Damaged Rio100 Claims Barn Door
Despite limping along with a broken port rudder, Manouch Moshayedi’s Bakewell-White Rio100 claimed Barn Door honors in the Transpac, finishing on Thursday before dawn. The Barn Door Trophy is awarded to the first monohull to finish without power assistance, therefore Comanche is not eligible. Rio’s elapsed time was 6 days, 17 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds. This is the second Barn Door in a row for Rio. Aboard as strategist was the great Dutch sailor Bouwe Bekking.
Rio’s performance on starboard jibe was deeply affected by the damage. Floating debris took out the rudder on July 9, resulting in a hole in the hull. The crew cut a plastic panel from a spare water tank, fashioned a patch, and screwed and glued it into place with additional stabilization from support rods. The repair held, and the team finished with the emergency rudder during the final run to the finish.
Frank Slootman’s Pac52 Invisible Hand finished around 7 the same morning. Sailing with the Hand was Kiwi rock star Gavin Brady, one of the developers of the new class, which is based on the TP52. "This new generation of Pac52s are getting back to the original offshore/inshore design concept," Brady said. "We were fast, but I told the guys we had another 10 miles a day we could squeeze out of the performance if we were more aggressive jibing on shifts." Brady didn’t believe they had a chance to catch Rio after the bigger boat was damaged. "We knew they were going to jibe over to port and then ramp back up to their normal speeds." The Hand is currently leading on corrected time.
Several more boats have finished, with the majority still on the course and duking it out. Checking the tracker, we see that Bill Lee’s 68-ft Merlin will likely be the next finisher. As of this morning, they were less than 60 miles from the Diamond Head finish line. Not far behind and to the north is Roy Disney’s Andrews 68 Pyewacket. We’ll have much more in the August issue of Latitude 38; in the meantime, follow along at 2017.transpacyc.com.