Wild Ride

Reading about pretty intense sailing is almost always interesting. When it is written by a world-class sailor on a state of the art boat, it's as good as it gets. We knew there were a number of excellent boats with a number of excellent sailors in the Coastal Cup (Frisco to Catalina Island, 360 miles) and we wanted to hear the stories, knowing that it blew hard the first night (upper 30's and big waves).

It's not easy describing what it was like onboard in those conditions, but Bruce nelson, onboard the TP 52 Yassou of his design did an excellent job. Big props to Bruce for writing this for us. Enjoy.

We had a nice start and were having a good race running with Beau Geste down the outside, with Alta Vita to leeward inside and behind, up until sundown Saturday - then things started to get pretty wild. The NW breeze steadily built all day to a solid 25-30 kts, then began gusting 35-38 kts, but the waves seemed to just stack up in height without stretching in length. As the breeze increased we became steadily faster than the waves at 17-21 kts boat speed, and a lot faster than the waves in the hard gusts which left the helmsmen little choice but to spear straight through the backs of the waves ahead at serious pace, often over 25 kts with LOTS of water flying everywhere - I was surprised the reaching strut did not snap off. Porpoising along this way for hours was pretty wet and got kind of tedious after the initial thrill wore off, and when we did eventually broach in a hard gust the masthead A-sail would pin the boat down as it flogged violently for several minutes. A few times we were able to pull the bow down by trimming the staysail hard and sail out of the broach, but in the bigger gusts we were forced to blow the halyard and haul the damn thing in over the boom and start over ... not fast and very tiring, we lost miles each time this happened.

By 0400 hrs Sunday we made it down to San Miguel Island and had to decide how to play the second half of the race. Our early game plan, based on our wx and routing info, suggested staying left and fairly close to San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands to take advantage of the left shift approaching Catalina, while being careful to avoid the lee of Santa Cruz Island and the light air trap of the Santa Barbara Channel. As we passed by Santa Rosa with 29 kts of wind, the plan was looking good ... but then the Eddy got us, and we ground to a rapid halt. We gybed back to starboard and headed South trying to get back into the fresh NW breeze, but we just didn't go anywhere. About 4 hours later, we spotted Alta Vita about 3 miles South of us, and they didn't have any wind either. The two of us drifted the remaining 40 miles to Catalina - we played the left, they played the right, and they crossed less than a half-mile ahead at the finish. I suppose the better move was to hold starboard pole all the way to the Catalina layline, or beyond ... I guess that's what Pegasus did, and assume that's what Beau Geste and Gone with the Wind did - but I really don't know exactly what happened out there. All I do know was that, as crewmember Dave Gruver aptly summarized, we were all useless as a box of rocks for the next two days!

Bruce

Ps - by the way, Gone with the Wind has our keel and rudder designs - need to find some small consolation after getting beat up like that!