Cabo Race: Going to be a slow one

Twenty-two team have entered the biennial Cabo Race, taking the fleet from Newport Beach, CA south along the Baja California Peninsula to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Monohulls (19) will start on March 11 with the multihull fleet (3) starting on March 12.

Peter Isler files this pre-start report.

Okay race fans, a couple of hours til the start of the Newport Beach to Cabo Race 2017. I’m on the SC70 Holua – and we’re stacked up in a great class of seven “sleds”. The 70 foot lightweight downwind oriented boats that were born here on the west coast have enjoyed a bit of a revival lately.

We’ll also be watching the face off between the hot MOD70 Phaedo – which is making its west coast debut racing against the ORMA 60 Mighty Merloe – they start tomorrow and it’ll be fun to watch that race.

Unfortunately, all the good weather that has brought so much rainfall to the west coast (and turned our hillsides green!) has departed and high pressure is going to dominate this one. No records this year – and a lot of light air shucking and jiving are in order… but that will make for some interesting racing.

On board Holua with eight crew – we are looking forward to getting in the flow of the watch system… current routing shows this race could take as long as 5 days! Pretty slow for 783 nautical miles.

A yellowbrick race tracker is provided to follow along.

Race details – Tracker – Crew lists – Facebook