The 2017 Offshore Race Week was a huge success and it returned to California for the second year in succession.
The show was put together by five yacht clubs in California, namely San Francisco Yacht Club, Santa Barbara Yacht Club, Encinal Yacht Club, San Diego Yacht Club and Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club. This was a weeklong event that was held along the Californian coast from May 27 to June 3.
The SoCal race was included in the weeklong event along with Coastal Cup and the Spinnaker Cup. This race was a longer race that featured a lot of variety winds. This made the race a very challenging one for the sailors this year. The start was very slow and then the breeze shot up like anything to reach around 300 knots at the Santa Cruz Islands. It again shot off just before the race was about to conclude. The boat to finish the race first was the H.L. Enloe’s ORMA 60 Trimaran, Mighty Merloe.
Frank Slootman skippering the Pac 52, Invisible Hand, and his team won the overall SoCal 300. He was very happy to have resisted the storming winds to win the event. The tactician on the Invisible Hand, Gavin Brady, was racing for the first time in the SoCal event and did not seem to have any nervousness.
Gavin said that the team was looking forward to taking part in the race and they wanted to do it at any cost. There are not many races that are run the way the SoCal 300 is run. It is very important to have very good legs in order to grab at the points offered in the event. He said that it is one of the toughest trophies to win in the United States and was glad that Invisible Hand was able to do it.