The Fast Fleet Finally Gets Its Turn

2026 PACIFIC CUP ·  SAN FRANCISCO TO KANEOHE BAY

The Fast Fleet Finally Gets Its Turn

Race Update  ·  Friday, July 10, 2026

Every boat in the 2026 Pacific Cup is on the water and pointed at Hawaii. Friday is the day the harbor waits for, because Friday is when the big, quick boats finally get to go. 

The big boats are away

The two divisions that started today are the fastest in the race, so they go last. Pac Cup staggers its starts so the whole fleet, from the tiny doublehanders to the eighty footers, converges on Kaneohe Bay at about the same time.

First off the line at noon was the ORR 2 UK Sailmakers Division: Kimo Winterbottom's Andrews 56 Halawa, Wayne Zittel's DK46 Cazan, the J160 Maritimo 160, the Club Swan 42 with the best name in the race, Free Bowl of Soup, Mark Howe's Santa Cruz 50 Adrenalin, and Oaxaca, a Santa Cruz 50 sailed by the cadets of Cal Maritime.

Ten minutes later the ORR 1 Pasha Hawaii Division took off, and this is the bunch that makes the old hands grin. Chip Merlin's Merlin is here, the famous Bill Lee 68 built on a simple idea: “Fast is Fun.”

Alongside her are Roy Disney's Andrews 68 Pyewacket, Tina Roberts on the Spencer 65 Ragtime, and the two biggest boats in the race, David Raney's Wylie 80 Gem and Ken Chui's Advanced 80 APSARAS, plus Zeus, Vitesse and PIMU. 

A tale of two weather windows

Here it gets interesting, because the early boats and today's fast fleet face two very different opening chapters. The Monday and Tuesday crews earned their miles the hard way, with first nights gusting into the thirties and short, lumpy seas. They are now well down the track in the softer middle of the course, working through the light patch and angling toward the tradewinds filling in to the southwest. The big Pacific High is parked large and firm to the northwest, which is the news everyone wants, because a solid High means solid trades for the run home.

Today's starters get a friendlier send-off. That same coastal breeze is still blowing, a healthy 20 to 25 knots from the north and northwest with the odd squall, plenty for the sleds, but it is easing over the next few days, with the biggest relief around Monday the 13th. So the fast boats get a good hard reach off the beach, and then they must  solve the same light middle before the trades. In short, the front of the fleet is chasing the wind that the back of the fleet is about to sail into.

Where things stand

The posted standings are pretty much guesses. They’re based on actual positions but cannot take into account the value of strategies like heading south to get to better wind, but they’re the best we have.

On corrected time, the results that hand out the silverware, Flashgirl leads the combined PHRF fleet. Here is how the classes stack up this evening:

Doublehanded PHRF (Holokai): Surf

PHRF 2 (Bridger Marine): Viva

PHRF 1 (Naos Yachts): Flashgirl

Doublehanded ORR (Bobbi Tosse): Rahan

ORR 3 (Weems and Plath): Zaff (was TC till an hour ago)

ORR 4 (Goslings Rum): Dorado

ORR 2 (UK Sailmakers): Cazan (provisional, just started)

ORR 1 (Pasha Hawaii): Ragtime (provisional, just started)

One name missing from the top of those standings is ʻio, and there’s the rub. She is a top-five boat in the fleet for velocity made good and is trading the biggest daily runs with Rahan yet sits last in her ORR 3 class on handicap because her rating asks her to sail fast just to break even. It is the exact bind her designer described.

The little boats that could: RAHAN and ʻio

Here is the story that has the whole race grinning. For the first few days, the biggest single-day runs in the entire fleet came not from the 50 footers or the sleds, but from a 36-foot Beneteau and a 27-foot Antrim.

Charly Devanneaux's FIRST 36 RAHAN and the little all-carbon Antrim 27 ʻio, sailed by Buzz Blackett, David Liebenberg and Julia Paxton Liebenberg, have spent the week swapping the daily-distance lead like a couple of dinghies at the club. ʻio keeps pressing, throwing down big days for a boat you could nearly park in your garage. 

Here is the twist. With the sleds and the maxis now off the dock, that 24-hour crown gets much harder to hold, because a Bill Lee 68 or an 80 footer in a downwind slide can post enormous daily numbers. So the little duel may soon have some very large company. However it shakes out, tip your hat to the small boats for owning the distance board this long. That is what the Fun Race to Hawaii is all about.

Words from the fleet

The best part of the morning is not the position numbers, it is the crews' own words, and with more boats settling into downwind mode overnight the mood out there has lifted.

Downwind has arrived for much of the fleet. Quiver's Adam set the S4 kite around one in the morning and is “excited to finally be in the downwind portion of the race.” Duende is chasing top surfing speeds under the spinnaker (and reports, with a straight face, that some of the crew now claim to hear a Bigfoot roar at night). And Penelope got the chute flying, turned to the business of catching dinner, and made a generous offer:

Penelope

Marisa checked in this morning not with a report but with a poem, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes this race what it is:

The morning poem from Marisa

Not everyone had a poetic night. True Love called it “a black black night” with 20 knots and 40 degree windshifts, and when the kite wrapped, the skipper turned it into a lesson, unwrapping it in the dark several times until the crew had it down. They also hosted a sea bird that, after soiling the driver, settled into the spinnaker sock for a rest. Spirits stay high on breakfast burritos and lasagna, with halfway showers, a worst Hawaiian shirt contest, rubber chickens and a birthday still to come.

And our favorite little boat checked in wet but grinning. ʻio, riding low and southerly, nodded to the Beatles with “we all live on an ʻio submarine,” thanked the race committee for the kind press, and then delivered the line of the day:

ʻio

What’s next

So the board is finally set: every division is racing, the trades are building out west, and the fast boats are charging after a fleet with a few days' head start. From here it is a long chess match with the Pacific High, and whoever reads the trades filling in best will be smiling when Diamond Head comes over the horizon. More soon.

Racer update

One note from the race committee to close out the day. Free Bowl of Soup, the Club Swan 42 that started this afternoon in the ORR 2 division, has turned back toward the coast. The most important part of the report is the good news: everyone aboard is safe and accounted for.

Status: Turned back. All crew safe and accounted for.

Reason: Mechanical failure (shroud).

Note: The team just announced to the DRO that they will restart in an hour or so. They have some comments on the factory method of securing the turnbuckles.

About this report

Weather from the Weather Routing Inc. Pacific Cup brief of July 10, 2026; divisions and standings from the official 2026 entry list and leaderboard. Positions are given relative to the San Francisco to Hawaii rhumb line. Standings are provisional; see the official Pacific Cup tracker for current results.