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Lending Club 2’s Astonishing Feat

The Lending Club 2 crew picked their ideal weather window and sailed past Point Fermin in San Pedro to start their L.A.-Honolulu record attempt on Wednesday.

© 2015 Jeremy Leonard / Sail Revolution

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."

The jubilant crew of Lending Club 2 arrived at Oahu on Sunday morning.

Lending Club 2
©Latitude 38 Media, LLC

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.

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An aerial view of Saturday’s start off San Pedro. © Sharon Green / Ultimate Sailing A week into this 48th edition of Transpac, the story lines continue to grow weirder and more spectacular.