Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico.
A race for the 'bold and fearless' - and Kitty James
Kitty James would have loved it.
Even as many of her old sailing favorites were sweeping into Mexican waters in the Newport Ocean Sailing Association’s 63rd Newport to Ensenada International Yacht Race Saturday, the longtime editor, writer and photographer for the former Santana magazine lost her battle with cancer.
James, 65, never missed trekking south to report the race for the bible of Southern California sailboat racing until the popular publication slipped from the scene a few years ago. At the start of Sunday’s awards ceremony NOSA Commodore Doug Jones led the crowd in the sun swept courtyard of the Bahia Hotel in paying tribute to her before the distribution of exotic hardware started.
Then every other winner seemed to be from James’s old home ports in Orange County: eight first places in all, including four for Dana Point Yacht Club.
One of the latter was collected by Cindy Wynne’s team on Sol Mate, a Beneteau 35S, as the best of three all-woman crews among the 217 boats entered, 198 of which started and 192 finished.
The last racing division boat to finish was Steve Ginder’s Exit Strategy, a Jeanneau 46.5 from Dana West YC that also posted the slowest corrected handicap time when it crossed the line at 5:58:27 Saturday afternoon—a double whammy that clinched the booby prize, the coveted Brass Spittoon.
A day earlier, Taxi Dancer, owned by Dick Compton, Jim Absley and Tom Parker of the Santa Barbara YC, showed it hasn’t aged in about a quarter-century of competition. The sleek bright yellow Reichel/Pugh 68 finished 70 1/2 minutes behind Lorenzo Berho’s faster Peligroso but that was close enough to correct out on handicap time to win the Maxi class—and, as final tallies showed Sunday, to outscore all the racing division boats on corrected time and collect a $6,500 Lamborghini diamond watch.
They’ll have to share the watch three ways, but one had to wonder how all of those other venerable rival ultralight sleds felt about choosing to do another race on the same weekend.
Parker said, “I think a lot of people worry about Mexico, but it was fun.”
In other strong classes, Mike Warns’s Fifty-One-Fifty, a Santa Cruz 50 from Ventura Sailing Club, won PHRF-A and Bill Gibbs’s Afterburner catamaran from Pierpont Bay YC won the ORCA class for multihulls. read more »
