SIGHTINGS
Kenichi Horie and 'Suntory Mermaid III' departed San Francisco Bay on March 26.
Franciscans who remember his first voyage here in 1962, when the 23-year-old Kenichi sailed into San Francisco Bay after 94 days at sea aboard the original plywood Mermaid. Now 83, the apparently unflappable Horie continues striving to set records while carrying a message of environmental continued in middle column of next sightings page
a chat with paul cayard — continued would be a 35- to 40-knot day. In those conditions you don't actually have the spinnaker up, it's faster to just be on the jib, ripping along doing 30-35 knots. That's not so scary, because the top end of the spinnaker is where it's really hard to steer the boat. We would think of our friends who were lovers of sailing but amateurs, and how fun it would be if we could helicopter them onto the boat just for a four-hour watch. They wouldn't want to stay when they turned the lights off. You go from here to Hawaii in the Transpac? That's a mild adventure. That's beautiful, and I did it with my kids to give them a taste of it, but it's nothing like the Southern Ocean." Dave Migdal, the PR guy, asked Paul, "Do times like that make you question your love of the sport?" "It's very much on the edge of sanity. One time we pushed it too hard in race mode and got into some trouble. We tipped the boat over on its side. There was a guy up the mast at the time. It was blowing 40 and snowing and 2 a.m. and it was really brutal. We thought we were going to lose him overboard, but he hung on somehow. The boat broached and was lying on its side for about four minutes. Until we were able to cut the halyard and get the spinnaker down, the boat was being shaken by the spinnaker being whipped by the 40-knot wind. The guy up the mast was clipped on, but he was getting battered, and he had to just stay down below for three or four days after that, he was so bruised. I don't know if there was a moon that night but I can still kind of see the whole scene." The new Ocean Globe Race will start on September 10, 2023. To follow the adventure, see www.oceangloberace.com. — chris
LATITUDE / CHRIS
LATITUDE / JOHN
for kenichi horie
*UNE s
Latitude 38
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