Photos of the DayAugust 6 - Santa Barbara to King Harbor In a couple of hours, we'll be taking off on the 81-mile race from Santa Barbara to King Harbor. As you can see from the photo of some of the gals on our crew, we've been assigned the letter 'O' - or maybe it's a zero, God forbid - to identify ourselves to the race committee. Actually, it's all our fault for not having racing numbers on our sails. Anyway, we're told that this year's fleet
is 140, a big jump from last year's group of 120. We think that's
great, because this is a terrific race - as long as the wind
holds, which it has the last two years. We may change our mind
if we're slopping around off Pt. Dume 18 hours from now. Alchemy at the Wednesday night race Photos Latitude/Richard In fact, Dick Compton's Andrews 77 Alchemy was sporting a big blotch of white near the bow where they apparently had some kind of recent collision with a J/24. Much worse, we hear, is the skipper of the boat who was hit in the head with a boom during a jibe a week or two ago, and who hasn't yet come out of a coma. Our prayers are with this sailor. We'll try to get more on the story. In any event, we hope the best of health and the best of sailing to everyone in today's event. |
No, Not Larry EllisonAugust 6 - The Sailing World In the August issue of Latitude, we have a feature on a new 292-ft foot 'clipper ship' being completed in Europe for a Northern California owner. As we noted in the article, the builder would only let us use the photos if we didn't identify the owner. Some readers have written in to guess that the "biggest clipper ship ever" was built for Larry Ellison. Well, that guess is absolutely incorrect. But stop guessing, because we're not going to say who it is - having already done so more than a year ago. |
The Problem with GovernmentAugust 6 - Midway Atolls A couple of weeks ago, a cruising boat
on her way from Fiji to the Pacific Northwest stopped at Midway
Atolls to resupply and break up the month-long trip. They were
charged $1 a foot for mooring and $2.25 a gallon for fuel. The
mooring fee seems slightly high, but the charge for gas is quite
reasonable. |