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"The History and Culture of Surfing."
From a talk in Dennis Phillips’s Design Theory class
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trans pac
v5: Is there open ocean surfing?
Mickey Munoz: Yes. I’ve done a bunch of open ocean racing.
The best sailing we had was out of Los Angeles Harbor. You have the starting line at the breakwater and the first sailing mark is Catalina Island.
v5: Is this the Trans Pac Race?
MM: Yes. Then depending on the wind and how fast you are going, by mid-evening you are out by San Nicholas Island, which is ninety miles out. It’s right in the wind line, off of Point Conception, that blows right through San Miguel. It gets really bad out there fast. Waves get big and there us a lot of wind, it’s black and scary. This being our first night out with the boats going very fast and knowing you have to go two thousand some odd miles, you want to keep it together and not wreck your gear on the first night! Due to a mistake, one of the dagger boards had slipped down too far and broke off. So being the water guy, I stripped all my clothes off and dove in naked under the boat. It was eleven o’clock at night and the wind is blowing thirty-five miles an hour and even though I had a line on me and a flashlight in my teeth, trying to get this board out of the water, and it is cold! The next thing that happened was one of the rudders broke and that was a major deal. The boat was twenty-five feet wide and rudder to rudder, you have this big tiller connected between and an extension on that so you could move forward on the boat and still be able to steer. With one rudder gone, you are holding up this whole tiller arrangement, which is an eighteen foot pole that you are hanging on to and trying to steer the boat and you have fifteen hundred miles yet to go! Then all the electronics go! Everything, GPS, DHF radio, all the electronics go down, done, zero!
v5: Where these related incidents that caused these things to happen?
MM: No, just flaws…
v5: In the management?
MM: Yes, in the management. (laughs) So in the old days the hippies would watching the trails of the jets flying to Hawaii, saying “Well, okay, steer that way”. (laughs) We did it! (laughs) It was overcast the first three or four days, so you can’t take star sights, you can’t even tell where the hell you are. We did have a hundred dollar Sony radio that you could kind of use as a RDF, a radio direction finder, where you can find an a.m. station, since a.m. antenna is directional. They say if they are broadcasting out of Honolulu and we sailed that way! That is how we actually got in.
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Because it is an open boat and you are exposed, you’re wet. It’s one thing to go surfing all day, but another thing to go surfing all day and night. That is what you are doing on these boats, you are going real fast at times with a lot of water
coming onto the boat, making sail changes, it’s work and a lot of sitting.
Just keeping warm and dry is challenging and eating can be just as tricky
when there is no real cabin. We had a “cabin” space that a big guy couldn’t turn over in, it was sixteen inches wide. A catamaran’s hull is a tough place to be.
The fourth or fifth night out, we got a break in the weather, perfect velocity and sail. The sail was asymmetric reaching, mylar material, foresail and big out on a pole. We call it the flyswing, a beautiful, translucent, almost sparkling mylar. The moon was coming through the clouds and the clouds were lit up silver, with a shimmering trail from the moon on the water in back of you and back lighting the sail. We had an incredible range of direction we could take without changing trim by steering. That meant we could ride waves with impunity. We could drive up and veer off into these waves, and since the wave can get bigger in the middle of the ocean, big enough to ride a fifty foot boat easily, that’s surfing at it’s finest! We didn’t wake up the other watch, we did six hours with the most incredible sailing I’ve ever experienced. I can bitch about the boat and the owner, but I have to say it was one of the highlight sails of my life. With that kind of speed in the eighteen to twenty-five knot ranges, you can ride anything!
The next day we got into a situation where we ran into the Pacific High, where the wind is fluky and weird. The wave and swells get confused because the winds are lighter. We were coming out of that and there were these huge pyramid waves and the wind starting blowing. The sail that was up was a big asymmetrical spinnaker and we were starting to take off in waves that you could not steer out of. The steering was awkward anyway because we only had one rudder! We tried to sail prudently but there were some big wedges. You do not want to purl out there! (laughs) There are times though you can ride waves for what seems like miles and at the same time you are riding a wind wave too. You are riding this puff, you sail in and out of it, you get a feel of the wind and that’s a wave too. It’s an elegant experience.
v5: Are you going along the line of the wave?
MM: You can do that, go across the face and also straighten out, since they are not like a point break wall all the time. So you can come across and cut back and stay in the wave. At the same time you are playing the wind wave too because you need to have the pressure in the sails to maintain your speeds. That’s a trick too.
We made it in about six days, second fastest ever and won the race.
It is a psychological test. When you have six people, all together, in stress situations; it’s a real interesting experience.
Recently in the last ten years, the French have done some fabulous stuff with alloy hulls. They have set such incredible records, one of which a man did a transatlantic by himself. I don’t remember what his time was, but on that race he single handed broke the all time 24 hour sailing record. He did five hundred and thirty-four nautical miles in 24 hours, which would be about a twenty-four knot average, for 24 hours on a single-handed sailboat. There are not many powerboats that have ever done that. That’s something!
Even more phenomenal, which I equate almost equal to man walking on the moon, is that they have broken the all time, around the world record. Which was held by a nuclear sub-marine. They broke it with a catamaran in 79 days; they were trying for the mythical 80 days round the world.
Here we are doing a measly two thousand miles and we manage to break a dagger board, rudder and all the electronics go down.
v5: But you still won the race.
MM: Yes, we did, but imagine keeping eight people physically and mentally,
as well as the physical parts of the boat, for that many miles.
Sailing high performance boats like that is another way of surfing.
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