Famed Italian skipper Giovanni Soldini and his tireless crew of eight sailors obliterated the record for sailing the “Golden Route” from New York to San Francisco, shaving a full 10 days off the previous record around the tip of South America.
The crew pulled into San Francisco Bay aboard the VOR70 Maserati on Saturday, precisely 47 days and 42 minutes after leaving New York and sailing around Cape Horn, following a challenging 13,225-mile route made popular during the Gold Rush — hence the name. The crew easily eclipsed the record set in 1998 by Yves Parlier when Aquitaine Innovations made the journey in 57 days and 3 hours.
“We are happy!” Soldini said in a statement. “The Golden Route is an historic record, a very important and challenging one…. Maserati proved to be a powerful boat, a technological and reliable one. The crew has been extraordinary, everyone was prepared to face even the hardest situation.”
The monohull VOR70 is a far higher performer than the previous record holder. It is a Volvo 70 monohull, the fastest of its type, with a carbon-fiber honeycomb construction. These babies go for about $4 million new, but Soldini’s boat, formerly the Erikson III, is a 2006 model outfitted specifically for this mission. The boat was optimized for high winds to make the fastest time. She’s 70 feet long and 20 feet wide, with a mast 105 feet tall and an 18-foot keel. It sports a canting keel that pivots out of the hull to more effectively counterbalance the sails. This technology, developed in the past 10 years or so, allows for greater speed by adding power and stabilizing the boat. The sails are of Kevlar, the same stuff you find in soldiers’ body armor.
Forecasting technology also advanced alongside the boats in the days since Parlier set the record, providing Soldini’s crew with far more accurate data than Parlier had available. The crew relied upon laptops and a satellite antenna to download the latest weather data and images.
Still, sailing is sailing, and all the technology in the world won’t make a bad crew into a good one and it can’t replace the expertise of a seasoned skipper.
“The cool thing about records is they are traditional,” crewmember Ryan Breymaier told Wired a few days ago, while the boat was still 800 miles south of San Francisco. “Maserati is mixing with tradition in a modern way.”
And how did Maserati get involved? Soldini is friends with the top brass at Fiat Group, which owns Maserati, and he convinced him to put up the money to buy the boat. The original plan had Soldini doing the Volvo Ocean Race, but it’s a much bigger undertaking, so he decided to challenge the Golden Route record.
The historic route was heavily used by clippers during the gold rush of the mid and late 1800s. It is a difficult journey that takes sailors through a variety of weather conditions, including the Doldrums and the westerly gales at Cape Horn. Flying Cloud set the record at 89 days and 8 hours in 1854, a record that stood for more than 130 years until Warren Luhrs and Thursday’s Child made the journey in 80 days and 20 hours in 1989.
“It’s not really the record we’re beating but the record we’re setting that counts,” said Breymaier. “It will be difficult to break later on. We’re racing whoever is coming after.”
Sailboat Crew Breaks Speed Record in NY-to-SF Voyage
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Sailboat Crew Breaks Speed Record in NY-to-SF Voyage
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Sailboat Crew Breaks Speed Record in NY-to-SF Voyage
