Lack of Winds Yields Yawner : Yachting: For many crews, Transpac was more like a cruise to Hawaii, and frustration level was high.

Aside from Grand Illusion owner-skipper Ed McDowell falling overboard--he’s OK--and three boats returning to port with early problems, the 37th biennial Transpacific Yacht Race from Point Fermin to Honolulu was as mild as a nonalcoholic mai tai.

The customary trade winds failed to develop their usual velocity, leaving the boats to seek out squalls as they tried to gain an advantage.

The crew of Victoria, Mike Campbell’s Andrews 70 sled from Long Beach, had to repair its partially torn mainsail along the way, “and I slept through that,” Campbell said.

Said Bill LeRoy, the St. Francis Yacht Club commodore who sailed his Santa Cruz 50 Gone With The Wind: “It would have been beautiful for cruising to Hawaii with your wife and kids. Nothing could go wrong.”

Mike Elias of Long Beach, who started on Starship I but finished on a 747 after Starship I’s mainsail was destroyed on the first day, concluded after talking to many of the crews: “There’s not a lot of (exciting) stuff to talk about. It was really a boring race.”

It was hot and humid, frustration flourished, crews became irritable, and what little wind there was didn’t help much.

Said veteran Tom Leweck, navigator on Richard Compton’s Andrews 70 Alchemy from Santa Barbara: “There was no danger of breaking anything--including the tedium.”

On a few boats, it may have seemed so, but not on those trying to be the first to finish. John DeLaura’s Santa Cruz 70 Silver Bullet overtook Neil Barth’s Excel 53 Persuasion and Hasso Plattner’s Reichel/Pugh 50 Morning Glory--the numbers indicate the boats’ lengths--on the last day to sweep line and handicap honors, but it wasn’t easy.

The anguish aboard Persuasion was especially pronounced. Given a day’s head start in the new system of staggered starts, Persuasion lost to Silver Bullet by only 1 1/2 hours, with Morning Glory another 6 minutes 12 seconds back.

Barth, from Newport Harbor YC, flew off to Maui shortly after the finish to escape his disappointment.

But Keith Kilpatrick of Newport Beach, who takes care of the boat, was on Transpac Row on Thursday, folding sails and preparing the boat to return to the mainland next week. Kilpatrick described the final days of the race.

“We’d take their morning roll-call position and plot them,” he said. “We felt real fortunate that Silver Bullet had (navigators) Mark Rudiger and John Jourdane with them. Every morning they were (on a course) right behind us (and we thought), ‘Gee, we must be going the right way because those guys are smart.’ You couldn’t feel any better about your position than being right in front of them . . . like they were using us for input and they liked what they saw.”

But watching Silver Bullet close distance day by day was nerve-racking, Kilpatrick said.

“Our prerace consensus was that they’d probably get 25 miles a day on us,” he said. “It turned out to be about 30.

“The last day, they were still 30 miles behind us. We got part of a squall and then sat in it and didn’t go anywhere. We saw them coming before it got dark.”

About that time, Persuasion developed a mechanical problem and was unable to recharge its engines to power its electronic navigation equipment.

“Neil gets upset about things like that, and I’m down there, where it’s boiling hot, working on it. . . . That wasn’t a good time,” Kilpatrick said.

“We weren’t expecting to see them until the next morning. ‘Oh, God, they caught us so fast. What did Morning Glory do to us?’ Now we’re panicked about that, too.”

Morning Glory was the only other boat in Persuasion’s IMS-A class.

“Every day we were neck and neck, almost always within sight of each other,” Kilpatrick said. “It was incredible.”

At about 2 a.m. on that final Monday, Silver Bullet sailed past, only a few hundred yards away. An hour or two later, the crew of Persuasion overheard Morning Glory talking on the radio to the Coast Guard about a flare it had sighted. The Coast Guard asked Morning Glory for its position, and Persuasion was able to fix its rival about 15 miles to the south and “dead even,” Kilpatrick said.

“About 9:30 that morning, we spotted them on the horizon. It was ‘Here we go again,’ and this time we were going to the finish.”

With Silver Bullet gone, it was a match race with Morning Glory.

“It was the longest day I’ve ever sailed,” Kilpatrick said. “Luckily, we held them off.” However, Morning Glory, the smaller boat, beat Persuasion on corrected handicap time to claim the class trophy, although Persuasion will receive the first-to-finish trophy for IMS at the awards banquet tonight.

The only thing that bothers Kilpatrick now is Persuasion’s No. 3 position on Transpac Row, behind Silver Bullet and Morning Glory. Boats are customarily lined up in the order they arrive.

“Look where we are,” he said. “We’re a little upset that they put them there. What they said was that they called in first. I think the parties were set up that way.”

But there also was the satisfaction of beating all the other ULDB 70s after Silver Bullet, especially Roy Disney’s Pyewacket, which was built specifically to win this race.

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Ed McDowell and his Grand Illusion crew were greeted with leis, trays of mai tais and Hawaiian food when they docked on Transpac Row this week, just as were the boats that finished first.

The Santa Cruz 70 from King Harbor YC has been one of the top competitors in Southern California’s tough ULDB 70 fleet, winning a couple of Mexican races and the season championship in 1990 and ’92. But Grand Illusion struggled to 11th place in this race.

McDowell was asked if there were any highlights.

He thought for a long time, then replied, “No.”

Asked what he would remember about the race, he paused again, then said, “I fell overboard Saturday.”

Say what?

“The boat went one way and I went the other way,” McDowell said, walking away. “Talk to the crew.”

Crewman Graham Kelly said McDowell slid out between the upper and middle lifelines when the boat lurched. He managed to grab a stanchion with one hand and hang on as the boat dragged him through the water.

“We put the boat head to wind (to stop it), and then got organized,” Kelly said.

Two of the biggest crewmen, Ken Hevard and Stewart Palmer, were assigned to pull McDowell back on board.

“They flipped him up on the deck like a big tuna,” Kelly said.

But the incident was sobering.

“It changed the perspective,” Kelly said. “We’ve been a pretty successful crew, but we realized if somebody goes overboard, you could lose them. It made us think about the human part of this.”

Besides, Kelly said: “You don’t want to leave him behind. Finishing without the owner is considered bad yachting etiquette.”

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Many boats experienced an agonizing finish off Diamond Head, where an opposing 2-knot current all but offset the wispy winds.

Disney said Pyewacket was making so little headway that “we were discussing getting the anchor out.”

Medicine Man’s Bob Lane said the race committee radio kept saying of his boat: “ ‘They’re five minutes from the finish.’ An hour later they’re saying, ‘They’re five minutes from the finish.’ ”