Coastal Cuppers Get It All

Robert Plant and John Shampain’s Hobie 33 Still Crazy looks to have crushed the rest of the Wednesday starters, and we’ve got to belive the Thursday starters as well, after finishing the Encinal YC’s Coastal Cup around 7 a.m. this morning.

"They were totally jazzed and said they had a great race," said Encinal YC’s Charles Hodgkins. "They may have first place."

Still Crazy‘s closest competition looks to be Steve Carroll’s Express 27 Tule Fog, which looks to have escaped the big Catalina Eddy that appears to have smothered the entire fleet. If the race’s tracker is accurate, all the boats between the western Channel Islands and Catalina are beating in a less-than-10-knot southeasterly. We can’t guarantee that, because there seems to have been some irregularites in the tracking system. For instance, four boats haven’t shown up at all on the tracker, and in some cases, the boats’ transponders have been polled at different intervals, some over two hours apart.

Hodgkins said that, so far, there have been three retirements. Douglas Storkovich’s Andrews 56 Delicate Balance dropped out with unspecified equipment failure, while Steve Stroub’s SC 37 Tiburon ran out of spinnakers, and Andy Costello’s J/125 Double Trouble suffered a broken rudder. Double Trouble navigator Jeff Thorpe elaborated:

"We were side by side with [Per Peterson’s Andrews 68] Alchemy about 40 miles off Monterey. We went by [Bob Barton’s Andrews 56] Cipango like they were standing still, while doing a consistent 22-24 knots of boatspeed in 30 knots of wind. We had just peeled to the 1.5 oz and the boat got really squirrelly and hard to drive. We wiped out and, when we looked over, we were left with a 12-inch nub of the rudder. The post was still there, the core and skins just snapped off."

With just that stub of a rudder, the storm jib and motor, the Double Trouble crew were able to fetch Monterey in 30 knots of breeze at 110 degrees true.

"We’re very fortunate we had that little sliver of rudder," Thorpe said. "If we’d gotten past Monterey, there’s no way we would have been able to get back upwind. We would have been dragging sheets and probably ended up at Port San Luis."

Stroub’s Tiburon was also having a great race when, after a short stretch, they were left with only a .5 oz kite to get them all the way down to Catalina. "The boat was lit up, and it was really fun to drive," said crewmember Rusty Canada. "We were sailing with the A5 in 25-30 knots with boatspeed in the low 20’s and never below 15. We had to peel from the A5 down to the A4 because the breeze went behind us. With the weight on the bow, we wiped out with both kites hoisted and full. We were able to get that one sorted, but a little while later, we wiped out again and ripped the A4, so we put the A5 back up. A little later we wiped out again and the spin sheet shackle blew off the clew. It’s too bad. We were having a great time — chewing up the Farr 40, right on our predicted track, even beating our numbers slightly. We missed out on the perfect race."