HEY YA —
JOHN POUNDER / WWW.JLDIGITALMEDIA.NET
At the windward mark on Saturday, March 27, 'Hey Ya' sets the kite.
S
even years ago I was having a beer at Vallarta Yacht Club when Ken 'Yak' Yachechak sat next to me. We exchanged greetings. "Are you interested in being my partner in a boat?" asked Yak. Always one to carefully consider big investments, I waited a few seconds before saying, "Sure!" So began my relationship with Hey Ya, a Beneteau Oceanis 390 built in 1989. I was making a decision to purchase an almost-30-year-old boat pretty much sight unseen. What could possibly go wrong? After years of work on the boat, including removing a staysail (who puts a staysail on a 39-ft Beneteau?) and practically rebuilding the aging Volvo Penta engine, Hey Ya was getting back to her former glory. Somewhere in there I bought Yak out. He became more interested in sailing Mike Seth's J/145 Double Take than sailing an aging production boat that couldn't point and had a habit of losing races, badly. When COVID hit, I decided I was going to make lemonade out of lemons and devote a good deal of my quarantine time to Hey Ya. I did extensive rewiring, pulling out what seemed like miles of wire that wasn't doing anything. As a retired electrical engineer, I had frequent "WTF?" moments during the project. In spite of a few compromises that still wink at me Page 70 •
Latitude 38
• May, 2021
from time to time, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. In addition to the rewire, I also contracted with a local company to recanvas the boat and make new interior cushions. I put her on the hard, and Peter Vargas's team at Sea Tek gave Hey Ya a new top-to-bottom paint job and thru-hulls. They worked on Hey Ya for two months, and like a lot of boat owners, I became a familiar face at the yard. Hey Ya's refit-reveal was this year's four-race Vallarta Cup in January. Holy moly, we won our division! I know that crew — and the fact that there were only three boats in our division — had a lot to do with it, but damn! A win is a win. It had to be the new paint! The question was, were we ready to tackle the Banderas Bay Regatta?
N
ow in its 28th edition, the Banderas Bay Regatta has become an institution in western Mexico. Normally held in March, it began as a cruiser's race, and to this day cruiser racing has been the main emphasis of the event. Due to COVID, BBR XXVIII was 'postponed' in 2020, so when March rolled around this year, now-commodore Randy Hough was determined to make it happen. A noparty event was planned, something that a few of us were skeptical about. After all, the motto of the event is, "They had a party and a yacht race broke out."
One week prior to the first race, only 13 boats had signed up, and volunteers were seriously considering canceling. True to form, cruisers refuse to be driven by schedules. By the first day of the event, 27 boats had registered, and 25 showed up on the starting line. The event offers a fairly large list of diverse classes to choose from, anywhere from ORR and Performance for the racy guys, to Cruisers, JAM (Jib and Main), Jack and Jill (doublehanded), 20-somethings (boats less than 30 feet), multihulls, etc. After the registrations come in, the BBR committee apparently goes into a smoke-filled room to decide who goes in what classes. Hey Ya, being an Under-45-ft Cruiser, was put in the Over-45 Cruiser Class because there were only two under-45s. Sigh. I'm going to get my butt kicked by all those huge, long waterline, double-wheel monsters, and they're going to do it while serving martinis. It ain't fair! One other thing that BBR does for cruising boats that intend to race is handicapping, with each boat eventually getting a 'VYC Rating' based on Southern California PHRF, with additional benefit given to cruising boats for things like extra weight, age of sails, non-folding propellers, etc. Hey Ya is rated 149. I collected my crew, hardened racers all. Tim, Charity, Eric, Paul, Carol and Edda would get Hey Ya around the course for me, while I sheepishly called
