Five of seven crew racing on the Dehler 46 Favonius, including owner Greg Dorn, will set sail this week on their first West Coast to Hawaii race. The crew is competing in the 51st edition of the Transpacific Yacht Race (aka Transpac), a biennial ocean race organized by the Transpacific Yacht Club.
Race starts run in a delayed sequence from July 13-17, with the start line off Point Fermin in Long Beach and finish off Diamond Head in Honolulu.
Dorn has been optimizing the boat for inshore and offshore racing since he received delivery of her in May 2019, assisted by boat captain Ashley Perrin (San Rafael), a Transpac veteran.
“Favonius is a great boat with a very big rig and a relatively low SAD – sail area displacement ratio – so in essence, she’s very powered up,” Dorn, a Tiburon resident, explained. “We’ve really had to learn how to handle the boat – learning how to drive it, keep it balanced, and going fast.”
In addition to learning the boat, Dorn’s preparations have included extra work on the electronics and the water maker, as well as additional rigging to run different downwind sail sets.
“Ashley runs everything related to the logistics of the boat, safety, and everything in preparing for the trip – she’s been fabulous,” Dorn said. “Once we shove off, then our navigator Will Paxton (Bel Marin Keys), who has sailed numerous Transpac races, will be focused on an optimal course to the finish line.”
Unsurprisingly due to a year of uncertainty and pandemic impact, this year’s entries are down to some 40 boats following a record high of 85 in the race’s 50th anniversary edition in 2019. The race typically entertains at least 10 international entries but this year just one entry from Mexico makes up international representation.
“We would have been thrilled with 60, 50 is fine, 40…well, that’s where we are,” Jim Eddy III, commodore of the Transpacific Yacht Club, noted. “We wanted to continue with the race but it’s not a break even at this point. We are dipping into reserves to make it go and we are happy to do that as that is what the reserves are for, to keep it going regardless. While the social side may not be what is typically is, the ocean and the wind haven’t changed – the experience of that will be what it always is and should be great.”
While the team on the Beneteau 49 Knotty Boo, owned by Jason Holloway and co-skippered by Brent Crawford (Kentfield) are disappointed to be racing without three Danish friends they know through Knarr sailing due to COVID-related travel uncertainties, they’ve not missed a beat with their race training. Earlier in the season they raced the Islands Race and Newport to Ensenada Race.
“The Islands Race especially was great preparation as it uses the same starting line as Transpac and it takes you pretty far offshore so it’s a good sampling of what the race is like,” Crawford, who navigated super tankers on the route between the West Coast and Hawaii for many years, commented. “There are a lot of talented teams competing, and we’d like to win but if we don’t, we’ll still have a good time!”
Michael Moradzadeh, owner of the Santa Cruz 50 Oaxaca, cited multiple list-making as his necessary antidote to ensuring all boxes are checked for his 15th Pacific crossing. But once underway, those mental lists do disappear, he affirmed, to be replaced by a focus on living in the moment.
“The race is a great way to clear your head. It takes me about three days from land to reset to a mentally clear state where I am just focused on the boat. A big element of for me is the dynamic of working with the wonderful and varied people who I sail with and it’s really the small moments of how we accomplish this or that task – whether it’s reefing the sail or changing the spinnaker nicely or figuring out why every time you pump the water pump in the galley water comes out of the sink in the head,” he laughed.
Moradzadeh expects a highly competitive race in his division. “They’re people who we have seen before and whose performance we absolutely respect. Topping the list is Horizon who at first was our distant goal and now they are our fierce competitor which is exciting for us, and we hope for them as well.”
One of the larger boats in this year’s fleet is Artemis, the Botin 65 owned by Ray Paul (San Francisco) racing his first Transpac with a Marin-stacked crew including Hogan Beattie, Sonny Lopez, Dennis Rowedder, Jeff Wayne and Seadon Wijsen.
“I feel like we’re sailing the boat well,” Paul noted. “We’re in a class with four boats, we know who we are racing against and we’re competitive against those boats. Our favorite competitor is Peligroso – we’re close in speed, in some conditions we’re faster and vice versa but we’ve raced against her a lot this season and it’s always a great race for both of us.”
Info at https://transpacyc.com/.
Weather guru Peter Isler of Marine Weather University has provided the following report for Transpac sailors:
The crystal ball is starting to reveal details about the weather for Transpac 2021 and it is looking “interesting”. Although it has been a windy season along the California coast and the equatorial El Nino/La Nina situation is neutral, those climatological trends are not what racers should be looking at now. We only care about a little snapshot of weather — one to two weeks in mid to late July, focusing on the weather now and in the next two weeks, specifically the state of the North Pacific’s summertime feature — the semi stationary high-pressure area and how it will impact the winds on the route to Diamond Head, Hawaii.
With about a week before the start, the weather models are at the edge of their comfort zone, and they don’t all agree. But the high looks to be pretty far west and very oblong shaped, a circle stretched out east to west which creates a nice highway for the trade winds. At this point the trades looks like they will be a touch windier than average. That would mean a fast race. A big “X factor” is a tropical storm that one of the global models see spinning up off the Central American Pacific coast and trekking westward – affecting the wind field – especially the slower boats.
But no-one should be placing their bets yet on how the weather will pan out – as start date approaches the weather models will hopefully be in more agreement and the final decisions of what sails to bring and how to play the tactics will have more certain data to rely on.
