Transpacific Is More Than a Race to Long Beach Sailor

He hasn’t the big name or the big bucks. And he certainly doesn’t have a very big boat.

But Bill Boyd has sailing in his blood and a heart full of desire--and he actually believes he can win the 40th Transpacific Yacht Race, which is getting underway with staggered starts this week.

“But only if conditions are just right,” Boyd concedes.

What the 47-year-old Long Beach resident really has--and he is the first to acknowledge as much--is a mid-life crisis.

And he’s dealing with it as any seaman might: by taking off on a lengthy adventure.

Boyd’s adventure just happens to be another Transpac, his fifth. Only this time, he’s aboard the smallest of the 33 boats in the 93-year history of the 2,225-mile race from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

And when he gets there, on a 25-footer named Vapor, he plans to stay.

“I’ve sold my home, sold my car and now it’s time to go,” he said earlier this week, while making final preparations in a slip in Alamitos Bay.

Boyd is part Hawaiian. His sailing partner, Scott Atwood, 43, of Long Beach, is of Scandinavian descent. They are sailing under a flag that reads “Vikinesian in Crisis.”

They are one of only two teams making Transpac history by being the first to compete in the newly established doublehander class, which requires a crew of only two.

If nothing else, the more adventurous doublehanders add some character to a race long dominated by the same old characters.

“The big-money people like Roy Disney spend millions of dollars to do this and that’s why he’s winning,” Boyd said of the Walt Disney Co.’s vice chairman, whose 70-foot Pyewacket won the last Transpac, in 1997, with a record elapsed time of 7 days 15 hours 24 minutes and 40 seconds.

“A lot of people can’t compete with that and say, ‘Why bother?’ . . . We’re actually doing this now for our own personal satisfaction. We have no galley and no head. All we have is a poop deck aft.”

Indeed Disney’s new Pyewacket--he recently retired his 70-foot turbo-sled in favor of a faster 73-foot maxi-sled--will share the spotlight with other such renowned racing vessels as Medicine Man and Zephyrus IV.

These yachts, which leave from San Pedro’s Point Fermin on Saturday at 1 p.m., are considered the front-runners for the coveted Transpacific Yacht Club Perpetual Trophy, better known as the “Barn Door” award, which goes to the monohull with the fastest elapsed time.

The smaller monohulls will start today and a lone catamaran, which is excluded from Barn Door contention, will leave Tuesday.

But because all vessels are handicapped according to length and design, the prestigious Governor of Hawaii trophy for best corrected time is pretty much up for grabs.

Pyewacket, for example, gives up the maximum 210 seconds per mile, or about 5 1/2 days, to Vapor. So it’s not out of the question that Boyd and Atwood could win on best corrected time.

“We’re one of the faster 25-footers in America right now, so with the corrected handicap, we could win this thing if we sail hard and the winds are favorable,” Boyd said. “But if the winds are too heavy for us, the big sleds will run us over. . . . So we’re hoping for light to moderate winds.”

In any event, this ought to be a Transpac to remember for Boyd and Atwood-- provided they aren’t at each other’s throats by race’s end.

They will take turns at the helm in three-hour intervals and this will go on 24 hours a day over 12-16 days, if they’re lucky.

They have no books and no music. They’ll eat well enough, having stored packaged freezer meats, salads and soups. But they will be eating on the go and probably dressed in foul-weather gear while getting drenched with spray.

“What’s different about this one is that if I don’t perform or if he doesn’t perform, it’s over,” Boyd said. “It’s just the two of us on the smallest boat ever, so it’s going to be very challenging. It’s kind of like us against the elements.”

The elements may be the least of their problems. Vapor has yet to respond to the mandatory daily roll-calls, leading race officials to speculate about radio problems.

Either that or they’re experiencing a real crisis.

THE ALBACORE SCORE

The season may seem young, but already more than 25,000 albacore have been caught aboard one- and 1 1/2-day boats, and that’s assuming nobody’s violating the Mexican limit of five fish per person (not that any of the San Diego skippers would allow that!). Throw in the multi-day boat counts and the numbers probably double.

Some good news, for those who don’t like to drive all the way to San Diego: There’s pretty consistent action in U.S. waters, where there is no limit on how many albacore you can catch. But they’re not catching all that many.

The counts from Orange County and Long Beach/L.A. Harbor vessels have been averaging about 35 a day this week at the offshore banks southwest of San Clemente Island. The fish are of fair size, averaging about 20 pounds.

CROAKER POWER

It has been a banner season for white seabass, mostly at the islands but more recently along the coast as well. As of Wednesday, party boat captains had reported catching 7,186 of the big and tasty croakers. That’s only the 20th-best year on record, but the best since the 28-inch rule went into effect in 1978.

In 1949, anglers bagged a record 65,545 white seabass but they were allowed to keep 15 fish, including five of any length. This year the limit has ranged from one fish during critical spawning weeks to the current three-fish limit of seabass 28 inches or longer.

One theory for this year’s bonanza is that last year’s El Nino drove fish north from Baja California.

Steve Crooke, a Department of Fish and Game biologist, said that might be a factor but added that the dramatic El Nino of 1983 deserves more credit.

“We saw a lot of them in the winter of ‘84; they started spawning up here and they’ve been spawning here ever since.”

SOUTHERN BAJA

At the East Cape, the striped marlin had been so thick “you could almost walk across them,” one angler observed. That changed when the bait situation took a turn for the worse at the beginning of the week. It’s starting to improve, though, and fishing is rebounding. Sailfish numbers rose dramatically Wednesday and Thursday.

Inshore, Don Sloan of Borrego Springs, fishing with Baja on the Fly, spent 55 minutes fighting a 17 3/4-pound jack crevalle using 16-pound tippet. Had his fish weighed another pound, it would have been a line-class world record.

HAPPY TRAILS

Glenn Banks, manager of Reds Meadow Resort and Pack Station near Mammoth Lakes, reports a strange sighting in the back-country wilderness: clear trails.

Except for small patches of snow on north-facing slopes, hikers and fishermen this holiday weekend will have dirt beneath their feet instead of snow at most locations below 10,000 feet.

The popular Thousand Island lakes are almost entirely ice free, which is an indication that the back country has indeed opened up.

Last year, the lakes were iced over until July 10 and the trails were buried until July 20.

HUNTING

Rabbit season opens today for cottontail, brush, pygmy and snowshoe rabbits, but hunters face only fair overall prospects because of the dry spring. Those who are successful should remember that latex gloves are recommended while field-dressing a rabbit to avoid exposure to tularemia, a bacterial disease named after its point of discovery: Tulare.

The state-run Imperial Wildlife Area near the Salton Sea has abundant cottontail and jackrabbit populations (jackrabbit season is year-round). San Jacinto Wildlife Area in Riverside County has fewer rabbits and limited access, thanks to spring drought conditions. Prospective hunters should call both areas in advance.

WINDING UP

Citing “unforeseen circumstances,” Roy Morioka, chairman of the prestigious Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament off Kailua-Kona, announced recently that there will be no contest this year but that it will resume next summer.

Morioka said in a news release that the planning process had stalled and that there were conflicts with the International Tournament of Champions, which Kona is hosting next spring.

There’s obviously more to it than that, but the bottom line, one skipper said, is that the cancellation after 40 consecutive years “is a massive loss to the community and the end of an era.”

* FISH REPORT, PAGE 11