Last Transpac Finisher Arrives

With yesterday’s arrival of the final finisher and today’s awards celebration, the 48th Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu slides into the history books.

We’ve already told you that the Santa Cruz 37 Celerity finished first, the 100-ft Wild Oats XI scored the fastest elapsed time, Rio100 won the Barn Door Trophy, and the SC70 Grand Illusion won on corrected time overall. But somebody’s got to be DFL. That dubious honor goes to Yasuto Fuda’s Feet 30 Fortissimo II, which took more than 17 days to finish the course. "The small Italian-built sportboat with a crew of four intrepid sailors from Japan persevered through some tough conditions," wrote Dobbs Davis, the race’s media manager. We’ll have more on all of the above in our two Transpac features in the August and September issues of Latitude 38.

One element in the race the entries all had in common was trash. Not trash generated by the sailors, but trash sighted and sometimes picked up by the sailors. Wild Oats’ Roy Pat Disney, a veteran of 20 Transpacs, described encountering "at least three bits of junk every minute — timber, fishing nets, plastic, poles that have broken away from commercial fishing nets. You name it, and it’s probably here."

During the race, the crew of John Sangmeister, Dave Hood and Pete Hambrick’s SC70 OEX developed an inventive way of tracking trash: "As we sail to Honolulu, we are regularly hitting our Man Overboard Button at the helm station to plot a new piece of debris. Last night we received a warning broadcast from the SC50 Adrenalin of a large submerged object spotted in the vicinity. Later that evening, we were forced to back down after hooking some fishing net on our keel that couldn’t be cut with the kelp cutter."

For more on the Transpac, see www.transpacyc.com.