Rosebud wins King Kalakaua Trophy

by Rich Roberts on 27 Jul 2005 Pegasus finished at 11:14 p.m. HST Monday night and Rosebud followed at 2:25 a.m. Tuesday with 39 minutes to spare on the 3 hours 50 minutes Pegasus owed her in corrected handicap time as an older generation member of the TP 52 class.

‘I didn't know if we'd won until we crossed the finish line,’ Sturgeon said. ‘We didn't know when [Pegasus] finished. We were blasting all out up to 23 knots off Molokai. The winds were over 25 with gusts to 30.’

So Transpac's big winners duplicated last year's Newport-Bermuda Race when Hasso Plattner's maxZ86 Morning Glory was first to finish in record time, as it won the Barn Door here, and Rosebud won overall---the latter a rare double in America's premier ocean races believed to be last achieved by Dorade in the 1930s.

Rosebud, whose home port is Santa Cruz, Calif., said the contest ‘was for the most part like leapfrog,’ although he thought the daily position reports were often misleading.

‘You have to think of the angles,’ he said. ‘All the way you're trying to beat somebody you can't even see.’

Kahn, who switched to a TP 52 after winning the Barn Door with a bigger boat the last two years, said, ‘It was a tough race from a competition standpoint when you don't know who wins [at the end]. But these boats are fun to sail. It's more of a sailing challenge.

‘The handicapping is tricky. We're all right with it, but to put [almost] four hours on an almost identical boat is difficult.’

Both boats spent the last few days before their start in Long Beach's Rainbow Harbor, the new mainland home for Transpac.

Kahn told a Transpac official, ‘The sendoff in Long Beach was fantastic. You guys ought to start the race right off Long Beach.’

For years the race has started 13 miles away off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, offshore from Donald Trump's golf course reconstruction project.