Race 1 - Marina Del Rey to Cedros Island and Turtle Bay

When I close my eyes, I can still feel the boat rocking. This is after 36 hours on land in San Jose Del Cabo.

But the rocking and rolling didn't start for several days after the race began. We had a little wind as we headed out for the start 8 days ago, but within an hour of the starting gun it had died away to almost nothing. We started the boat's perky little diesel engine and kept on our way.

The fleet departs Marina Del Rey

We passed Catalina in the evening and by dawn we were cruising past San Clemente and on towards San Diego.

Catalina Island

And then not much happened for about 48 hours. We raised a cheer when we crossed into Mexican waters, but the wind stayed elsewhere. We motored. After a while, we headed farther out to sea in search of a breeze, but all we found was a bit more swell - then came the seasickness.

I tried to tough it out, but finally ended up at the rail on Sunday night. Then Stacy convinced me that a scopolamine patch was the better part of valor and I got better very quickly.

But that didn't help our race situation - we were falling farther behind the fast boats every hour. A Spinnaker-equipped boat can sail straight downwind with just a little breeze, but we need about 10 knots of wind to do better than our crossover speed (where it makes racing sense to discard our handicap advantage and use the engine).

Captain Bill Tarr

When we got to Cedros Island on the morning of Day 4, we were totally becalmed and race rules require that we sail the last mile to the finish. We had sails up, but we just drifted with the current to the finish. Then we fired up Perky again and motored on to Turtle Bay. That's when I caught my fish.

Sunset south of Magdalena Bay

As we expected, we finished second to G-Rated in this leg, but there's a silver lining - the race committee adjusted our handicap to make the second race leg more of a race.

Rose of Sharon - a lovely Schooner on our race

More on legs two and three later.