| | |  Americas & Beyond | August 2008 
DeMeuse-Disney Gear Up for Del Rey Yacht Club’s PV09 International Race Series
 Rich Roberts - The Log
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| | Leslie DeMeuse-Disney clutches a champagne bottle to christen the new Reichel/Pugh 60 Pyewacket V, built by Westerly Marine in Santa Ana, as skipper Roy Disney looks on. (Robbie Haines) | 
| | Pyewacket V (Steve Lee/Westerly Marine) | | |
Disney and a new Pyewacket V to compete in Puerto Vallarta Race series.
Marina Del Rey — An ocean racer all his adult life, Roy Edward Disney thrived on competition while sailing the waters off North America and Europe. But despite logging several records, 15 Transpac Races with three first-to-finish “barn door” awards and so many races to Mexico that he says “I wouldn’t even know how to count,” he felt vague envy for some of his sailing peers.
Not anymore. Now, launching his second life of sailing at 78, he has the perfect boat: a new Reichel/Pugh 60 named, familiarly, Pyewacket V, for Del Rey Yacht Club’s PV09 International Race Series — consisting of four separate races along the way from Marina del Rey to Puerto Vallarta, starting Jan. 31, 2009.
It’s a transformation of the 20th biennial event to Puerto Vallarta, presented by CORUM Swiss Timepieces. The object of the race’s new series format is to provide serious racers (like Disney) an opportunity to sail hard between laidback layovers with lively parties at Turtle Bay, Magdalena Bay, Cabo San Lucas and, finally, Puerto Vallarta — or as many legs as they choose to sail.
It won’t be like any of Disney’s other Mexican races in which, he said, “The closest (destination) was to Cabo (San Lucas), and you always heard these great stories from people who brought the boat home and stopped in Turtle Bay and other places. And as you’re sailing down there you’re always thinking, ‘Gosh, I’d love to see these places and not just sail by ‘em and sometimes not even able to even see ‘em.’ When you get in near the coast, it’s beautiful going along there.”
And Disney’s boat, built at Westerly Marine in Santa Ana, isn’t like any of his first four Pyewackets — named for the mystical cat in the non-Disney film, “Bell, Book and Candle.” He isn’t looking to break any records.
“The boat’s kind of racy, but it’s not a racing boat,” he said. “It’s more a cruising boat — and it’s sort of a cruising race. It sounded like a nice way to get the most out of the boat in great comfort.”
That should not be a problem. Lynn Bowser of Westerly Marine listed some of the amenities as “an all-cherrywood veneer interior, three staterooms and three heads, a complete galley with a full stove and granite countertops, a microwave oven, a stainless steel freezer and refrigerator, a full separate stall shower in the master stateroom, a flat-screen TV that folds down from the overhead (for watching Disney movies only), a nice nav station, curved glass windows, a trash compacter, a water-maker, a heater, full hydraulics, teak decks, a roller furling boom, a dodger …”
There’s also a carbon-fiber mast and a hydraulic keel that retracts from 13.5 to 8.5 feet, “so he can get in and out of harbors,” Bowser added.
Disney and his wife, Leslie DeMeuse-Disney, will be part of a small crew, with a minimum of professionals.
“This is a friendly race, so we want to bring our friends,” Disney said. “But I’m also really curious to see how fast the boat is.”
Minus the extras, most of which Disney didn’t enjoy on his other boats, the 60-footer would probably be significantly faster without one-third of its total displacement of nearly 40,000 pounds. It could have been more. There’s no casino, helicopter pad or swimming pool.
Bowser said, “It was originally being built as a cruising boat only, and then we got halfway and (Disney said), ‘Ah, we’re probably going to take this in some cruising races.’ Now that he doesn’t have a race boat, he’s got to race something.”
Thirty-one boats are currently signed up for PV09. The entry limit is 40 because of mooring limitations at San Jose del Cabo and Marina Vallarta.
If five or more boats are interested, there will still be the traditional nonstop, 1,125-nautical-mile format of “the longest and oldest enduring race to Mexico” — so, Magnitude 80’s record of 3 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes, 39 seconds that toppled Joss’s durable 22-year-old standard last year is not entirely safe.
The first leg will be 376 miles from Marina del Rey to Cedros Island outside Turtle Bay; then 220 miles to Magdalena Bay, famous for its friendly migrating whales; 152 miles to lively Cabo San Lucas, at the tip of the Baja peninsula; and the last 286 miles across the Sea of Cortez to Puerto Vallarta, on the mainland.
The format, divided into spinnaker “performance” boats and non-spinnaker “racer-cruisers,” expands the event’s “Salsa” concept of the last few years into “Hot Salsa” and “Milder Salsa” divisions. The overall winner will be determined not by accumulated time but by combined finishing positions in the four races, as in a regatta — but with no throwouts.
To ensure that all participants will be able to finish a race in time to enjoy the layover and the start of the next race, they may use engines if the winds become so light that their sailing speeds drop below their designated “crossover” speeds. The crossover speed is defined as “that boat speed at which the application of the motor penalty will have no detrimental effect on the final computed corrected time.”
The PHRF handicap is applied only to the distance sailed.
Preparation seminars are scheduled for Oct. 23 and Dec. 4, along with an Southern California Yachting Association-sponsored safety at sea seminar Nov. 2. These will serve as tutorials for entries, prospective entries and those just interested in learning what offshore sailing is about.
This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of The Log Newspaper. All or parts of the information contained in this article might be outdated. |
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