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4/30/2004 6:45:00 PM
San Diego, CA
Back in the marina at our dock

A New Star Is Born - Lawur and Crew Finishes 5th

Here is the promised race report from the biggest international sailing race, the Newport to Ensenada Race. The race is about 120 miles long from south of LA 60 miles into Mexico and lasts anywhere from 6 - 26 hrs.

OK ? so now we took all the excitement away from this race report, but yes we finished the race 5th in our class of 22 boats ? not too shabby for first-timers like us ? :-)

But let?s take this one step at the time ? as a quick reminder, we decided a few weeks ago to partake in the Newport to Ensenada Regatta, the biggest international sailing race. The race is about 120 miles long, depending on the course you take, from south of LA 60 miles into Mexico. The preparation involved beside a lot ... and I mean a lot of paperwork (yacht club membership, boat rating certificates, entry documents, inspections, ...) to getting the boat ready and adding new safety equipment we would have needed anyhow at a later point in time, e.g. a life raft (some of you might remember our discussions around that topic ... I really didn't want one ... well my Dad, who works for an insurance, talked me into it ... he knows how to sell ?life insurance? ... doesn't he).

To get to the race, we needed to bring the boat up to Newport Beach the day before on Thursday 4/22. In all honesty, that was the worst part about the trip. We forgot to take our pills against seasickness (Stugeron) in time and pretty much left a trail up the coast for most of the trip. Beside Niki and I, our 5th crew member Daniel joined us on the trip North (crew member 3 and 4 to join in Newport) ... it ended up being his 'only' part of the trip ... he was sooo miserable after the trip with 8-10ft chop that he decided not to come along for the race. That meant we had a crew of 4 for the race, Niki, Dave Kusmik, a friend and ex-colleague from Deloitte, and John, Dave's boat neighbor (Daniel is John's son). They joined us in Newport just in time for the party ... glad though I decided to be responsible for navigation because if Dave would have been the one, we would have ended up in Hawaii ... it took them over an hour to get from the airport to the party ... a trip that should take 20 mins ... they did some sightseeing in LA, not sure what there is to see though ... :-)

Since everybody we talked to about this race talks about the party the night before, I think it needs an honorable mention in our race report ... a typical LA type party, pretty people, lost of blondes, lots of silicone (sorry but its true) ... well in short the preconceptions about LA are true ... it was a big reminder of my Grammy night I wrote about in a previous <a href="http://www.lawur.com/logbook/detail.aspx?lid=5b5fd33a-7658-4ac4-bebf-c1a785 efe8f3">logbook entry</a>. Definitely worth going ... most people at the party though didn't race to Ensenada.

The morning on Friday, we got ready for our race start at 13:40 ... so let me give you the quick run-down of how something like this works ... now that I am an expert at this after having done a whooping ONE race ... just a quick reminder, there are about 500 boats starting this race ... all between 12:00 and 14:00 ... I have to admit I was very intimidated by all the boats around us, more about hitting a boat then really thinking about a good start. It is quite exciting pulling up a main sail in the harbor channel between 50 other boats going out and getting ready for check at the jetty end.

What happens is that they send of about 30-40 boats every 10 minutes across 2 start lines setup outside the harbor, one off-shore and one in-shore starting line. I would guess the start lines are each about 300 ft (100m) long marked with 3 buoys. There is a set start time for each class, ours was 13:40 and they count down on the radio the times. John, who races his boat up in the Bayarea, had a lot of good input, so what we ended up doing is staying pretty much off-shore and out of most peoples way until our start time got much closer ... that way we didn't really get as close to the super boats such as the 'Stars & Stripes', a former Americas Cup winner, as we would have liked, but it felt much safer for me. Our start strategy was to go to the start line about 10 mins before the start ... we got there about 8 mins to go ... then we went up-wind for half the remaining time, did a tack which is quite interesting with 22 boats around you. Then we went back downwind towards the starting line for 4 mins ... interesting to see that I had no real appreciation how fast or slow our boat accelerates and given that I didn't want to cross the starting line to early, we eased up on the sails a bit too much but nevertheless we crossed the starting line 3rd ... an exciting feeling ... suddenly we were all heading down the same course at 8.5 - 9 knots ... everything was perfect, the sun was shining, the wind was nice and strong, the boat was at its top-speed going often over 9 knots, which is huge for our type boat ... we all got a huge adrenaline rush and had a great time ...

... well that would summarize the next 6 hours ... doing over 8 knots consistently and being surrounded by lots of boats even 20 miles off-shore. This is quite a difference to what we have seen otherwise. Not that we are such huge sailors yet, but when we went anything more then a couple miles off-shore on our trip South or even on a day sail, typically you will maybe see 1 or 2 other boats around you ... here we were surrounded by boats all the time, especially noticeable during the night.

At around 6 o'clock after going off-shore about 20 miles, we decided to fall off the wind and we raised our gennaker, a combination of a spinnaker and a genoa (big foresail). Reason for that is that for a smaller crew of 4, it is a lot easier to fly a gennaker then a spinnaker since you don?t need a pole. By that time, the wind was blowing a consistent 20-22 knots and we had our hands full keeping Lawur going on course, but we were flying and it was great fun. We had some scary moments watching another boat broach when they pulled up their spinnaker ... never seen it before but what basically happens is the spinnaker has such force that it pulls the boat into the water, the mast was almost touching the water (looks similar to small sailing dingies that are close to capsizing) and John said their bow was buried in the water / waves all the way up the mast ... I have seen a dingy roll, but seeing a huge keelboat like ours almost roll, was just freaky ... took Niki and I a while to get over that, but Lawur didn't do anything crazy like this; she was doing a steady 9 on a nice broad-reach course.

