Pacific Cup 2022 – It’s a Wrap!

We’ve been in Hawaii for 2 days now.  Time to eat, shower, sleep, and meet/welcome many friends to Kaneohe Bay that arrived soon before or after we did.  That has definitely been a highlight this year.  In previous years we’ve been a later arrival and having prepared for Pacific Cup while living in Texas, we didn’t know very many people in the race.  6 years later, and having raced a lot during that time, this group of 60 boats that raced to Hawaii is more like a family.

Oh, the race?  Yes, well, it was rather pleasant as races to Hawaii go.  Moderate wind and flat sea for most of the race, then nice breeze and waves and swells that were bigger, but not so organized.  Then the final day.  Winds over 20 knots much of the time and then an unexpected twist to the race.  Hurricane Darby was dissipating south of Hawaii as we approached.  That made things very interesting.  Not the wind, nor the rain.  It was the waves.  100nm from the finish we were suddenly sailing in waves as tall as buildings and coming from an odd direction relative to the wind.  Those Darby swells greeted all of the fleet as they approached Oahu, making for some serious challenges for most and epic rides for others.  It turned out to be our Achilles heel.  We’d had smooth sailing up to this point and were in a good position to win our division and maybe even PHRF overall, ahead of all the boats that started on Monday and Tuesday.  Alas, we couldn’t fly the spinnaker in what turned out to be the strongest winds of the race plus the crazy swells coming from Darby.  We tried.  After taking down the spinnaker and trying various things to keep going fast, we decided to put the A3 back up, in the dark, with no moon.  The moment the kite filled, we started try to figure out how to get it back down.  It was an absolutely wild, out of control ride, in the pitch dark.  We spent the next 20 minutes trying to keep the boat pointed in the right direction.  Wiped out countless times, and about half the time we were pointing in the right direction with the kite full, I was shocked we were actually in control momentarily.  Our concerns quickly shifted to preservation.  We really didn’t need to break anything 100nm from the finish.  So, by some miracle we got the kite back down and proceeded towards the finish under main only.  Arriving at Kaneohe Yacht Club was as awesome as ever, with mai tai’s and leis, and that wonderful sense of “we got here!”.

We then had to wait another 18 hours for the next boat in our division to arrive (Wolfpack, actually the next Mon/Tues starter) – and it quickly became apparent that they had a chance to move into first, if they could keep up the pace of what they were managing to do (11+ knots average!). It turns out, they had a fantastic ride to the finish, as they could fly their kite going more square to the wind and the waves with a regular spinnaker pole to square the kite back.

And that was how we didn’t win our division, or PHRF overall.  Sigh.  We ended up 2nd in our doublehanded division and 5^th overall in PHRF.  Darn.  So close.  But we gave it a good go, and we are very satisfied with how we raced.  We showed up prepared, made good decisions, made some bold decisions, sailed fast, managed our energy well, got really, really close to the finish and then we got Darby’d.  But we lived to sail another day, and we are enjoying ourselves tremendously!

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