Bold Forbes, the boat, is on track to achieve what
Bold Forbes and Smarty Jones, the horses, couldn’t manage: win a Triple
Crown of sorts.

Jack Franco drove Ed Cummins’ J/105, recent winner of Southern California’s
prestigious Lipton Cup for Balboa Yacht Club, as it ran down Dennis and
Sharon Case’s Wings in the stretch to claim victory in the largest class of
the 20th North Sails Race Week Sunday on a tiebreaker.

The photo finish triumph also brought Bold Forbes the Boat of the Week
award as winner of the most competitive class.

Cummins now plans to campaign the boat throughout the country, including
the New York Yacht Club’s Race Week in July and the J/105 Nationals at
Marion, Mass. in September the third jewel of the crown.

Wings, a steady contender from San Diego, sailed into the last of six races
with a seven-point lead, but weather conditions—a stark switch from the
first two days of breezy southwesterlies—were made to order for shuffling
fleets.

In light southeasterly air of 8 to 9 knots oscillating through 30 degrees,
Bold Forbes, named for the 1976 Kentucky Derby winner, finished second
behind Tom Coates’ Charade as Wings struggled to ninth place.

That left them tied at 24 points, and since each had one win it was Bold
Forbes’ two seconds to Wings’ one that nailed the tiebreaker.

Bold Forbes started quietly with an 11th place in the Friday race, then
settled into a 3-2-1-5-2 groove. Partway through the last race Sunday when
they saw Wings get tangled up in a crowd of boats, Franco said to the crew,
“Hey, guys, we can win this thing.”

In the marquee Farr 40 class, John Kilroy’s Samba Pa Ti sailed into the
last day with a seemingly insurmountable lead.
Forget seemingly.

Scott Harris and Alexandra Geremia’s Crocodile Rock took its best shot by
winning the first of two races, with Samba Pa Ti fourth, but even with some
aggressive pre-race match racing—Chris Larson calling tactics for
Crocodile, Paul Cayard for Samba—the best the Crocodiles could do was to
cut the margin in half with a third to Samba’s sixth in the last race.

It was Samba Pa Ti’s fourth win in as many Farr 40 events in Southern
California recently, with the class Worlds at San Francisco in September
as the goal.

“I don’t feel we’re perfect, but we have upward momentum,” Kilroy said.

With the hard campaigning, Kilroy said, “I’m lucky to have the most
supportive sailing wife in the world. Catherine was captain of the Brown
sailing team.”

Crocodile rode Samba deep past the pin end before the last start, and Samba
issue.

“We just said, ‘We’re going to be conservative and not take any chances,’
“Kilroy said. We knew it was going to be dicey.”

Oscar Krinsky’s 1D48, Chayah, from Long Beach, with Walter Johnson driving,
won out among the event’s biggest boats in PHRF 1. But Jay Steinbeck’s
Margaritaville, a newly modified Andrews 52, found the light wind to its
liking. With a minus 60 rating that had it giving 40 seconds per mile to
Chayah and the other 1D48, Lew Beery’s It’s OK, Margaritaville, with Pete
Heck driving, continued to finish far ahead in every race but this time won
and finished third on corrected handicap time, as well, leaving it second
overall.

Given a choice of conditions, Steinbeck said, “Light air is much better for
us. It’s the weight of the boat relative to the sail area.”

Heck said, “We have an overlapping jib we use in light air that nobody else
had.”

Their closest competition, boat for boat, came from Alec Oberschmidt’s
Reichel/Pugh 50, Staghound, with North Sails president Gary Weisman as
tactician.

Heck said, “The results don’t show how well those guys sailed. I told our
guys, ‘We’re racing Staghound. We can’t see the other guys back there.’ ”

John Carroll’s Arana, a heavy 24-year-old Dencho 51, suffered in the light
air with a ninth and a fifth but held onto first place in PHRF 2 for a two
by two points over Paul Kent’s Farr 395, Chance, from San Francisco.

Kent’s team collected the Lydia Kent Family Trophy for the best family
performance. The award is named for his late mother, who lived in Long
Beach. The crew included Kent’s brother Steve and sons Robert and Peter.

The biggest surprise winner was Gary Mozer, a 44-year-old real estate
investor from Long Beach, in the six-boat J/109 class. It was Mozer’s first
regatta. He started taking sailing lessons three months ago, took delivery
of his boat one week before the event and after two days of practice, with
some help from an able amateur crew, drove it to three wins, two seconds
and a third.

He said he knows “it’s not that easy. We worked very hard. It’s
concentration and teamwork. Just watch the telltales on the jib and listen
to what your crew is telling you.”

Bruce Ayres’ Monsoon team won five consecutive Melges 24 races before
stumbling in the last one.

Ayres’ brother Don, a crew member, said, “We had a bad start, missed one
shift and that was it.”

They dropped out, knowing they were already assured of first place.

“It would have been nice to have that other first, though” Don Ayres said.

Some of the one-designs also sailed for class championships. Samba Pa Ti
and Dave Voss’s Schock 35, Piranha, won their Pacific Coast titles, and
Chris Winnard’s Disaster Area crew from San Diego won the Santa 20 Western
Regionals.

Piranha won four of six races—including the last after returning to the
line from an early start.

Dick Velthoen and Paul De Freitas’ J/35 Rival was named PHRF Boat of the
Week for its victory in PHRF 4, with no finish worse than third among 12
boats.

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