Newport to Ensenada Race With ‘Favonius 2’
Greg Dorn’s San Francisco Yacht Club-flagged Favonius 2 (Transpac 52) raced the 77th Newport to Ensenada Race on Friday. We used the race as another training session for the 2025 Transpac coming up in July.
Conditions were fairly mellow but consistent this year. For our noon start in the Maxi class, we had overcast skies, which slowly burned off to a late afternoon sun and a spectacular sunset. Winds for the majority of the race were 8-12 knots. The top teams all navigated slightly east of rhumb line this year for best routing. We sailed within 2–3 miles of Mission Bay and Point Loma, and the sunset inside the Coronado Islands was spectacular.
Our main competitors Zephyrus (R/P 77) and Fast Exit II (Ker 52) did a great job in the reaching conditions. At 9 p.m. in the darkness south of Rosarito, they had extended to a 5–7-mile lead on us. We were in a strong third for line honors with a half-dozen boats within five miles of our transom.
Just as our navigator Sylvian Barrielle predicted, we were lifted at 10 p.m., jibed onto the port-tack header, and lined up perfectly for the finish line 21 miles away. Zephyrus and Fast Exit barely slowed down on final approach to Ensenada, and both finished around midnight–12:30 a.m. The nighttime wind gods (unsurprisingly) wouldn’t let us pass through so smoothly. We had a few starts and stops inside the last 10 miles to finish third on line honors at 3:05 a.m.
Quick high-fives and cleanup followed, and then it was a skeleton shift on deck as we motorsailed right back to San Diego. An early Saturday afternoon lunch at SDYC was welcomed as we debriefed the race and discussed further improvements for the Favonius 2 crew and yacht. Our next race is the SoCal 300 at the end of May.
Beyond the racing there are the natural wonders captured while sailing south:
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