Baker’s Mag 80 breaks race record late Friday

Doug Baker just wanted the record. H.L. Enloe would settle for his newfound respect, this time.

Both — one sailing the 80-foot monohull Magnitude 80 from Long Beach and the other the 60-foot Jenn trimaran Loe Real from San Diego — emerged from the 62nd Newport to Ensenada International Yacht Race reasonably satisfied.

Baker had a race record for monohulls of 10 hours, 37 minutes, 50 seconds and Enloe scored a first-place finish in a faster time by nearly two hours of 8 hours, 45 minutes, 3 seconds, second only among multihulls to the late Steve Fossett’s record of 6:46:40 on the Stars & Stripes catamaran in 1998.

Oh, sure, a multihull should beat a monohull of similar size, some monohull sailors may say dismissively, but Baker wasn’t as concerned about that as he was chasing the ghost boat adorned with the face of a witch’s cat on the hull.

Mag 80’s time was only 7 minutes, 3 seconds faster than the record of 10:44:54 for the 125.5-nautical mile race set by Roy E. Disney’s Pyewacket III in 2003, the year it took the record away from Mag 80.

Overall, the race was so fast that 56 boats had finished before sunrise Saturday — a premature arrival for crews whose lodging reservations were made for Saturday night. All boats had finished by 4 p.m. Saturday.

The overall winner on corrected handicap time was Cleve Hardaker’s Sojourn, a Catalina 30 from San Diego in PHRF-K class with a rating of 192 seconds per mile. Complete results

Both Mag 80 and Loe Real started of Balboa Pier at the same time — noon Friday — but on opposite sides of the split line, and though both finished well before midnight it was never a boat for boat race.

— Rich Roberts