NEWS
California Offshore Race Week 2023
Hoel, Gilles, and Buzz, closing in on San Diego. Photo by Karl Robrock.
By Buzz Blackett
We campaigned ‘io in two of the three legs of this year’s California Offshore Race Week. I had an all-Richmond Yacht Club, all-star crew of Hoel Menard and Karl Robrock for both the Spinnaker Cup and the SoCal 300 and Joel Turmel and Gilles Combrisson for one race each.
We had a mediocre finish in the Spin Cup, mostly due to poor positioning between Seal Rock and Montara—outside the boats that surged ahead along the shore and the inside the boats that took the traditional outside route and got the new breeze first. We had some fun downwind sailing during the last third of the race, trying to get ahead of Andy Schwenk and his crew on Spindrift (the eventual overall winner).
We campaigned ‘io in two of the three legs of this year’s California Offshore Race Week. I had an all-Richmond Yacht Club, all-star crew of Hoel Menard and Karl Robrock for both the Spinnaker Cup and the SoCal 300 and Joel Turmel and Gilles Combrisson for one race each.
We had a mediocre finish in the Spin Cup, mostly due to poor positioning between Seal Rock and Montara—outside the boats that surged ahead along the shore and the inside the boats that took the traditional outside route and got the new breeze first. We had some fun downwind sailing during the last third of the race, trying to get ahead of Andy Schwenk and his crew on Spindrift (the eventual overall winner).
|
Faced with the specter of an accurate forecast of extremely light air for the Coastal Cup, morphing the race from a 24 hour sprint to a 48+ hour drifter, we opted for an inside route—portaging ‘io on her trailer from Monterey to Santa Barbara. Although it was painful derigging and rerigging the boat, we enjoyed watching the YellowBrick tracker show the rest of the fleet struggling at two to four knots and us making tracks down Highway 101 at 55 knots.
The SoCal 300 was more like it’s supposed to be. A short, light air beat just off of Santa Barbara harbor to a weather mark while avoiding the kelp (which we failed at); a 25-mile, medium air, jib reach to the straits between Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Islands, a 100-mile, fire-hose, southerly spinnaker reach to a weather buoy 120 miles west of San Diego, and a medium to light air run to the finish off Point Loma. We reveled in the spinnaker reach and held our own on the run until the last 45 miles, when the wind veered instead of backing (ruining our approach plan). In the end, we won our division and ended up third overall. Argo-4, a Southern California J-125, won the race overall. For the second year in a row, a hard-chined 26 footer from the Pacific Northwest won the California Offshore Race Week overall. This year it was Moonshine, sailed by owner Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski, David Rogers, and their coed crew. Moonshine was the Club’s guest before the Race Week, and before last summer’s Pacific Cup. 
|
'io makes her way under the Golden Gate Bridge in the Spinnaker Cup. Photo by Stuart Engle.
|
