Emma Gets Ready to Send It

The biennial Mini Transat starts from La Rochelle, France on Sunday, and the Bay Area will have its adopted own, Emma Creighton among the 78 starters. Creighton, who doublehanded her all-carbon, high-tech Simon Rogers-designed prototype Mini Pocket Rocket in last year’s Pac Cup, will be joined by 32 other proto sailors for the solo crossing from La Rochelle to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, via Funchal, Madeira. Of course, a Mini Transat is hard enough on its own — 4,200 miles across the Pot au Noir with only a VHF radio and race-provided weather on a 21-ft boat with a massive sailplan. But being a French race, there are language and cultural barriers that crop up with everything from logistics to things as mundane as the race program, which listed her name as Emma "Freighting" at one point.

The latter may perhaps have been a happy accident, given that Creighton — much as we suspect every skipper in the race plans to do — will be "sending it" as fast as possible through the complex course that’s interrupted by two archipelagos — the Canary and Cape Verde Islands — before the sailors even reach the ITCZ. So Creighton, a native of Maine, will have her work cut out for her for what will probably be as long as a month aboard her 1,700-lb boat with its canting keel.

In the 34-year history of the Mini Transat, only two other American women have completed the race. Amy Boyer, who called the Bay Area home at the time, sailed the ’79 race in a Wilderness 21 after sailing in the ’78 Singlehanded TransPac. That year was the first, and to this day only, time an American has won the Mini Transat. Norton Smith, formerly of Mill Valley, sailed the Tom Wylie-designed American Express — the first water-ballasted Mini ever — to the honors a year after winning the same Singlehanded TransPac that Boyer sailed in.

You can follow Creighton’s progress to this point on her well-written blog, but once the race starts, it will be lights-out for media communications — the race rules strictly prohibit the use of any type of equipment that can communicate at a range suffcient for her to post updates. Thankfully, the race has a good website — as far as French-run races go, it probably has the best English translation — where you can find a tracker, updates and analysis.