Lending Club 2’s Astonishing Feat

Can a sailboat really cross the 2,215 miles from Los Angeles to Honolulu in less than four days? Apparently so! The 105-ft trimaran Lending Club 2 arrived at the Transpac finish line off Diamond Head at 5:44 a.m. local time yesterday recording an elapsed time of 3 days, 18 hours, 0 minutes, and 9 seconds. "Subject to ratification from the World Sailing Speed Record Council, we’ve just knocked a full 24 hours off the previous record!" the team posted on their Facebook page.

"I think it was the right call to leave early," said co-skipper and charterer Renaud Laplanche of San Francisco. "If we had left with everybody else in the Transpac Race we probably wouldn’t have beaten the record. It’s a good example of when you can’t win the game, change the rules."

Covering an average of 590 miles per day, the big tri was sailing at 30+ knots of boatspeed whenever we checked in on the tracker. Their theoretical average speed was just under 25 knots. You can still see the track at https://my.yb.tl/lendingclub2.

Renaud and co-skipper Ryan Breymaier have now successfully completed the trio of record attempts they’d planned when they chartered the boat earlier this year — the other two being a crossing of the English Channel from Cowes to Dinard in March and Newport to Bermuda in April.