One Good Trip Earns Another : ‘Go’ Goes the Best, Wins Its Skipper Surprise Honeymoon

Mike Rockoff skippered Go across the finish line in Saturday’s fourth annual BMW sailing race and won himself a honeymoon.

Go’s crew--Rockoff, John Ingle and Butch Parker--won first prize in the handicapped 10-mile race, earning Rockoff a vacation for two to Germany.

Interestingly enough, Rockoff just happens to be getting married Wednesday. And no honeymoon had been planned, basically because of reasons relating to money and work.

“Now I’ll have to figure out a way to get out of work,” Rockoff said with a no-problem smile on his face.

Go, a Santana 20, covered the course in a corrected time of two hours 14 minutes three seconds, about a minute better than second-place Cookie Monster (2:15:18). It also won the award for being the first boat across the finish line.

“It was a good race for us,” Rockoff said. “We started in front and had clear air all day. That’s the name of the game for us. We sailed our own race and didn’t have to worry about anyone tacking up on us.”

The only problem encountered by the crew was kelp.

“We caught some kelp two or three times and had to get rid of it,” Ingle said. “But it was a fairly smooth race.”

The key came between marks B and C on the course--Coronado and Seaport Village--when Rockoff, Ingle and Parker decided to turn it up a notch.

“Everything was going so well during the race, we decided to be more aggressive then,” Rockoff said. “It wasn’t a very long leg, and we proved we could do it.”

Rockoff purchased the boat in 1978, and the three--all members of the Coronado Yacht Club--started sailing together in 1980. Saturday’s race served as a tune-up for the Santana 20 Class Championships, which will be held during the first week of July at Klamath Falls, Ore. Go finished second in that event in San Antonio, Tex. in 1983 and third two years ago at Via de Bravo, Mexico.

This time, Go’s crew will have momentum on its side. The vessel won the Coronado Cays Shearson-Lehman Hilton race two weeks ago, then improved Saturday on last year’s 14th-place finish in the BMW.

“This year the air was light,” Rockoff said. “The wind was not blowing hard at all. The bigger boats couldn’t get up to hull speed.”

Besides, Go was ready to go this year. Rockoff, a 38-year-old computer systems analyst, was laid off Feb. 1 and was out of work for 3 1/2 months.

“The boat got a lot of tender loving care,” he said. “It doesn’t need anything right now.”

Each of the 165 boats--carrying about 1,100 sailors--was handicapped according to size, design and potential performance of the boat. Of 165 starters, 150 finished. The others didn’t complete the course in the four-hour limit.

Not everything went smoothly for all finishers. Marshall Harrington’s EOS won the Hardest Working Crew award for averting a possible scratch in the middle of the race.

EOS lost the support wire holding its spinnaker in place and, spinnaker flying, Harrington sent a crew member shimmying up the pole to fix it. When the acting mechanic couldn’t retrieve the wire, he came down, and another crew member was hoisted--this time, in a chair. He was able to reset the spinnaker, and EOS finished, although far back in the pack.