Transpac Race: A Gunboat Tour to Hawaii

(July 14, 2015) – The first of four staggered starts got underway yesterday for the 48th edition of the LA-Honolulu Transpac Race, with 22 entries in Divisions 7 and 8 now on the 2225 nm course. The fleet has now fanned out, with 50 nm separating the high and low roads after approximately 200 nm of racing. For a video recap of day one, click here.

The final start on Saturday, July 18 will be for the fastest boats in the fleet, which was to include the 105-foot maxi trimaran Lending Club 2. However, as their aspiration is record breaking, a difficult weather forecast later in the week has them now tentatively leaving Wednesday (July 15), thus withdrawing from the Transpac Race.

With the departure of Lending Club, the multihull fleet becomes a Gunboat event with one 62-footer and two 66-footers. One of the teams that will be on the start line Saturday is the Gunboat 66 Extreme H2O, with watch captain Malcolm Park providing this update on PressureDrop.us:

“The owner has always held the vision that that his boat was to be a fast cruising boat. What has changed, since we picked up the boat in South Africa three years ago, is how to use advanced design, construction and ergonomics to improve the almost ten year old boat.

“The most significant design changes from a stock GB66 are the 4.3m deep “C” foils that provide nearly 4 tons of lift at 20 knots of boat speed, a generous sail plan that allows us to fly a hull in as little as 12 TWS, a rotating mast with a cross beam and longeron all built by Southern Spars that allow us to carry up to 8 tons of luff tension on our furling sails. Some of the ergonomic changes include a proper curved traveler mounted on the aft beam along with tiller steering.

“Our peak speed so far is just over 30 knots… we can sustain in the low 20’s in a flat sea state. However, the forward cockpit at speed is perhaps the wettest place I have been on a boat. We started with six drains in that little cockpit and now we are adding two more monster drains. On the Cabo Race, I was up there with 2-feet of water in that cockpit! The good news is that when you come off of watch, you can take a hot shower.

“As for rating the field, the multihull fleet has taken their rating out of the PHRF realm and we will be racing with VPP ratings generated by Harry Dunning using the Transpac wind Matrix. The ratings were generated using scale weights for the boats and supplied weight declarations for the gear that will be on board for the race. This will be the first VPP / TOT racing I have done on a multihull and I am optimistic that this will be the future of handicap rating for multihulls.”

Race website – Tracker – Daily video analysis – Facebook

Transpac schedule:
July 13: First Transpac Start: Divisions 7 & 8, 1300 PDT
July 16: Second Transpac Start: Divisions 4, 5 & 6, 1300 PDT
July 18: Third Transpac Start: Multihulls (1230 PDT), Divisions 1, 2 & 3 (1300 PDT)
July 29: Mt Gay Rum Party, Waikiki YC
July 30: Hawaii YC Bacardi Rum Okole Maluna Party
July 31: Honolulu Awards Ceremony – The Modern Hotel
Aug 1st: Kaneohe YC Party and Plywood Cup Regatta

ABOUT TRANSPAC
First organized by the Transpacific Yacht Club in 1906, the Transpacific Yacht Race or Transpac is an offshore sailing race from Point Fermin in Los Angeles to Diamond Head, just east of Honolulu, a distance of 2225 miles. This is among the world’s great ocean races, and biennially attracts some of the world’s fastest sailing yachts, some of its most talented offshore racing sailors, and a wide variety of offshore sailing adventurers.

Transpacific YC also conducts occasional races to Papeete, Tahiti. Membership is open to all sailors who have completed a TPYC race to either of these destinations in paradise.

Report by Dobbs Davis, Transpac 2015 Media Manager