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Fifty years ago, Bill Lee was a controversial designer. Merlin was still two years in the offing, and the Wizard wouldn’t be Commodore of Transpac YC for another 35 years, but a lot hung on the question of whether or not Stu Cowan could repeat as an overall winner with his Lee-designed, 35-foot Chutzpah.
The surfing contest that had begun ten years earlier, with the advent of Cal 40s, was in full swing. The ULDB revolution took it a step farther, and not everybody liked the ULDB thing. Not everybody liked the thought of crossing an ocean on freeze-dried foods just to compete with the Chutzpahs of the world.
We’re talking 1975.
There was also the Ragtime question. The skinny, hard chined lightweight, born in New Zealand, had shown her heels to the fleet in ’73. A repeat for the Barn Door trophy, Ragtime wasn’t a strong bet, however, with Windward Passage returning and new boats, too, in the form of Ondine, fresh off a Newport to Bermuda record. There was also the 72-foot Ballyhoo from Australia, where one fleet after another had been treated to views of her disappearing transom.
The grand, classic Alden schooners Serena and Constellation couldn’t be counted out, depending.
These many years on, looking back, it was quite the race.
“What comes back clearly,” says Bill Lee, “is navigating by sextant and dead reckoning. If the sun came out, you woke the navigator.
“I went with Rod Park on Panache, which was 40 feet, and those were the days when we lined up the boats at Ala Wai in order of finish. So, there were all these tall masts, then Panache, then more tall masts.”
Chutzpah would win overall, corrected time, for a second year in a row, feeding Stu Cowan’s enthusiasm and, as Bill Lee put it, “Stu liked for people to know that he was enthusiastic. He was large at Waikiki Yacht Club, but he described his job on the boat as pouring hot water over the freeze drieds while the good guys managed the boat.”
Waikiki Yacht Club Staff Commodore Michael Roth writes, “When Stuart announced to anyone who cared to listen that he would win the 1973 race, no one believed him. However, Chutzpah created a good deal of consternation among the Transpac officials of the day, and consequently, the day before the start of the 1973 race, her rating was raised to 31+. Notwithstanding, Chutzpah finished first overall, winning Class D, the Dillingham Trophy for First Hawaiian Boat, and the King David Kalakaua Cup for First Overall. For the 1975 race, her rating went to 32+, but she came in First Overall again.”
WYC proudly displays Chutzpah’s trophies from her big wins, but, the last owner reports, she went away. Chutzpah was cut up and discarded “a few years ago.”
Ragtime never went away. Instead, a repeat Barn Door launched her into the realm of legends. Navigator Ben Mitchell, a legend in his own right, took Ragtime deep south early in the ‘75 race, no regrets. A young Benny Mitchell sailed that year on John Calley’s 53-foot Sunset Boulevard, and they went south too, but not so far south. Today Benny remembers dad coming over the radio to ask, “How are things up there at the North Pole?”
With a Class A handicap win looking likely for Sunset Boulevard, the answer would have been, not bad. When they broke the boom, Mitchell recalls, “We banded it with a sacrificed pipe berth and were good to gybe in 40 minutes.” These 50 years later, Mitchell plans to sail the 2025 race on Roy Disney’s Andrews 70, Pyewacket, a boat born for downwind racing.
In a boat definitely NOT designed for downwind racing, two generations of Roys received their Transpac baptismals with the S&S centerboarder Shamrock. The younger Disney can laugh about it now. He shares this photo taken from another boat (probably in passing) as Shamrock was rolling (and rolling) its way to the islands. Shamrock was a classic beauty with a yawl rig, “and we took the mizzen out to see if that would calm the rolling and broaching,” Disney says.
Not quite.
Shamrock stayed in the family, as a cruising boat.
The 1975 fleet of 65 boats sailed with Transpac ratings intended to shake things up from the outcomes of 1973. But that wasn’t enough to prevent 14 repeats. With an extra four hours of penalty to carry, Ragtime dropped from second in Class A to 7th and 52nd overall. But the Barn Door swung open in 9:23:54:51, shaving about 14 hours off her 1973 time. As navigators go, Ben Mitchell was a force. He had seen the High splitting and weakening. He dipped away from it as far as he dared, got the breeze he was betting on, and still covered only 2,359 miles, Point Fermin to Diamond Head.
A few days in, Windward Passage had 24-hour runs of only 156, 193, 149 and 142. On July 10, Ballyhoo logged 93 miles. Jack Smock’s history of Transpac does not include Ballyhoo owner Jack Rooklyn’s appraisal of our biennial surfing-to-Hawaii (sometimes) festival. But we know that the rush down the final miles of the Molokai Channel tends to induce amnesia in spades.
Chutzpah, 35 feet, logged only 7 miles less than Ondine, 79 feet, between July 6 and July 10. Considering that Chutzpah had weighed in at a svelte 6,500 pounds, we can understand. But the High re-formed along about day 11, and with it came the breeze. Daily runs for Class A soon hit the right numbers.
And that was then, and this is now.
Ragtime, now in the hands of Tina Roberts, is all new, and not, and she’ll keep the bets coming till the leaders close on Coco Head and pick up the squeeze-play rush into Diamond Head.
Roberts took over Ragtime when her partner, Chris Welsh, died suddenly, and she has since “done all the things that Chris would have done to the boat, and more,” she says. “We took her down to the wood and came back with two layers of carbon fiber over the original plywood. The new carbon mast is the same height as the old one, but now we have a square top main and more sail, with EC3 rigging instead of the old rod rigging.”
Ragtime shed 2,000 pounds, Roberts says: “You lay her over 24 degrees, and she sits on her chine and just begs to surf.”
There are plenty of newer sleds ready to give Ragtime a run for it, but you’d have to walk a mile to find a boat with such charisma.
Fifty years ago? The winter before Transpac, Doug Jorgensen was along for a ride on Red Rooster in a Whitney Series race when he looked at the loads in the mainsheet/traveler arrangement and remarked that he saw a weak point. Assured it was fine, he kept on looking at it, imagining next steps if it really did let go. And it did.
“It was fixed in a matter of seconds, because I had already thought that through,” Jorgensen recalls. “Suddenly I was part of the crew for the race to Hawaii.”
Which started July 4, 1975, off Point Fermin, everybody together because that’s how we used to do it.
“Jim Barber brought along a steamy novel that had just hit the stands, The Other Side of Midnight. In the slow stretch, half the guys on the crew were reading it.”
When things picked up, they learned a lot about their 42-foot Carter design.
Jorgensen says, “That was a difficult boat to sail. If you set up just right on a wave, to go straight down, you were fine. If you heeled, you were going to broach. To windward, to leeward, all depended on which way you heeled.
“That’s how we lost the book. Right overboard. The mood was touchy for a bit.”
Spoiler alert: “Sidney Sheldon’s novel, The Other Side of Midnight, concludes in an intricate web of ambition, betrayal, and revenge, with the fates of the leading characters unraveling with devastating clarity.” It’s just as well to not have that on your mind on that last gybe to the big red buoy.
“2025 is my fiftieth year of Transpac,” Jorgensen says. “This time it’s with my own boat, Picosa, a J/111. [Winner of the 2025 Islands Race.] I’m going with my son and four of his buddies. We’re not cutting edge, but it should be a good ride.”
And family crews are one of the great traditions of Transpac.
Reading matter on board? We’ll have to get back to you on that.
PS: This piece could not have been written without Jack Smock’s 719-page history of Transpac, 1906-1979. But Jack himself is almost lost to history. Does anyone, anywhere have a photo of Jack Smock? Personal stories?