The Hull Truth: He Wants to Finish

Bill Gibbs appears to have the fastest boat in the Tommy Bahama Newport to Ensenada Yacht Race, but he doesn’t think he can beat the record. He just hopes he can beat the curse.

“If we finish I’ll be happy,” the Ventura sailor said. “If we do better than finish, I’ll be ecstatic.”

The 55th edition of the world’s largest international sailboat race, renamed for its first title sponsor, is scheduled to send off the first of about 450 boats at noon today from a split starting line set just outside the Newport Harbor jetty.

Gibbs and five friends will be sailing the largest multihull, his 52-foot catamaran, Afterburner.

Multihulls, which don’t need keels for stability, are inherently faster than heavily ballasted monohulls. That’s why the multihull record for the 125-nautical-mile race, 6 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds by Steve Fossett sailing the 60-foot Stars & Stripes catamaran in 1998, is five hours faster than the monohull record of 11 hours 54 minutes by Roy E. Disney’s 73-foot Pyewacket in that same extraordinarily windy race.

Fossett was the first ever to finish before sundown; Disney’s was the first monohull ever to finish before midnight.

Last year Gibbs, 47, didn’t finish at all. “That was our very first race with the boat,” he said. “We went right out and broke the mast, about 9 o’clock at night. ... We were way in front of everybody.”

Gibbs isn’t sure his boat is exorcised of the demons it may have brought with it from New Zealand, where he bought it 16 months ago.

“The previous owner had bad luck,” he said. “The big race in New Zealand is similar to the Ensenada race in length. He must have raced it from ’87 to ’99 and won less than half the time. The joke was that he won every time he finished.”