Afterburner is a 52' catamaran owned by Bill Gibbs and based out of Ventura, Ca. After battling the steep part of the learning curve for awhile, they are getting the boat to sail pretty fast these days. Few things are more fun than reading first hand stories about interesting races, and here is one from Bill himself - Ed

I enjoy writing a long, GPS track based, report to share with friends/sailors/crew outside our local ORCA group. Hence the excessive detail . Only takes a click to delete :-) Otherwise, here it is for your enjoyment. -------------------

The Tri-Point Race is the last and shortest of our local Land Rover"Island" Series, which includes the Hardway and the Milt Ingram races. All involve Anacapa Island as a mark. Kind of hard to miss. Anacapa is one of our local Channel Islands, a small one. Its neighbors, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, are huge by comparison. Anacapa is long (~ 4.3 miles mostly E-W), skinny, broken into three sections by narrow gaps, has a lighthouse and a famous arch at the east end, and sports a small mountain with a pelican refuge at it's west end. The backside can be a nightmare to racers due to variable wind shadows. And Santa Cruz, 7.5 miles west, can cast its own long shadow when the wind pipes up. The local "normal" winds are westerly. The Tri-Point is the only local race leaving Anacapa to starboard, making the backside the upwind leg for extra fun. One of its oddities is that in a W wind, there is no downwind leg. Leg 1 is a beam reach (5.1 miles) to oil rig Gina, leg 2 a close reach (7.2 miles), leg 3 the weather leg (the backside of Anacapa, 5 miles), leg 4 a broad reach to the finish (17 miles).

My last two Tri-Point races have been less than stellar performances. Both were in light winds. Both times I tacked in close for the final island rounding, only to get severely headed by light confused winds in close to the west tip of the island. Both times I struggled around the island, watching boats that had stayed out, sail past me. Last year a local monohull, Quantum (Andrews 56) beat Afterburner on elapsed time. I got a humbling education on light air weather legs. This year will be different!

Preparation - We sail the week before, and watch the winds daily. The whole week is very similar. We should have 8 knots W at the start. It should build up to 12 later in the afternoon. We arrive early and re-rig our bowsprit for the screecher reaching we'll be doing. Then it's out to the start line.

Start - We get out to the start line about 25 minutes before our start (the fifth start). We have a small jib up and are ready to unfurl our screecher at the beam reach start. Odd, it's already blowing 10-12, and bit more northerly then we expected. 5 minutes before our start it's built to 12-14, just out of our screecher range. So we quickly hank on the #1 jib. The honk at 11:20 is our start (the last), we hit the line doing 16 knots and we're off for Gina. Spectators commented on the 2 fast cats throwing up rooster tails through the start line, us and the Roland 36 2-of-10, sailed by Billy Bob Boyer.

Leg 1 (182 degrees true) - The wind seems to be building further, and on short races I'm concerned with losing time with sail changes. We stick with the small jib. Our competition is 2-of-10. They start a little ahead and to leeward, we pass high, bear off for the mark, she ends up high and behind us. We could have carried a bit more sail, but we're set up for the next leg nicely, and average 17 knots for the leg. We pass all but the top monos.

Leg 2 (212 degrees true) - Behind the rig is a small lee, and a couple of boats fishing. Then we're through (11:37), and heading up for the island. Winds have kept building and its hull flying time. We've also got some waves running (4'?) which works to our advantage over the smaller 2-of-10 and we start making time on them, as we continue to hull fly and average 17 knots (16-20). We must have looked good, as a leading mono (The Santa Cruz 50 Lina) gave us a full crew cheer as we passed them to leeward. Winds look stronger in front of Anacapa and we depower a bit by traveling down. Then we're into the east lee of the island (12:03).

Leg3 (244 degrees, 271 degrees, 299 degrees, the 3 island sections) - Unlike light air years where this first lee can be a giant hole, there's wind. Fluky, shifty, gusty, but wind none-the-less. As we head up to close hauled, we surprise some fishermen by flying a hull just off their stern. We settle in on a good course doing 9-14 knots parallel to the first island section. Most excellent! The wind settles down and drops, as does our speed. We swap in the #1 jib for a bit more power (12:16). We get our speed up in the 12 range and 2-of-10 is a small spot miles behind us. Shifty and dying winds make it tough to call the lay line for the island's west end, so we over stand a bit and tack (12:35). And sail smack into the Santa Cruz wind shadow, 7 miles to weather of us. Now we're averaging 3 knots. Over standing a bit at 12 knots is a lot less painful than at 3 knots. Swirling winds have us trimming all over the place. No worries, as 2-of-10 will have the same problems, right? They are getting bigger fast, as we creep along. They see us parked, tack in to the surf line and find a breeze coming down the back of Anacapa's little mountain. I can see how he'll sail past us on the inside if we don't get wind. We don't get wind. I can't repeat the words I used. We finally feel a slight breeze from a single direction, speeding up to 5 knots. But 2-of-10 has rounded the island, hit the wind line and gone to warp drive. We continue to crawl, then accelerate, then hit the wind line ourselves (12:54). 2-of-10 is a distant spot miles ahead as we accelerate to 20+ in the full wind.

Leg 4 (32 degrees true) - Wind, waves, whitecaps, in plenty, and a bad guy to catch (just a figure of speech). We are on course flying/skimming the windward hull, averaging 21 knots (hit a peak of 24). I didn't take the opportunity to put in a reef while drifting, not knowing what the wind would be. Now I wish I had, but there isn't time. We've got the main traveled down and twisted off. The extra sail area is a bear as Afterburner goes from heavy lee helm to heavy weather helm with each gust and wave, only balanced in the middle somewhere. We're trimming the main constantly to keep the hull flying as we broad reach with the #1 jib. On the whole we're moving fast and catching 2-of-10, slowly. We pass them to weather about half way down the leg. Ed describes our lee hull throwing spray half way up our main. We do have a few mishaps along the way. The leeward cockpit fills from spray faster than the scuppers can empty, floating sheets out the scuppers (effectively towing warps and further blocking the scuppers) on several occasions. A detwister shackle exploded. Nothing major. The crew held up well. Don cranking on the main, Rick trimming the jib, Corey navigating, Vincent fixing loose halyards and sheets, and Marcie spotting our hull altitude. In bouncy fast hull flying conditions, I like a spotter amidships, using hand signs to show me our hull distance out of the water. Marcie supplemented her hand signs with a cry of "flying!" as we'd lift off. Her cry's pitch gave a good indication as to how high we were, as it went higher along with the hull :-)

Finish - The finish is at the end of the first channel in Ventura Harbor. We hit the harbor mouth doing 19.5 knots, while I'm calling for more main. Don calmly points out that this might be inappropriate inside the harbor. The wind diminishes inside, our speed falls to 15 and we finish doing 12 (13:44:40). Unfortunately there is no race committee. We had been unable to raise them by VHF for the last hour, but had hoped they could hear us. In reality we surprised them. We finally resorted to a cell phone and interrupted their lunch telling them of our arrival and finish. 2-of-10 finished 3 minutes later.

Awards - Sunday PBYC had a BBQ lunch with awards. No Name (Reynolds 21) took first, No Regrets (F28R) second, 2-of-10 third, Afterburner forth, Indefatigable (F31) fifth, and Lightwave (Reynolds 21) sixth. Our nemesis Quantum from last year finished over an hour behind us. Afterburner set a new course record of 2:24:40, shaving an hour off the old one. The prior record was 3:41:28 by Tom Roland on Warp 10, a Roland 36 (sistership of 2-of-10) in 1999. Both 2-of-10 and Afterburner smashed it by about 1.25 hours.

08/29/2002