Swiftsure 2007 on Atalanta

The Swiftsure International Yacht Race celebrates its sixty-fourth year with record breaking conditions.
By Dennis Palmer

The race was held on May 26 & 27, 2007, starting at Clover Point near Victoria B.C. The event features races of several lengths, the longest being the Swiftsure Lightship Classic at 138.7 nautical miles. In total, 206 boats participated, with 22 going the distance on the long course. The long course ventures out the notorious Straits of Juan de Fuca, which acts as a venturi to accelerate the wind from the Pacific between the Olympic mountains in Washington State and the mountains on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. When strong wind and current are from opposite directions, the Straits are infamous for huge, square waves. The race course continues beyond the Straits into the Pacific Ocean, where the swells take their toll on boats and crew. The rounding mark is a Canadian Navy vessel anchored at Swiftsure Bank.

I raced the long course aboard the yacht Atalanta, a 74-foot ocean racing ketch, designed by Bill Tripp and built in 1968 in the Abeking & Rasmussen yard in Bremen, Germany. Atalanta was originally named Ondine II, and was commissioned by Huey Long. She is now owned by real estate developer Richard Hedreen and her home port is Seattle.

Atalanta has a long history of ocean racing successes, including line honors in the Sydney Hobart race with Ted Turner aboard. She also claimed line honors twice in the Newport to Bermuda race. In a century of Newport to Bermuda races, only two boats have exceeded Atalanta's average speed of 9.4 knots: Nirvana and Pyewacket. Atalanta twice won Swiftsure on corrected time, and held the corrected time record for ten years until it was broken this year.

Atalanta is an massive, powerful vessel. The numbers below give you some idea of her magnitude.

• Displacement: 118,000 lbs. (That equals 3.5 Santa Cruz 70s)


• Spinnaker sail area: 5000 Square Feet (That equals two 2500 sq. ft. single story rambler houses)


• Main mast 100 feet tall, with a diameter so large you can't wrap your arms around it.


• Mizzen mast taller than the main mast on most 40' boats


• LOA 79 feet


• 18 foot beam


• Wire rope shrouds: 1" in diameter


• Weight of #1 genoa: 320 lbs. It takes 4 to 6 people just to get the sail on deck.


• Two coffee grinders with stations for 4 people, linked to primary winches about 30" in diameter.
  

The race started under cloudy skies on Saturday at 10:10 with winds of 10 to 15 knots from the west. The wind quickly built to 20 to 25 knots, tapered off a bit near Neah Bay, and cranked back up to 30+ knots when we got outside the Straits into the ocean.

Atalanta sails upwind in a strong breeze like a locomotive. We reached peak speeds of about 11.5 knots on the way out the straits, and rarely dropped below nine knots. Imagine a heel angle of 40 to 45 degrees on a boat this big. With an 18 foot beam, the windward rail is about nine feet higher than the leeward rail. That's as high as sitting on the roof of your house looking down at the yard. Not a place for somebody with a fear of heights. Climbing from the leeward rail to the windward rail is like rock climbing on a slippery, wet surface. When the crew sits on the high side, you have to contstantly brace your self from fallling down to the low side into frigid 48 degree water. The leeward rail is often submerged during high wind, with a river about a foot deep running across the deck at 10 knots, fast enough to sweep people off the deck in the blink of an eye.

Check out this video of Atalanta running her rail during the Swiftsure race:

View the Atalanta Photo Library: www.flickr.com/groups/atalanta

We had a few mechanical problems during the race. Our hydraulic pump would not function. Even though we were using a suit of racing headsails, the boat is set up with a furling headstay for cruising. The furler was stuck with the grooves for the headsails 90 degrees to the centerline of the boat, so there was lots of friction for doing headsail changes. It took four guys grinding hard to hoist a new headsail inside the old one. With all that friction, dousing the headsail was a lot more work than usual, so we were pretty burned out after several sail changes on the way out to the windward mark.

