SOLO TRANSPACIFIC YACHT RACE W
hat if you were sailing from San Francisco Bay to Hawaii and didn't set a spinnaker? What if you just pointed your bow at your destination and went straight there, on a fixed compass heading, without much navigation or jibing? You might expect to have a more comfortable ride than otherwise, but you wouldn't expect to win a race. And yet, that's exactly what happened this July. Philippe Jamotte is an experienced sailor but a novice singlehander. When he stepped off his Olson 30 Double Espresso on July 5, first to finish the 2018 Singlehanded TransPacific Yacht Race, it was probable that he had already won the 16-boat race on corrected time as well. "I have barely any experience at all with a spinnaker and none with a sea," said Philippe. "Since I'm very conservative there was only so much I was going to do. Waiting for the wind to pick up — that was my strategy. The boat's just a beast. It felt like a rocketship. For me the part that was tense was all the racing."
He took the lead when he put up the #2 jib. "I had the #3 and the full main and I'm not making it up here, what's happening? Finally it dawned on me. I got the big whisker pole out and went 10.9 for four hours, I got a little addicted to that. I liked the windy reach. Farther down I didn't like the trade-wind parts." Philippe sailed a rhumb line course, dead downwind with the jib to port. "At the beginning I was like, what's the weather doing, what should I be avoiding? But in the end it was just where the wind goes, so do I. It was a simple race." He tried to keep the boat light. "If I'd have known what I know now I wouldn't have taken the spinnakers. That would have been another 100 pounds." Some of the other early finishers agreed that spinnakers were more trouble than they were worth. David Clark, who finished second on his Olson 30 Passages, said, "I flew the spinnaker diminishing amounts. Day 5 was my first spinnaker day. I flew the half-ounce for half the day until it got really windy. I
took that down and set my regular asymetrical kite. The next day I flew the asy almost all day, the next day half the day, the next day 3-4 hours because I also had twin jibs. I just got tired of fighting the spinnaker, fighting the boat." Greg Ashby said he flew the spinnaker "1% of the time" on his Wilderness 30 Nightmare. "I had one good day of flying the spinnaker; all the other days were bad days. The second day I put up a kite I flew it most of the day — until the wind picked up and blew out the top. I was done for that day." He had bad roundups and wraps, and dumped the kite in the water twice. "The spinnakers were awful. They were bad." "To fly the spinnakers a lot of the time is very difficult," commented David. "You have to really be an expert at spinnaker handling and have an abnormally good autopilot." John Colby's brother-in-law couldn't understand why he wasn't flying the spinnaker on the Hylas 42 Iris. "The windvane wouldn't have held it steady
Philippe took his race-winning 'Double Espresso' for a final spin around Hanalei Bay on July 11 before handing her off to her new owners, the Kauai Sailing Association.