A short comment about our course (see attached picture of track) which seemed to have been pretty much the only decision as a skipper I can really take credit for, we decided to go off-shore rather then in a straight line (well actually it happens to be a rhumb line because in distance racing a straight line across a curved surface is not the shortest route ... pretty funny thought, isn't it). There is also an in-shore route that tries to take advantage of local near-shore winds, but based on some of the research I had done (web surfing and talking to some old sailing buffs ... ) that route almost never works. At the end, all the people who went off-shore like us did pretty well especially during the night ... while a boat a couple slips down from us was parked for 4 hours straight, we were doing a slow but constant 3 - 4.5 knots. After having done 8.5 for a whole afternoon and then wobbling around at 3 knots, I was pretty much my low for the race and when we crossed Pt Loma of San Diego at around 10pm, the shower just felt too good ... so I asked my crew if they wanted to call it a day/night and motor home ... well you know how that went over ... needless to say, they convinced me to stay and I had a new nickname for the rest of the race ... no need to spell it out here. Am I glad they convinced me!!!!

During the night a few things notable happened. We passed an unlit boat in the middle of the night ... scary because it was really hard to see and we missed the boat by merely a few boat lengths. After the wind had died at around 8pm, we decided to motor for about 1 1/2 hours, which in retrospect was nothing. In the cruising class, we were allowed to motor but got a 2 hr penalty for each hour of motoring. Did the math and as long as we were going over 3 knots, it made no sense to motor so we only motored to charge our batteries and the rest of the night we wobbled around until 7am, when the wind picked up again.

We had a nice morning sail, not quite as strong as the day before, but still nice wind, in shorts and t-shirt ... we were doing great with the miles counting down ... 15, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 ... wow, what was that, there is a guy coming towards us with the wind from totally opposite direction ... oh my good, we have a wind-shift ... all hands on deck, we need to change sails! In our rush to the finish line which was clearly visible by now, we wrapped the gennaker around the forestay, had to drop it all tangled up and so we just used our jib and were doing a meager 3 knots. So rather then racing into the finish line as we had envisioned, we were again wobbling ... the wind had died down by now and all the other boats around us were in the same 'boat' so to say ... not really but you get the idea. It took us over 2 hours to finish the last 6 miles ... it should have taken only 50mins. Needless to say, by the time we hit the finish line we were somewhat down, we had missed our 20 hr goal by quite a bit, since it took us slightly over 25 hours to get to Ensenada, but WE DID IT.

After anchoring in the Ensenada harbor in-between 400 boats was quite exciting and turned out quite tricky (we had to re-anchor twice since we swung into another boat in the evening), but once done we celebrated with champagne, chocolate and beer. We freshened up and headed to shore with the little water taxis that were all over.

Our first visit was to the race headquarter where we handed our race time and forms in (previous owner of our boat again ... pretty funny) ... checking on the boat, we were pretty down ... we had one of the longest elapsed times in our class and given that our boat was the 2nd fastest rated boat (works like handicap in golf), we thought we would finish dead last in our class ... Dave was pretty down, since it seems he for once was a lot more competitive than me ... I know hard to believe but true. With the preliminary, self-assessed race results, we headed for dinner and straight back to bed ... since we did so badly, it wasn't very hard for us to leave early again on Sunday morning and miss the mug celebrations.

On Sunday, we had a long, cold, windy and foggy motor back up the coast but it was to have John and Dave with us for company and swapping duties at the helm. Coming back into the country was the easiest immigration Niki and I have ever seen ... maybe we should take Lawur to Austria the next time around and avoid SFO and all the airport hassle ... :-)

Back in San Diego at the dock, we were all exhausted from a long sailing trip, limited sleep, pretty intense sailing but we all felt great despite our belief that we did crappy in the race. Since Dave had bugged me now for 10th time about how we sucked at the sailing thing, I decided to check the race results on the website again ... it took me a while to figure it out since the results where unsorted yet, but after counting twice, it turned out all the other boats who came in BEFORE us had motored ALL night long and therefore their corrected time after the penalties where way higher than ours ... WE CAME IN FIFTH and even got a mug ... still think fondly back at Dave's happy face when I told him the news. The decision to only motor for 1 ½ hours, was what made the biggest difference. Let me quote a friend from work here ? ?So Robert, you ?won? the race by doing a spreadsheet ? I expected nothing else from you?

All in all, we had a great weekend, we learned a lot about sailing, about sailing with crew and we made new friends, starting with John who was a great addition to the Lawur crew.

Let me finish this with a family tradition ... at the end of the day we all share our HIGH & LOW for the day ... here are the crews for the weekend:

Niki - HIGH: To finish with no major complications / LOW: Her sunburned face Dave - HIGH: The race start / LOW: When we fouled the Gennaker (though it wasn?t even his fault) John - HIGH: Niki?s  Gulasch / LOW: When Danny, his son, dropped out Robert - HIGH: Doing 9.5 knots on Friday afternoon / LOW: When we were wobbling around Pt Loma

A BIG THANKS goes to the crew of Lawur for making this happen ... Niki, John, Dave ... you are the best!

To the next race together,

Skipper Robert

PS: <a href="http://www.lawur.com/picts/album.aspx?cid=356f2ee4-5cdd-4421-9a0a-2c47bf08d 41b">Click here</a> for more race pictures ? we just didn?t want to send too many with email since many people have a 1MB email size limit.

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