Ocean Racing News

While much of our offshore focus has been on the Pacific of late, there’s a strong Bay Area connection to the Transatlantic Race. Richmond YC products Matt Noble and David Rasmussen, and San Francsico YC product Molly Robinson are an intregal part of the Oakcliff All American Offshore Team,  a group of twenty-somethings sailing the R/P STP 65 Vanquish (neé Moneypenny) against some much bigger boats with much bigger payrolls. Having been stuck behind a persistent ridge that has slowed their progress and that of the other big boats around them while allowing the slower boats they’ve already passed to catch up, the AAOT sailors may not have been able to put up a winning time but they managed to finish with some company yesterday, as you can see in the pic above. George David’s Rambler 100 ended up setting a new elapsed-time record of just under seven days, nearly setting a new 24-hr monohull record in the process, while Ken Read’s Volvo 70 Puma took overall honors.

Back here on the West Coast, yesterday was a tense day of watching the tracker from our Hawaiian hotel. We had to post this last night, because it’s too close to call between Hap Fauth’s R/P 74 Bella Mente and Doug Baker’s Andrews 80 Magnitude 80, and both were expected to finish early this morning. If we got lucky, they both finished after sunrise, which meant we were able to take advantage of a pre-dawn raid on a big sporty to get photos. But the time difference means we’ll have to put those up on our Facebook page, because ‘Lectronic will have already been posted. Once the boats are inside the 100-mile ring, their info will go real-time on the tracker, so you can follow it yourself! With about 330 miles to go this morning, the two boats were separated by nearly 130 miles north to south, setting up a hero or zero situation for Bella‘s navigator Ian Moore and Mag‘s navigator Ernie Rachau, with corrected time division honors still up for grabs between Bella and Lorenzo Berho’s Kernan 68 Peligroso. Division 2 had the same size split between Jorge Ripstein’s TP 52 Patches and Chip Megeath’s R/P 45 Criminal Mischief. It’s very similar in the overall corrected-time leading sled division where James McDowell’s SC 70 Grand Illusion is 100 miles north of Philippe Kahn’s Pegasus MotionX and just barely ahead on corrected time.