Lexus Newport to Ensenada race

by Rich Roberts on 27 Apr 2006 It's billed as 'the world's largest international yacht race,' this 59th Lexus Newport to Ensenada offshore adventure starting Friday. As of Wednesday, there were 457 entries, and every one of the mad assortment has its own reasons for doing it.

Doug Baker wants a record for his high-tech ocean racer, Magnitude 80, while Lou Comyns, 79, and Vic Stern, 83, look to extend their participation to 51 and 44 races, respectively.

Dennis Conner, enjoying the post-America's Cup phase of his legendary career these days, is sailing wooden boats older than himself---still to win, of course, but also for the fun of it. This time Conner, 63, has chartered Kelpie, an 82-foot schooner, for a 125-nautical mile test drive in the Ancient Mariner class with other classic wooden boats, such as Paul Scripps' elegant Miramar. He may buy the boat if he likes it.

Others will be sailing boats as small as 24 feet, some with two hulls (catamarans) and some with three (trimarans) but most with only one (monohulls).

The 23 classes of boats will start at 10-minute intervals beginning at noon. There is no prize money but there are more than 150 trophies. One of the most coveted---the brass 'Spittoon'---will be awarded to the last boat to finish before the deadline of 11 a.m. Sunday. It's often a highlight of the race to watch boats maneuver for that one at the finish line.

About a third of the starters will be competing on the honor system in Cruising classes, which means they will be able to use engine propulsion overnight between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. but not for more than 12 hours in the entire race and only if they count each start-up as 30 minutes and record it in their logs.

Everybody else must sail the whole way because it is, after all, a sailboat race.

The race record for monohulls is 10 hours 44 minutes 54 seconds set by Roy Disney's third Pyewacket, a Reichel/Pugh 77, in 2003. The record for multihulls is 6 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds set in 1998 by Steve Fossett's 60-foot Stars & Stripes catamaran---still the only boat to finish in Baja California before sundown in one of the race's windiest years.

Baker's Magnitude 80 from Long Beach is gunning for the monohull record, along with Doug DeVos' maxZ86 Windquest from Michigan and Disney's former maxZ86 Pyewacket, which he donated to the Orange Coast College of Sailing and Seamanship and will be co-skippered by director Brad Avery and boat manager Keith Kilpatrick.

Those were three of the five boats that followed Hasso Plattner's maxZ86 Morning Glory across the line in record time in last summer's Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii. Magnitude 80 finished less than three hours ahead of Windquest and 8 1/2 hours behind Pyewacket. But this time Baker is worried more about Windquest, although for handicap purposes Pyewacket is rated the fastest boat (minus 225 seconds per mile) in the race despite being modified with less ballast and sail area and sailing with a mostly amateur crew.

Even the two hottest multihulls, Texan H.L. Enloe's 60-foot Loe Real and Bill Gibbs's 52-foot Afterburner, are rated only minus-177 and minus-151, respectively, while Windquest is minus-183 and Magnitude 80 is minus-165.

Baker held the record with a smaller Magnitude in 2002 and hopes to get it back.

'We'd love to,' he said. 'That's the goal. We have some good competition. Windquest will be formidable. Pyewacket is depowered a bit, and they don't have the same folks that Roy had, but it's still very fast.'

Magnitude 80 has already won the two most recent races to Mexico---Newport to Cabo San Lucas and San Diego to Puerto Vallarta---and beat Windquest in the former.

Windquest's boat manager, Tom Gieser, said, 'Magnitude's the boat to beat.'

But Baker said, 'Ensenada always boils down to that last 30 miles. Once you enter Todos Santos Bay, invariably it's light air and you just have to worry your way in there. You have to get the right wind and the right wind direction and finish with some kind of breeze.'

Baker also recognizes that 'a lot of the boats just go for the fun of it.'

Those would include Comyns' Cal 40, Ahsante, and Stern's venerable catamaran, Imi Loa, although it wasn't always the case. Imi Loa once was a power in the Ocean Racing Catamaran Association that Stern continues to serve as secretary, treasurer and CFO.

'We've always managed to get there,' he said. 'I won our [ORCA] class three times on corrected time, in '64, '65 and '75. There are many more multihulls now, and they’re much faster. Imi Loa is in the middle of the fleet. I don't expect to win the race on elapsed time anymore.'

Stern, whose 83rd birthday is two days before the start, sailed his first Ensenada race in 1963 and hasn't missed one since---all on the same boat. His best memory is from 1975.

'It started out with a nice big breeze and I just had the genoa [headsail] up as we hit the line at 11 knots. Then we put up the spinnaker and accelerated to 23, the spin blew out after five minutes, and we put up another one and by the time we got down to the Coronado Islands we were five miles in front of the whole fleet.

'Then out of the pack came [two-time Transpac winner] Ragtime, and as the wind dropped she overtook us and finished a half-hour ahead of us, but we were second in the harbor. No disgrace to be beaten by Ragtime.'

One of Stern's crew members---Alan Burg of Fawnskin, Calif.---has been with him for most of his run.

'I picked him off a dock at Ensenada as a teenager in '64 to bring the boat back and he became a regular crew. Now he's a grandfather.'

Stern and Comyns both live in Long Beach.

'I've done 50 [races to Ensenada], but not on the same boat,' Comyns said. 'Vic's claim to fame is he's done all of them on the same boat. I've taken the Cal 40 since 1965.'

Comyns said one of his crew, Jerry Wilburn of Cypress, has been with him for '25 or 30' of the races.

'The rest of my crew over the years basically died,' Comyns said.

Baker, Stern and Comyns didn't make the first race in 1948, when winds were so fierce that only 65 of 117 starters finished. But they were among the record number of 675 entries in 1983, and they shared the agony of 1996 when winds were so light that only 179 of 446 starters were able to finish under sail.

Ideal sailing is never guaranteed, but almost everybody has a chance to win. In the windy 1998 and 2002 races, Ernie Minney’s 53-foot, 68-year-old wooden schooner Samarang from Newport Beach---'not a racing boat at all,' he said---won the overall prize for corrected time.

The starting area is just outside the entrance to Newport Bay. The starts may be viewed from headlands south of the area.