World renowned sailor, educator, and 2-times America’s Cup winning navigator Peter Isler is offering a Scuttlebutt discount on his online curriculum of weather and navigation courses. But first he shares a recent experience:

I had the good fortune of getting the invite to navigate Manouch Moyashedi’s Rio100 in the 2022 Newport to Ensenada Race, a 125 nm course from Newport Beach to the finish in Ensenada, Mexico. With the start on April 22, the race has been an important fixture in the west coast offshore sailing scene for 75 years.

I’d sailed on Rio100 when it was first launched (after its transformation to a supermaxi) and did the 2014 Sydney Hobart Race on it, though for the last couple of years, I’ve been racing against it on Roy Disney’s turbo’d Volvo 70 Pyewacket70. But with Pyewacket not doing the race, I was all in.

I’d been watching the weather set up and it looked like the “100 year race” – a front was forecast to pass through in the morning hours and fresh northwest fill would follow to push the fleet south quickly. Thankfully, the forecast stayed true to form.

At race start at high noon we rolled out the 100 footer’s massive A3 reaching sail and headed off down the race track – soon hitting 20 knots on the hot VMG angle. The wind stayed perfect the rest of the race and when we crossed the line at 7:02pm, we had shaved over 2 ½ hours off the monohull race record.

That one could stand for a very long time, as could the multihull course record that we set on Tom Siebel’s MOD70 Orion in 2016 of 5 hours and 17 minutes.

For a race that most southern California racers think of as being one of those sleep depriving “sprints” with a finish after dawn as you slat across the finish line with the drifter barely

But every race is different, and woe be to the tactician that just follows the golden rules that worked (supposedly) in previous race. Even on the remarkably direct track that we took on Rio (a powerboat would have followed our route for 90% of the race), there were some great take aways to remember: click here