The wind usually lightens up as you pass from the narrow Straits into the ocean, so we shifted up to the light #1 genoa as the wind abated. Unfortunately, the wind picked right back up to about 32 knots. The ocean swell was coming from a slightly different direction than the wind waves, and the combined peaks were taller than the boom on Atalanta, which is about 12 feet off the water. With 118,000 pounds of displacement, we blasted through the waves, causing spray to fire hose the crew. The light #1 was not up to the task of handling both a 32 knot breeze and the shock loading caused by bashing through the swells, and it exploded with the sound of thunder. We quickly doused the remains of the #1 and hoisted the #2 genoa as we were approaching the mark, with a gorgeous sunset of red, gold and yellow showing between the cloud cover and the ocean.

We rounded the mark at about 21:30, and hoisted the 5000 square foot spinnaker. Finally, the boat stood back up on her feet, and the crew could walk around the deck without using rock climbing techniques. The knotmeter climbed to 14.5 knots as we surfed down the big swells in the 30 knot wind, and I was trimming the kite with a kink in my neck from looking up a hundred feet to see if the luff was curling. We had a bright moon to guide our way back home, so I could see the spinnaker trim well.

The wind reduced to about 20 to 25 knots as we entered the Straits, and the ocean swells diminished so just rythmic wind waves remained, making for a very comfortable motion of the boat through the water. The stars were out, the moon was at our back, and we could see the running lights of our competition and big freighters and cruise ships we needed to steer clear of.

I went below at about midnight for some much needed rest, and got to relax for about 40 minutes before there was a call for all hands on deck to execute a gybe. Oh well, I would be able to sleep when I finished the race the next morning.

As we approached Victoria, we rounded Race Rocks, where the wind and current always accelerate. It was still dark, and we were threading the needle between rocks using the GPS, since we could not see them. We had a 3 knot current on the nose, and the wind built back up to about 30 knots as we approached the place where we needed to gybe. As we gybed, the mast end of the spinnaker pole travelled way too high on the mast, and the mast crew could not get it back down quickly with such great loads on it. Because of that, the grinders were not able to tension the new guy. I was in the cockpit, handling both the old spinnaker sheet and the new spinnaker sheet, and I could not let the old sheet go until the guy was tensioned. When that finally happened, I turned my attention to trimming in the new sheet with the help of two grinders, but the spinnaker was flogging violently by this time and it exploded with a boom. It took a while to haul down the shreds, and we were still making 11 knots without a spinnaker. We hoisted the #2 genoa, turned about 30 degrees to port and the lights of Victoria came into view about ten miles away. The rest of the race was a beam reach at 12 knots of boatspeed with no more tacking required, so the crew was able to relax and enjoy a sleigh ride to the finish line as the sun rose behind Victoria.

We crossed the line at 5:16 Sunday morning, and our corrected time earned us second place in division B, about a minute and half out of first place. Overall, we corrected out to seventh place for all divisions, and five of the six boats ahead of us shattered our old course record for corrected time.

Swiftsure Lightship Classic 2007 Top Ten Overall On Corrected Time

1. Coruba: Nelson Marek 68 (17:21:48)


2. Braveheart: TP52 (17:34:41)


3. Neptune's Car: Santa Cruz 70 (18:09:38)


4. Mayhem: TP52 (18:09:43)


5. Icon :Perry 65 (18:22:40)


6. Finale: Swan 46 (18:41:41 )


7. Atalanta: Tripp 74 (18:43:15)


8. Marda Gras: Santa Cruz 52 (19:12:22)


9. Night Runner: Perry 42 (21:28:05)


10. Jam: J160 (22:03:04)

For complete results, visit http://www.swiftsure.org/ for the Swiftsure website.

After we passed through the safety inspection and got the boat moored and put away, I checked into the Empress Hotel where I soaked my sore muscles in the hot tub and enjoyed a hot breakfast.

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