Mayhem wins out in San Francisco

A report form the US-IRC Pacific Coast Championship

San Francisco Bay was the scene for the US-IRC Pacific Coast Championship August 3-5 sailed out of St Francis Yacht Club.  The 17-boat international IRC fleet sailed four races over three days. In three races the top four finishers were no more than four minutes apart on corrected time.
 
The overall winner was Bob Wolfe from Vancouver sailing his TP 52 Mayhem. San Francisco’s John Siegel was second in his Wylie 42 Scorpio and third was Mike Garl sailing the Beneteau 40.7 White Dove. Scorpio edged White Dove into third on a tiebreaker.
 
"This regatta provides an ideal format to test the preparedness, performance of the boats and skills of the crews," said Regatta Chairman, Peter Szasz. Racing consisted of a 28 mile offshore race, sailed in 6 to 9 knots of wind on Friday, buoy racing in 10 to 25 knots of wind Saturday and the classic 'Bay Tour' on Sunday.
 
"For the Pacific Coast US-IRC championships," said Norm Davant from California Sailing. "We had 17 boats. This was the largest fleet to date for an IRC event on the bay, not counting the Big Boat Series. The fleet is growing all the time for this event. Both US and Canadian boats came from up and down the coast.
 
"We had a variety of boats- old, new, big, small. We had a TP 52 first, an older Wylie 42 second a production Beneteau 40.7 third, a Schumacher 54 fourth, a Sydney 38 fifth. We had a wide variety of conditions, light, medium, heavy, lots of current to contend with, the scoring was very close in many races.
 
"The best set up, best sailed boats are doing well regardless of age," Davant concluded. "In San Francisco I think the IRC rule works better than anything else we have used for a long time."

The Friday race, 28 miles in a light breeze with a flood current, separated the fleet with Mayhem winning by 00:06:10.8 over White Dove. Racing was closer and more competitive in both Saturday races.  In the morning race, Sy Kleinman’s Swiftsure edged out Scorpio by just 45.5 seconds and Mayhem was third two seconds later. Saturday afternoon Scorpio was first leading Swiftsure by 00:01:17.5 and White Dove by 00:02:03
 
John Siegel did well Saturday as the wind built to 25 in the final race of the day. " Scorpio likes lots of wind," Siegel said. "We had an abundance in races 2 and 3.  Despite our problems with having to give way to the start of the 1D35 fleet, we corrected 1:17 ahead of Swiftsure and two minutes ahead of White Dove. At the conclusion of Saturday's racing we stood in second place, one point behind Mayhem and a point ahead of White Dove. We felt very good with our position and realized we had a shot at winning the regatta and the West Coast IRC Championship."
 
Sunday morning arrived with dense fog. The committee set course Q, a bay tour… a long course with a lot of variety.  Mayhem finished the race in about two and a half hours, with White Dove correcting 2:52 behind and Scorpio 48 seconds behind White Dove.