Record Wouldn’t Be First Thing to Fall in This Edition of Transpac

Do you believe in omens?

One day in May, Roy Disney, an ardent sailor and vice chairman of the board of the Walt Disney Co., crashed his Mini-Cooper head-on into another car on a winding Irish road and shattered his right leg--thus, his string of 11 consecutive Transpacific Yacht Races since 1975 would end, although his boat Pyewacket would go without him.

Linda Elias, 46, had lived for the day she would return to the Transpac with an all-woman crew. She was left behind in the last race in 1995 after a series of six surgeries for ovarian cancer. This time an emergency follow-up sent her back to the OR as her boat sailed into the sunset.

A giant French catamaran that was the first to win the Jules Verne Trophy in 1993 for sailing around the world in less than 80 days took 1 1/2 months getting from Europe with a starving crew and barely made the start, with the help of a tow.

Finally, the race was barely under way when three boats suffered a similar problem: Their masts fell down.

Oh, and there was also the hurricane.

This is the 39th Transpac, about halfway along for the fastest boats, almost over for the smaller and slower ones that got head starts. Seven of the 38 starters have dropped out, but the Disney, Elias and French boats were doing just fine, the former and the latter on record-breaking paces amid a strange scenario: high hopes in high-tech boats going one way, passing broken boats and broken dreams already coming back.

With consistent breezes of 18 to 22 knots, it stood to be the windiest, wildest, fastest and most destructive of all Transpacs since the first one was switched to Southern California because of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906--or at least since five boats were dismasted on a single night in 1977.

Any of the bigger boats finishing by midnight PDT Sunday will beat the record of 8 days 11 hours 1 minute 45 seconds set by Merlin in 1977, and one might even be Merlin, which is still competing.

As of Wednesday, the threat of Hurricane Dolores appeared to be dissipating, although it remained on a converging northwesterly course with the race track. Although its winds may fade to a beneficial boost for the boats, weather experts say Dolores could push mountainous waves ahead of it to converge with the northern waves generated by the trade winds. That could leave the stragglers to sail in a virtual washing machine for the last few hundred miles.

The Transpacific Yacht Club exists for the sole purpose of running the race every two years. The commodore is Gil Jones, a Newport Beach lawyer who told sailors and guests at the July 1 Aloha Dinner on the Queen Mary, “If the wind continues to blow, at least 10 of you are going to break Merlin’s 20-year-old record--including the reconfigured Merlin.” During Wednesday morning’s daily roll call of the 31 remaining competitors, nine boats reported positions that put them hours ahead of Merlin’s record pace.

The 86-foot French catamaran Explorer, sailed by Bruno Peyron and Florence Arthaud, and adventurer Steve Fossett’s 60-foot trimaran Lakota were flying over the waves at a rate that would reach the Diamond Head finish line Saturday, a day ahead of Pyewacket and the other monohulls that started two days earlier.

Lakota on Wednesday finished a 24-hour run of 481 miles at an average speed of 20 knots to close to within 11 miles of Explorer. Two days earlier, Pyewacket set a race record for monohulls of 336 miles--an average speed of 14 knots, which is fast enough to water ski.

Logging a different kind of achievement was Survivor, a 56-foot boat entered by the Get Challenged organization of Ojai and crewed by 10 HIV-positive and AIDS sufferers. The names of 170 people who died of AIDS adorn the sides of the boat--”Angels on the hull,” they’re called.

Then there were the hard-luck stories. Dan Doyle and Patrick Rogers of Hawaii bought a 30-foot boat in Seattle called The Edge and renamed it 2 Guys On the Edge, unaware of how appropriate that would be. The rudder broke as they sailed it down the coast for the start, then broke again the first wild night out in the race, forcing them to return.

The cruising class is a 1997 innovation, intended to encourage less serious racers to participate by allowing the use of powered winches and auto-pilot steering and the luxury of freezers, hot showers, real bunks and other conveniences without suffering the stripped-down-for-speed hardships of the typical racer: competition balanced with comfort.

Seven cruisers started but two turned around before the first night was over. One, Ed Soellner, a 55-year-old Sacramento tax consultant sailing the 47-foot Seaz The Moment, explained as he sat out the race in Long Beach, consuming his ample provisions. “We were 30 miles out from San Nicolas [Island, 55 miles past Santa Catalina Island] and I had two crew members totally dehydrated,” Soellner said.

“They had been throwing up since we left the harbor.” One was 67, the other 69. “The 67-year-old had fallen and we thought he had a broken rib,” Soellner said. “All of us are offshore sailors. We were well prepared. But we decided it’d be best to turn back. We weren’t in it for the guts or the glory. We just wanted to get to Hawaii.”

Perhaps they should have had Fred Frye and Bob Lane on board. Frye is a San Diego doctor whose 52-foot Salsipuedes is far ahead in the cruising class, hoping to hold off Lane’s onrushing 56-foot Medicine Man from Long Beach. Lane is a pharmacist.

The cruisers started June 28; Medicine Man started with the smaller racing monohulls July 2 and has been gaining about 100 miles a day on Salsipuedes and was expected to pass it today before finishing tonight. That won’t earn Medicine Man a record or even the “Barn Door,” the slab of carved Hawaiian koa wood that goes to the monohull with the fastest elapsed time. That seems destined for Pyewacket or one of its rivals.

Similar hopes were crushed for Doug Baker with Magnitude, a new boat sailing its first major offshore race. Magnitude’s mast was the first to fall last Sunday, inexplicably snapping in 18 knots of wind. It returned to Long Beach with only 20 feet of the once-towering mast remaining.

Magnitude navigator Rob Wallace said, ominously, as he studied the broken mast: “It’s not the end of the carnage.”

Dedicated sailors understand the risks and are willing--eager--to take them for the sake of speed.

Five days before she was to depart on Bay Wolf, Elias had emergency surgery to remove an internal blockage caused by scar tissue from her previous operations. The day her boat left, she lay in a hospital bed, weak and in pain, and noted, “Here I am in a warm hospital bed with people waiting on me. If I was out there I’d be cold, wet and miserable. . . . I’d rather be out there.”

When she heard about the conditions, she wailed, “Oh, my God, they’re having the windiest race of all and I’m not there!”

Peyron’s American co-skipper, Cam Lewis, when told about the early dismastings, responded: “Good! That means there’s wind out there.” And Explorer and Lakota, with trampoline nets larger than a volleyball court connecting their multiple hulls, were making the most of it. Their only competition, Bob Hanel’s catamaran Double Bullet II from San Pedro, dropped out the first day. Its mast fell down.