Soap Opera in first - simply

by Rich Roberts on 26 Jul 2005 They bought their combination ham-single sideband radio on the Internet for $550, thoroughly grounded it with aluminum foil off the kitchen shelf and checked standard weather reports daily to see where the best winds would be.

‘We didn't try to be original,’ said Scott Self, who with Nigel Brown sailed his Hobie 33 Soap Opera to first place in Division V and among seven doublehanded boats in the Centennial Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii.

Oh, and their sails were green.

‘My favorite color,’ said Self, a soap manufacturer from Rockwall, Tex. ‘We didn't have any sail problems at all, and our radio worked better than some of the state-of-the-art stuff on the million-dollar big boats. All that carbon fiber causes problems.’

Their only problem was when their heavy duty aluminum tiller broke at the head of the rudder on the 13th and final night as they were about to enter the blustery Molokai Channel with their spinnaker up.

‘The boat went on its side, but the hatch was sealed, so we weren't going to sink,’ Self said.

They rigged their emergency wooden tiller in 30 minutes and were under way again, but without a spinnaker.

‘We knew we had won the division and doublehanded, so we went very conservative,’ Self said. ‘But we were still hitting 15 knots.’

Their elapsed time for the 2,225 nautical miles was 13 days 1 hour 10 minutes 35 seconds, an average speed of 7.1 knots.

Their watch system was four hours on and four hours . . . on. They finished with a plastic crate still full of food because ‘it was so rough we could eat only one meal a day,’ Self said. ‘One guy couldn't leave the helm and the other had to trim all the time.’

Sleep? ‘About one hour a day,’ Self said.

Self and Brown have been sailing together for 20 years so obviously are past becoming incompatible during two weeks on a small boat.

Brown said, ‘There's a real risk of that happening with some people, but Scott and I know what to expect from each other.’