Calif. Offshore Race Week Recap

Racers who competed in every leg of the second annual California Offshore Race Week got exactly what the brochure advertised: 600 miles of offshore racing down the California coast encountering everything from light air to champagne conditions to heavy-air downwind sailing. Combining the efforts of five yacht clubs in four ports, CORW appears to be the shot in the arm that the nearly dead Coastal Cup needed to survive.

After three legs of competition, it was a clean sweep of the podium for Santa Cruz Yachts, with a 50, a 52 and a 70 dominating the overall standings. Current J/70 world champion Joel Ronning’s SC70 Catapult landed just one point clear of Dave MacEwen’s SC52 Lucky Duck and John Shulze’s SC50 Horizon to claim overall honors. Lucky Duck claimed second in a tiebreaker over Horizon.

CORW encompasses three very different offshore legs, each one progressively longer than the last. On Saturday, May 27, a healthy fleet of 38 yachts took on the 88-mile Spinnaker Cup from San Francisco Bay to Monterey. The fleet beat out the Gate before reaching down the coast and eventually setting spinnakers for the long downwind slide to Monterey. First to finish was Bill Lee’s modified and re-fit 68-ft sled Merlin, which showed plenty of pace with her bigger rig and heavier TP52 keel, to finish in 9 hours, 34 minutes, 59 seconds. Edward Marez’s SC70 Buona Sera and Ronning’s Catapult finished just minutes behind Merlin, but corrected out far ahead to claim first and second in division. Other division winners included Howard Turner’s J/111 Symmetry, Shulze’s Horizon and Rodney Pimentel’s Cal 40 Azure.

After a day to recuperate in Monterey, 16 teams departed on the Coastal Cup,  204 miles down the coast to Santa Barbara. A race renowned for its gear-busting, heavy-air downwind conditions, this year’s race delivered in a big way. Once out of Monterey Bay and into the northwesterly pressure offshore, the fleet shot off like a rocket down the BIg Sur coast with many posting high numbers in nuking breeze and steep seas. The breeze shut down in the early morning hours of Tuesday, giving a big advantage to the fastest boats, notably Ronning and crew, who claimed line honors, completing the course in just 14 hours, 44 minutes, 21 seconds. One of the biggest stories of the Coastal Cup leg was that of the Moore 24 Snafu’s dismasting and the eventual Coast Guard rescue of both crewmembers, which we wrote about last Wednesday.

After another day to recuperate in Santa Barbara, the SoCal 300, now in its third running, drew 27 boats for light-air sailing off Santa Barbara before a nuking run down the Channel Islands and a lighter finish off San Diego. Making her offshore debut, Frank Slootman’s new Pac52 Invisible Hand showed impressive pace in a wide range of conditions to claim monohull line honors, the Division A win and the overall win. The other big winner was H.L. Enloe’s ORMA 60 trimaran Mighty Merloe, which led the fleet around the course to take an hour off her own course record from last year, finishing the 240 miles in 22 hours, 9 minutes, 18 seconds.

Full results can be found here, and we’ll have more in-depth coverage in the July issue of Latitude 38.