Lending Club 2 Will Go It Alone
The Transpac lost one of its most high-profile entries today, as Lending Club 2‘s co-skippers, Renaud Laplanche and Ryan Breymaier, have decided to preempt their scheduled Saturday start and leave at noon today, independently, in order to take advantage of favorable winds being generated by a low pressure system.
The change of plans means that the 105-ft maxi tri will be gunning for the outright Los Angeles-to-Hawaii record set in 2005 by Frenchman Olivier de Kersauson and crew aboard the 110-foot trimaran Geronimo (4d, 19h, 31m, 37s), which is 14 hours faster than the Transpac race record set in 1997 by the 86-ft maxi cat Explorer (5d, 9h, 20m).
"For the past week Renaud and Ryan, along with navigator Boris Herrmann, have been carefully watching the weather," writes Nicola Breymaier, "and concluded the weather window for the race start will not offer the right conditions for a fast race. At the same time they noted a low pressure system offering ideal conditions for an extremely fast crossing if the boat were to leave immediately."
She reminds us that Laplanche and her husband narrowly missed breaking the race record aboard a different boat (32 feet shorter) during the 2013 Transpac, at least partly due to having to dodge "debris as large as tree trunks and telephone poles," some of which damaged one of the boat’s daggerboards.
Since March, when Laplanche and Breymaier chartered the monstrous tri — whose mast is 140 feet high! — they’ve broken both the Cowes (GBR)-to-Dinard (FRA) and Newport-to-Bermuda records. Thanks to the tri’s Yellowbrick tracker, you can follow their progress toward Hawaii here.
For a look at how the monster tri moves offshore, check out this video clip from the Cowes-Dinard sprint. Courtesy LC Smith
Lending Club’s exit from the Transpac means the multihull division will be made up exclusively by Gunboats: Chim Chim, a 62-footer, and two 66-footers, Extreme H2O and Phaedo.
If news of Hawaii record attempts is giving you a sense of déjà vu, it may be because just last month another of the world’s fastest multihulls, the 60-ft foiling tri L’Hydroptère, attempted unsuccessfully to break the outright L.A.-Honolulu record.