Long Beach and Honolulu - Beverly O'Neill and Mufi Hannemann - will be among those saluting the crews of competitors leaving from Rainbow Harbor starting at 9:30 a.m. PDT. The local outrigger canoe club will lead race boats out past the Queen Mary on their way to the start area 13 miles west.

Among the top three contenders, only Hasso Plattner's Morning Glory will depart from Rainbow Harbor. Roy Disney's Pyewacket and Randall Pittman's Genuine Risk have done last-minute preparations in other area marinas.

The marquee start for the last 20 of 75 entries - second highest total in a century of Transacts - marks the climax of mainland activity and features boats owned by world business leaders and sailed by, as one crew member once said, ‘the best talent money can buy.’

The crew lists of professional sailors read like an all-star team from the Olympic Games, the America's Cup and the Volvo Ocean Race combined.

Plattner, whose SAP is the planet's largest producer of business software, will have three-time America's Cup winner Russell Coutts, among others, on his German entry, the maxZ86 Morning Glory.

Pittman, a national health care entrepreneur with a home in La Jolla, has Ken Read, navigator Mark Rudiger and Dave Ullman on his 90-foot Genuine Risk.

Both are seeking Disney's record of 7 days 11 hours 41 minutes 27 seconds set in 1999 and will contest the man himself for first-to-finish honors as, at 75, he sails his 15th and final Transpac on his own new maxZ86, his fourth Pyewacket.

Disney's crew is more a group of long time regulars but includes Robbie Haines, who along with Coutts won a gold medal in the 1984 Olympic sailing in Long Beach.

Analysts believe if these boats find conditions similar to 1999, they'll finish a full day ahead in six and a half days.

In a broader perspective, Bill Lee, whose design genius revolutionized Transpac in the 70s, said, ‘The original record [in 1906] was 12 days and 10 hours. This year three boats will be trying to cut that time in half.’

Dark horses in Division I for the Barn Door trophy for fastest elapsed time include Windquest, an older version maxZ86 with water ballast instead of canting keel technology, skippered by Doug DeVos of the Amway founding family, and Magnitude 80, owned and skippered by local hope Doug Baker.

John Bertrand, a silver medallist behind Coutts in the Finn class in '84, is one of Windquest's watch captains, along with John Kolius and Gordon Maguire.

‘What we need is for those guys to be playing with each other and we doing our own thing,’ Bertrand said. ‘We've raced against these guys before in the Newport-Bermuda race [last year]. Windquest was ahead of Pyewacket and even with Morning Glory with a day to go before they took off.’

The alternative to Barn Door line honors is the King Kalakaua Trophy for first overall on corrected handicap time, equally coveted by the rest of the fleet. Philippe Kahn, the Santa Cruz and Hawaii-based software giant who developed the camera phone, is shooting for that with a new Transpac 52 after winning the Barn Door with a larger Pegasus in 2001 and '03.

The ‘scratch’ boats - Morning Glory and Pyewacket - are giving Genuine Risk only 23 seconds for the race but will owe Pegasus more than two days' time when they reach Hawaii (time allowances on list below).

An even stronger bid for the Kalakaua is expected from the 77-foot Scout Spirit, formerly the super maxi sled Zephyrus V now owned by the Newport Sea Base in Southern California. Scout Sprit, chartered by skipper Bill Turpin, gets more than 32 hours from the top raters.