Pacific 1000 Catamaran Race : Smyth and Hill Are 2nd in Last Leg, 1st Overall

Larry Harteck of Santa Barbara brought his boat ashore just north of the Huntington Beach pier at 9:09 p.m. Sunday, winning the final race of the 11-leg, 12-day Pacific 1000 catamaran race that started from Long Beach July 23 and covered 1,000 miles of California coastline.

Harteck and his crew, Eric Brinton of San Diego, were greeted by a loyal band of followers that had been watching the horizon--and then the darkness--for hours.

Harteck and Brinton were standing between the flashing blue strobe lights drinking champagne and celebrating the day’s victory when the second boat came ashore at 9:25 p.m., carrying Randy Smyth of Huntington Beach and his crew Jim Hill of San Francisco, the overall winners of the Pacific 1000 based upon total elapsed time.

Harteck, who had started the day 27 minutes behind Roy Seaman of Malibu, maintained his watch on the beach until Seaman finished. Harteck had made up more than enough time to finish in second place.

It had been a long, tortuous ordeal for the sailors, but there were smiles all around at the finish. As Smyth said, laughing: “It was long and hard, but we enjoyed it all. The high waves, the broken rudder, the sharks, the flying fish--the ocean is really alive out there. Let’s say it was an adventure.”

Smyth, an Olympic silver medalist, won the 1985 Worrell 1,000 race from Florida to Virginia, after which this race was patterned.

The final leg took a lot longer than anyone had anticipated. Smyth reported that he sat still on the water for about five hours off Oxnard Sunday until the wind finally picked up at about 2:30 p.m. “Once we got going, we came blasting down here,” he said.

Harteck considered Sunday’s race from Oxnard “a great leg.” After the slow start, Harteck liked the steady wind that allowed him to use the spinnaker 70% of the time, and he didn’t seem bothered by the fact that for the first seven hours the fog allowed no more than quarter-mile visibility. “We did some good navigating today,” Harteck said.

Harteck said that he and Smyth exchanged the lead several times early in the day, but then he “just took off.”

Twenty-two boats left Long Beach to start the race July 23, but only 11 were intent upon finishing the 1,000 miles. Of those 11, only eight finished--including the first women to compete in a catamaran marathon regatta. Although they were in last place much of the way, skipper Stephanie Elliott of Santa Ana and her crew of Theresa Funaro of Cerritos and July Kolosvary of Long Beach, were determined to stick it out to the very end.