— ALL OUT, ALL WEEK
Spread — Mark Jones and Mark Howe's Bay Area-based TP 52 'Flash' storms off the line ahead of John MacLaurin's Davidson 70 'Pendragon VI', after tactician Jeff Thorpe called a perfect pin-end start; inset, Louis Kruk's Bay Area-based Beneteau 42S7 'Cirque' runs into the back of a wave.
more real estate, and a hospitality "tent" that looked more like a cross between a Christo art project and the kind of super spendy cocktail lounge we can't afford to drink in. Before we got to PV, we'd planned on just boat-hopping throughout the six race days and lay day in between. But we were serendipitously conscripted to sail on the Bay Area-based TP 52 Flash in Class 1, staffed by a full complement of Northern California sailors, and coskippered for the week by Bay Area sailors Mark Howe and owner Mark Jones. Project manager and tactician Jeff Thorpe of the Bay's Quantum loft led the group that consisted of Jay Crum, Paul
Allen, Dan Malpas, Chris Deaver, Joel Peterson, Ha-Ha XVI-vet Rob Walters, rigger Gilles Combrisson, Anthony Murphy, Bill Travis and former Latitude 38 coverboy, bowman Kevin Sullivan. Bill Turpin's Northern Californiabased R/P 77 Akela was fresh off taking the course record in the Vallarta race. The Akela team picked up right where they left off, winning Class 1 in the first race, a bay-traversing windward/leeward for the Governor's Cup, sailed in a 14- to 18-knot breeze. In a somewhat rare occurrence, the ORR rating system was used for the regatta. As most boats' ORR certificates are for offshore racing — where the system
is predominately used in the U.S. — the boats' inshore ratings weren't on everyone's minds beforehand, and some boats were still experimenting with optimizing their configuration prior to the start of the first race. The ratings would prove to be the source of quite a bit of debate, as ratings often are. But there were some legitimate gripes throughout the fleet. The most common was that setting the handicap Time Correction Factors before a race meant that they didn't accurately reflect the conditions. In some cases, your results had been tweaked due to someone's redress claim in the time-ontime handicapped races. ORR — formerly known as Americap — determines the TCF number based on a wind speed and direction matrix established after the races. US Sailing's ORR man, Dan