Counting Down to the Start Weekend

With three months still remaining until race time, the 60 current entries in the 42nd Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii are already maneuvering in their minds for position on crowded starting lines.

The three staggered starts off the Palos Verdes peninsula July 1, 4 and 6 will present a challenge to find clear air and a fast lane to the west end of Santa Catalina Island, 22 1/2 miles southwest and the only mark of the 2,225-nautical mile course. The race to Diamond Head looks to be a match between Philippe Kahn’s defending Barn Door champion, Pegasus 77, and Roy E. Disney’s record holder, Pyewacket, but first they’ll have to shake off up to a dozen other of the largest boats who will offer them no special privileges on the starting line.

Typical of most competitors, Craig Reynolds of Balboa, Calif. is already excited. For him and several others, the race is a family affair. One of his crew members will be his son Carson, 19, a member of the Orange Coast College sailing team who will experience his first Transpac.

Reynolds, 50, has done only one other Transpac himself, sailing the same Olson 40 called Bolt to fifth place in Division 4 in 1999. But he got the bug much earlier from his grandparents, Charles and Verna Reynolds, who sailed the 63-foot cutter Wetona with less distinction in 1928.

Reynolds said. “It was a gentleman’s game in those days and my grandfather had some professional guys running the boat. They were using RDF [radio direction finder navigation], and their celestial sights were so bad that they were parallel to the islands and had to turn to come in. My grandmother said she was terrified the whole way.”

Bolt and the other boats in Divisions 3 and 4 will enjoy a special holiday start on the Fourth of July. “I always wanted to go,” Reynolds said. “I spent five years getting ready to go in ’99, doing a succession of offshore races leading up to it. So now my son Carson is going. I’m not sure he has an appreciation for what a big deal it is. He’s a ranked match racer and has done a couple of [Newport-to-] Ensenada races and went to New Zealand to do match racing, but I tell him, ‘You don’t understand. This is Transpac. There’s nothing else like it.’ “

Transpac’s board of directors has endorsed US SAILING’s modified Rule 5.02.5 of the Special Regulations governing offshore and oceanic racing, which parallels a rule that Transpac already had in place.

The new rule requires that crew members on deck between sunset and sunrise shall wear harnesses and personal flotation devices (PFDs). The rule doesn’t require that the harnesses by connected—a key point in divided opinion among US SAILING members surveyed.

the last Safety at Sea seminar before the race—required of 30 per cent of the crew within the last five years—is scheduled June 28 at the Orange Coast College of Sailing and Seamanship in Newport Beach. The most recent one in March drew a full house of 126 people, most of them Transpac participants.

The final entry deadline is May 23 and the current line up breaks down into 41 in the racing divisions, nine Cal 40s in their own class and 10 in the Aloha class. The smallest boat entered at this point is Starbuck, a Dutch-built Black Soo 31.