Hobie Cat Racing — Two

Hobie Cats are beach boats. There is no centerboard or keel, the rudders kick up in shallow water, etc. You just sail toward the beach, jump off when the rudders kick up, and work with the waves to get it further up the beach. That’s the easy part.

The hard part is getting your Hobie off of the trailer and down to the beach. The two hulls and trampoline (deck) of a Hobie 16 weigh about 300 pounds. You and your crew mate need to round up four other Hobie 16 sailors to help. The six of you hoist your Hobie on your shoulders and carry it down to the beach. It’s not always easy to conscript helpers if you arrive a little late.

Learning to “step” the 26-foot mast is the trickiest part of rigging a Hobie 16. There are seven cables and a couple of halyards to deal with, and you have to keep it balanced while you pivot it up. The mast is not very heavy, but your grip is only about five feet from the base. It only takes about 30 seconds though, once you’ve got it down pat. The rest of setting up a Hobie is easy once you know where everything goes. [video]

In the rest of these segments on Hobie Cat racing, I’m going to relate some of the highlights I remember from the many regattas I sailed in. The next one was an early one.

Folsom

Regatta that is, not Prison. There are three fleets (classes) in Hobie racing: C fleet for beginning, B for intermediate, and A for expert sailors. You progress when you consistently win races in your current class. I was sailing in C fleet this first time at Folsom Reservoir.

There are two reasons this regatta was memorable — light winds and a fabulous dinner. There were about 150 Hobies there, and Dan Popylisen was crewing for me.

A Fleet always starts first, B Fleet starts 5 minutes later, and C Fleet starts 5 minutes after that. Usually, A fleet will finish more than 5 minutes before B, and C will be well behind that. That prevents a tangle of classes at the finish line.

The first day the winds were light and fluky. By the time C fleet started, I could see that A fleet was stuck with no wind, and B fleet was sailing into the same dead spot.

Normally you try to take the most direct path around the race course marks. I decided to stay about a half mile away from the glue pot, which made our course about a mile longer. My strategy paid off. We finished about five minutes before the first A fleet boat did! The rest of the boats finished well behind that.

Dinner was a special affair (and never surpassed). The race committee hired a mobile BBQ outfit to cater dinner for about 400 people (skippers, crew, and others). The slow-roasted beef, beans, and such came in a truck with a heated, insulated box. They pulled out what they needed as they served the meal.

I don’t remember how well I raced in the other races that weekend, but I did win a third-place A Fleet trophy a few years later.

Monterey Bay

I was a member of Fleet 17, in Santa Cruz. We sponsored a regatta across the bay in Monterey each year. The beach there is beautiful, and the waves on the beach are usually small. There are fishing and other big boats to contend with out in the bay, but it’s all good.

One year Mark, Nancy, and their friend Mitch Hulich drove down to watch. We were going to meet in Monterey Veteran’s Memorial Park and set up camp. Unfortunately the campground was completely filled by a big motorcycle rally. It’s a long story, but we didn’t connect the first night because of the confusion. They slept in the car down at Fisherman’s wharf, and I don’t remember what Dan and I did. We found them the next morning and decided to figure out later what to do about sleeping that night. We tried another campground that night, but it was full too. The ranger suggested we drive down the Big Sur Highway and find a place on the side of the road.

So we got back in our cars and headed south. I finally spotted a good spot where there was sort of a hedge along the road. We decided to put our gear over the hedge, and then park the cars further on down the road to obfuscate the actual location of our campsite. In the morning we carried our gear down to the cars. I had my tent in my old Army duffel bag. As I was loading it in the trunk an incoherent denizen came up from under the bridge. He spotted my duffel bag and mumbled something. I finally figured out that he wanted me to know that he had been in the Army too. Must have been Vietnam. I didn’t know whether to engage with him further or be very afraid. We left quickly and drove back to Monterey for another day of racing

Santa Cruz

Of course, Fleet 17 sponsored several regattas in Santa Cruz each year. It’s a great place for Hobie Cats. There’s a good breeze flowing most of the time, and there are often nice waves rolling by offshore. By “nice” I mean five foot crests about 40 – 50 feet apart.

I know it doesn’t look that way, but water doesn’t flow along with waves (except for breaking waves). The water just oscillates up and down with each crest. If you handle things right you can slide down the front of a crest and then turn parallel to the waves when you reach the bottom. That way you get a little boost from each wave.

That all works well unless you catch up with the wave ahead and bury the bows in the back of it. If you do you will pitch-pole, which means the Hobie suddenly upends and lands upside-down in the water. You are left floating somewhere nearby. You don’t win many races that way.

I remember one race at Santa Cruz in particular. At the start of the race, the wind was about 20 knots. As it progressed, the wind came up to 30 knots or so. Dan and I were handling it nicely, but it seemed everyone else had capsized or were sailing too cautiously. We were a quarter mile ahead of everyone by the time we rounded the leeward mark and headed for the finish line. The wind was getting stronger too, and we were enjoying the ride.

Then we heard three gunshots from the race committee boat. What the heck? That’s the signal to abandon the race. Why? When I looked around, the spume from the waves nearly hid the harbor. Looking up there was blue sky, but it was like a fog looking horizontally. That race would have been our best win ever, but all we could do was mope back to the beach. What a disappointment.

We did not get to race at all on another memorable day. There were huge waves rolling by. They were so big that they broke in deep water about a mile offshore first. Then the remains rolled over the beach. The breaks were about 15 feet high as they reached the beach. Two impulsive guys decided to go out anyway. Of course they hit a breaking wave on the way out. It pushed the Hobie’s hulls completely vertical. It looked like it was going to go over backward. But the wave kicked the stern up as it passed, and they made it out beyond the break.

They sailed around on the big waves outside the break with no trouble, but they didn’t fare so well when they came back in. There was a way to come back in that I thought they would try. There was just enough room tuck in safely behind the harbor breakwater.

But no, they came straight in toward the beach. The next breaking wave tossed them up on the beach. Their Hobie was wrecked, and they were pretty badly banged up. The rest of us realized we shouldn’t feel bad about not racing that day.