New Record Set - West Marine Pacific Cup

By Mary Swift-Swan

The story of the 2004 Pacific Cup run,The thirteenth running of this ocean race of fun.Forty-nine boats started the desperate dash,The weather was nice and they did not crash

Bobbi Tosse, Navigator on Bodacious

Mari Cha IV threw long shadows setting a blazing pace,
Yet with a sky high handicap did not win the race.
Only one mast and no rudders broke.
A first that 48 of 49 finished, a truly lucky stroke.

Mary Swift-Swan

Mari Cha IV Blazes across the Pacific
English owner Robert Miller Mari Cha IV is believed to have spent around $20M to craft this dream vessel. The all carbon fiber racing machine has set a new all time amazingly hard-to-beat record of 5 days and 5 hours sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii breaking Roy Disney’s Pyewacket record, set in 1998, of 6 days, 14 hours and 22 minutes. Mari Cha is on a 3-year mission to break as many records as they can before making themselves available for corporate charter or sponsorship. Before the Mari Cha IV Pacific Cup effort, the team smashed the Atlantic crossings record as her maiden outing. One of the many targets for this stunning team is the around the world in 80 days Jules Vern record. I think they have a very good chance to change boating as we know it.

Captain Jef d’Etiveaud , on the way into Hawaii, sent Bay Crossings this e-mail: “220 miles to go. It has been a good run so far. Fast start out of SFO and more importantly not a slow moment so far. High average is what breaks record s, so we hope that we will bring the boat safely to Hawaii. We keep pushing to get the best possible time.

I have always liked being at sea and this trip is as enjoyable as it can be. Champagne sailing as we call it here. Being so close to the finish brings a bit of pressure into the trip which up to now was quite easy: easy start, clear weather pattern, easy routing, good bye point and often the perfect condition for the boat.”
Jef
Returning, Jef also posted a missive on their website highlighted below:
“The Pacific Cup was a great race. Well prepared by the permanent crew (Damien, Vincent, and the boys), the boat arrived in Kaneohe Bay with nothing to repair. Our full racing schedule meant turn around 3 days after our arrival in Hawaii for the delivery back to California where we will put the boat on a ship to get to the Med in time for Les Voiles de St. Tropez…

One (the major race) organizer worth thanking is the Pacific Cup Yacht Club. They run a first-class event which is slowly but surely taking first place on the Trans Pacific Front. Their policy to open the race to large yachts is certainly the way to go-we hope that some day not too far from now we will see 5 super maxis on the start line of the Pac Cup! We will be there to defend our title and try to take the race all class on handicap!”

Held every other year, on even years, the next few events could get even more fun to follow. For more, go to www.maricha4.com or www.pacificcup.org.


ROGUE WAVES Paris – “European satellites have given confirmation to terrified mariners who describe seeing freak waves as tall as 10-story buildings, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. “Rogue waves” have been the anecdotal cause behind scores of sinkings of vessels as large as container ships and supertankers over the past two decades. One captain of a ship whose bridge windows were blown out by just such a wave, leaving the cruise ship without power for 2 hours, said it was like looking up at the white cliffs of Dover. But evidence to support the numerous claims has been sketchy, and many marine scientists have clung to statistical models that say monstrous deviations from the normal sea state only occur once every thousand years.

ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites to monitor the oceans with their radar. The radar sends back “imagettes” — a picture of the sea surface in a rectangle measuring 6 by 2.5 miles that was taken every120 miles. Around 30,000 separate “imagettes” were taken by the two satellites over a three-week project called “MaxWave” in 2001.

In a recent press release it was brought to light that during the brief test period the satellites identified more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe that measured more than 25 meters (81.25 feet) in height. These waves exist “in higher numbers than anyone expected,” said Wolfgang Rosenthal, senior scientist with the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, who pored over the data. “The next step is to analyze if they can be forecasted,” he said. Perfect Storm’s waves were said to be a 100- year storm, perhaps not.