This years Coastal Cup was one of the slowest in recent memory. Twenty one boats started in this years’ race on Thursday June 12th and by the deadline on June 15th only three boats had crossed the finish line. Unfortunately Mother Nature did not cooperate with the racers this year. First we had the challenge of too much wind for the southern California boats trying to make it up the coast, then the fluky, light air for the race. The weather leading up to the race was very windy with very strong NW winds. Things were looking up for a fast ride down the coast. Suddenly a low pressure system moved in over Santa Barbara and pushed all the strong winds off shore. The entire 277 mile course from San Francisco to Santa Barbara experienced light variable winds from every direction.

Even with the extremely light winds for the race, we did have a few finishers! The first boat to finish in this years’ race was Akela a 77’ R/P owned by Bill Turpin. She spent two nights off shore and completed the course in 48:23:36 with an average speed of 5.7 knots. The second boat to finish was Ocelot a 44’ Fox owned by Flannigan/ Nelson with a time of 63:33:16. The final finisher was Double Trouble a J 105 owned by Shaun Hagerman with a time of 70:52:14. All of the boats reported amazing sightings of large numbers of dolphins and whales. Double Trouble had whales traveling with them for four hours and one large whale (two times the size of the boat) eventually went under the keel and gently twirled the boat around 360 degrees!

To put the course times in perspective, the Coastal Cup course record to Santa Barbara is 20:54:30 set by Magnitude 80 in 2006 during a windy year. In a typical year the 50+ footers will spend one night off shore and finish sometime on Friday. The smaller boats usually spend two nights off shore and finish on Saturday. In this years race no one expected to be offshore for so many nights. Most of the boats arrived in Santa Barbara with little food, water, fuel or batteries. The boats that did finish seemed to hug the coast to get the breeze coming off the land.

Armchair sailors, family and friends were able to take a look at the progress of the race online. This was the first year that we used transponders to track all of the boats. The locations of the boats were updated every 4 hours on the Encinal Yacht Club website, and the u-turns home that many of the boats took were graphically displayed. Having the transponders proved to be popular and we’ll do this for the future Coastal Cups.

There is always next year! Plans are already shaping up for the 2009 Coastal Cup. For the past six years, the Santa Barbara Yacht Club has provided a fantastic venue to finish the race. Next year we are planning on going back to the original destination of the Coastal Cup race, Catalina Island! The dates are being finalized so stay tuned as it will be exciting to return to Catalina in 2009!