Transpac

The trimaran Tritium did not break the Transpac record – bummer – but they were first to finish at 21:52 PDT last night! The picture above shows the
65′ Manatea which started something like 5 days ahead of them!

This year's elapsed time close call wasn't as close as either of those years, but it was still close as John Sangmeister's Long Beach-based ORMA 73 trimaran Tritium Lending Club came up 2.5 hours short of besting the record established by Bruno Peyron with the 80-ft catamaran Commodore Explorer in 1997. Sangmeister and his outstanding crew were thwarted by lighter-than-hoped-for winds, having to sail a greater than normal number of extra miles to keep their speed up, plus they had no less than six collisions — two of them significant —with debris from the Japanese tsunami. One required pulling the daggerboard out for lengthy repairs, then reversing it in its case. To be fair, the entire fleet has had to deal with lighter-than-hoped-for wind and a tremendous amount of tsunami debris.
This has been an interesting TransPac, with lots more racing to go. PerDorade, which won the TransPac in 1931 — that's no typo — is once again the corrected time leader in fleet. As of today's standings, she was a little more than three hours ahead of Division 8 compratriot Sleeper, and six hours ahead of Westward, another Division 8 woody. At the time of that posting, Dorade was 270 miles out of Honolulu and moving along reasonably well.

haps the most delicious aspect is that Matt Brooks' St. Francis YC S&S 52