SAILING / TRANSPACIFIC YACHT RACE : Silver Bullet Takes Shortcut to Win

A perturbed Persuasion, a perplexed Pyewacket, an Orient Express running slightly behind schedule and a bull’s-eye by a Silver Bullet: all those feelings were among the baggage that weary sailors carried ashore as the 37th biennial Transpacific Race to Hawaii started winding down Tuesday.

John DeLaura’s Santa Cruz 70 Silver Bullet took a shortcut and finished Monday night in 9 days, 9 hours 11 minutes 17 seconds. Its solid game plan led to only the fourth sweep of first-to-finish and handicap honors in the world’s oldest and the West Coast’s premier offshore sailboat race.

A general absence of customary trade winds held Silver Bullet’s average speed to 9.8 knots and left it 22 hours off Merlin’s 1977 record.

For the first time in years, it appeared the “barn door” prize for first-to-finish might not go to one of the Ultra Light Displacement Boats--the downwind ULDB 70s, or “sleds.”

A new system of staggered starts gave the smaller boats a chance, and Neil Barth’s Excel 53 Persuasion from Newport Harbor Yacht Club and Hasso Plattner’s Reichel/Pugh 50 Morning Glory from Germany tried to make the most of it.

Starting a day in front of the sleds on July 2, they held off Silver Bullet until the final day Monday, when DeLaura’s big white boat blew past to finish only an hour and a half in front.

“They were gaining on us all the way,” said Pat Malone, bowman on Persuasion.

Worse, Persuasion finished only six minutes in front of Morning Glory, which thus won IMS-A class on a higher handicap rating.

Persuasion’s consolation was that it beat all the other sleds, but Barth was no more depressed than Roy Disney was frustrated.

This was Disney’s 10th and strongest try in the Transpac, and he looked good for about the first four days.

Then DeLaura broke away to the north to take a 23-mile lead, and the next day Pyewacket found itself locked in dead air for eight hours as other boats sailed past.

“We were on the back side of a squall,” Disney said. “We got into it and there was no way out of it. It was maddening. Through the rain we could see Alchemy and Mongoose moving. We tried to get down there but couldn’t do it.”

Pyewacket logged only 165 miles that day, far less than the rest of the sleds, and fell from second to 11th place.

Peter Tong’s Orient Express was impressive in its first race, virtually holding its own with Silver Bullet after the first two days.

At first, said tactician-helmsman Dave Ullman, the sailmaker, “We were just hanging in there.”

And hanging in there wasn’t good enough.

They hoisted a spinnaker, fell off the wind to the south, made a large gain the next day and set their sights on Silver Bullet.

That created a problem for the leader, who was trying to cover rivals spread out by 240 miles north and south and also overtake the smaller boats in front. So after holding a course north to build its lead, Silver Bullet dived south again.

“We realized we had (Mike Campbell’s) Victoria covered and put away to the north,” said Mark Rudiger, who co-navigated with John Jourdane and tactician Jeff Madrigali. “Now we had to go down and consolidate our position with the rest of the fleet. We didn’t want anybody down there to slip away from us.”

To do so, Silver Bullet didn’t really have to deviate from its game plan.

“We decided before the race started that we we going north,” Jourdane said. “The high pressure systems were very far north and they were stationary. There was more wind up there.” Jourdane, who navigated New Zealand’s Fisher & Paykel to second place in the 1989-90 Whitbread Round-the-World Race, said, “We actually sailed a Great Circle course shorter than the rhumb line (the 2,250-nautical direct course) because the weather systems allowed us to do that.”

Jourdane figured that by sailing the Great Circle arc northward--in essence, taking a shortcut across the curvature of the earth--Silver Bullet sailed only 2,210 nautical miles.