SKIP ALLAN boats. But in the case of Skip Allan and Wildflower, it couldn't be farther from the truth. A few days after the ship arrived in Long Beach, Skip was back home in Capitola. He had made his peace with the boat's fate and was happy to talk about what happened. As always, there is much more to this story than first meets the eye. But first, you have to 'meet' the man himself.
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LATITUDE/LADONNA
kip Allan was born into sailing. Or about as close as you can get — he was inside his mother's womb as she hiked out on a Star boat skippered by his father in the 1944 World Championships. Skip was born in February of the next year in Washington, DC, where his father, Bob, helped forecast weather for the D-Day invasion. After the war, the family moved west, and Bob became one of the movers and shakers in Southern California sailboat racing. Skip, brother Scott and sister Marilee cut their sailing teeth on Snowbirds inside Newport Harbor, and the family Lapworth 36 Holiday and later a Cal 40, Holiday Too, in the ocean. (So named because, as the Skip explained, "Nothing goes faster than a holiday.") Skip took to sailing like a fledgling bird to flight. He started racing Lehman 10s and later Stars, eventually owning one of each. He felt like he'd hit the big time when, in the late '50s, a cocky 16-yearold named Tom Blackaller showed up at the Newport Harbor YC. He was looking for crew for his beautiful varnished Star and picked Skip, partly for his local knowledge, and partly for the fact that — at age 12 — he was nice and light. By the time he was in his teens and early 20s, Allan was not only a skilled Star sailor, but an accomplished ocean racer whose resume rivaled that of sailors two or three times his age. In 1961, at age 16, he sailed his first TransPac with Jim Kilroy on the very first Kialoa, a 49-ft wooden S&S yawl. In '63 he sailed the race aboard Ticonderoga, Bob Johnson's legendary 72-ft Herreshoff ketch. He was back aboard in '65 when Big Ti — then almost 30 years old — thundered down the Molokai Channel in 40 knots of wind, crossing the finish in record time and beating the much newer Stormvogel by less than six minutes, boat for boat. It remains perhaps the greatest TransPac duel of all time.
Skip and 'Wildflower' head out the Golden Gate at the start of the Singlehanded TransPac.
to take him aboard, he did something few others in similar circumstances have done: He scuttled the boat. Those are the basic facts. Much has been written and said and blogged and riffed off those facts since then. Some armchair experts even went so far as to suggest that Allan 'freaked out'. Perhaps they can be forgiven, as that has been the case with other people on other Page 120 •
Latitude 38
• October, 2008
SPREAD AND LOWER INSET: COURTESY MSC TORONTO
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erdinand Magellan apparently never sailed very far north in the ocean he named Mare Pacificum — "peaceful sea". If he had, he might have encountered the area some modern sailors refer to as "gale alley". Located north and west of San Francisco, this several thousandsquare-mile stretch of water boasts the highest incidence of gales in the North Pacific from June through August. If Magellan had sailed there, we have no doubt we'd all be referring to this largest ocean on Planet Earth by a name decidedly less 'peaceful', if not downright devilish. In 30-some years of publishing Latitude 38, we've run more than a few stories of boats being lost in "gale alley". Many were within a few hundred miles of San Francisco, or much closer than that to the coasts of Washington or Oregon. Some were on the way back from Hawaii, some were heading down the coast to Mexico, some were on the homestretch of circumnavigations. All were lost when the weather turned foul, the seas turned big and sailing suddenly wasn't fun anymore. Fortunately, most of the sailors involved in these incidents lived to tell their tales. The latest victim was Wildflower, Skip Allan's custom Wylie 27. In late August, on the the way back to the West Coast from Hawaii — where he had won the Singlehanded TransPac in July — Allan and Wildflower were caught in a gale about 400 miles from home. After running under shortened sail or bare poles for more than two days — with the prospect of at least three more days of the same — on September 1 Skip requested to be taken off Wildflower. Before boarding a container ship which had diverted
In 1967, Skip and younger brother Scott 'borrowed the car keys' from Dad and did the TransPac on Holiday Too with a bunch of friends. They not only won the race overall, they were the youngest crew ever to compete. Skip was 22 and the average crew age was just 25. (That 'record' was broken by an even younger crew on another Cal 40 in the '69 race.) And so it went. By the time he moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford, Skip Allan was one of the most talented and sought-after sailors on the West Coast. And he just got better. In the early '70s, he helped in the design concept of Dave Allen's breakthrough Mull 40 Improbable, as well as Allen's next world-beater, the Holland 40 Imp. In 1977, Imp was the David that slew the Goliaths of IOR. She won SORC, the Fastnet, the Big Boat Series and was high-point boat at the Admiral's Cup. Skip was the sailing master and one of the primary drivers for all those events. Two years later, the boat returned to the fray. Although she didn't do as well sailing against newer boats, she gained perhaps a bigger measure of notoriety by surviving the infamous '79 Fastnet Race storm. In what remains the most disastrous sailing race of all time — and the largest peacetime ocean rescue operation — 146 of the 306 boats in that event were rolled to 90° or beyond, and 38 were rolled over entirely in waves 30 feet or higher.