Baja Race Full of Spills and Thrills

Records, a rescue and a shipwreck spawned by steady following winds . . . the 51st and fastest Newport-to-Ensenada international yacht race had it all.

Roy Disney’s Pyewacket from Los Angeles Yacht Club followed Steve Fossett’s 60-foot catamaran Stars & Stripes into the books by beating the mark for monohulls. The 70-foot turbosled crossed the line at midnight Friday in 11 hours 49 minutes--only about 6 1/2 minutes ahead of Doug Baker’s Magnitude but 21 minutes faster than the 84-foot Christine sailed the 125 nautical miles in 1983.

Fossett finished a few hours earlier, in 6 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds, and broke Dennis Conner’s record for multihulls of 8:29 set by the same boat in 1994.

A starting glitch when the race committee fired the gun one minute late was resolved by simply ignoring boats that kept going and crediting those that returned to restart with the time lost, if they requested it.

With 460 boats entered and 438 starting, the race was blessed by its best breeze in years--a steady 15 knots almost all the way. After starting at noon Friday, by 5 p.m. Saturday 410 had finished, 15 had dropped out and only 13 were unaccounted for.

But the lively conditions also cost a price in blown-out sails, the near loss of a sailor and perhaps the loss of a boat.

The crew of Jim Long’s 40-foot Fast Break from California YC abandoned ship after running aground at Estero Beach on the opposite side of the bay, and Brack Duker’s ULDB 70 Evolution, also from CYC, withdrew after crewman Scott Haisman of Simi Valley was injured while retrieving a crewman who had fallen overboard in the midnight darkness just outside the bay.