Nearly 100 sailboats compete in annual ‘Great Vallejo Race’

VALLEJO — The annual Great Vallejo Race concluded on Sunday as close to a hundred sailboats from all over the Bay Area raced back to Richmond after spending the night at the Vallejo Yacht Club.

“Vallejo always puts on a tremendous welcome,” said Andy Schwenk from the Richmond Yacht Club, captain of a unique two-masted boat named the Sir Edmund. Even though they had a mediocre start due to low wind, “as we approached the San Rafael bridge, it changed, everything came together,” he said. 

The Sir Edmund had a crew of 12 and ranked fifth Saturday. Schwenk declared their success to be “98% about the people you're with.” 

“It was a wonderful day, a great race,” said Elvin Valverde of Vallejo, who captained a green sailboat named the “Joker” with a crew of ten. 

The race is one of the biggest inland boat races in the nation, organized by the Yacht Racing Association and hosted by the Vallejo Yacht Club, which is only one of seven yacht clubs on the entire west coast older than a hundred years and has hosted the event for its entire 125-year history. The sailboats left the Richmond Yacht Club Saturday morning, raced to Vallejo and then raced back to Richmond on Sunday.

The final results are still pending and can be checked on the Yacht Racing Association website. 

For the race, boats are organized into 16 “fleets”, depending on their size and other features like keel shape and hull design. On Saturday, the first boats, a pair of tri-marans, left Richmond at around noon with fleets leaving the start line every ten minutes after. The fastest boats completed the voyage in over two hours while the slowest arrived in just under five.

A rating is accorded to each boat which adjusts its overall finish time and placement. Points from Sunday’s race are tallied to the overall score of each boat. Not nearly as many raced Sunday as Saturday and no winners were actually awarded.

On Saturday, the boat with the fastest adjusted time was the Jetstream, skippered by Daniel Alvarez, with a corrected time of 2:57:10. 

The Rufless by Rufus Sjoberg followed with a corrected time of 03:05:55 but with the fastest actual race time of all at 2:33:53. 

The Saturday race was honorably closed by the Koamalu from Vallejo, skippered by Joe Depietro and Kim Ohlson with an adjusted time of 04:47:18.

Several of the fastest boats on Saturday’s race did not qualify Sunday even though they had participated, receiving a DNC, meaning “did not compete.” Concerning the Sir Edmund, Schwenk explained that “we arrived at the finish line and they disqualified us because we didn’t check in over the radio when we started,” even though “the boat was hauling ass and the crew did a good job.” The Jetstream. which came in first Saturday, also received a DNC Sunday. 

Less boats participated Sunday. They had a faster finish time and the results more tightly packed, even with the added difficulty of having to tack upwind.

Tom Condy along with his wife Sylvia were crewing for their friends from Denmark aboard their boat named the Tivoli. Condy, who used to work in the Bay Area as an engineer, said he was privileged to have been able to retire early and now lives on his sailboat with his wife sailing between Fiji and New Zealand. He said that for him the race is a great opportunity to get back together with his friends and spend a weekend on the water. Accompanying their crew was a sailor dog named Scupper, named after the openings on the side of ships designed for water to flow overboard. 

Saturday was the most important day of the race because all of the partying was concentrated that evening. Even before all the boats had docked into the harbor, volunteers were already busy serving food, pouring beer and mixing Mai Tais as two live bands played back to back. Sailors danced well into the night, or not depending on age, until rejoining the clubhouse for breakfast Sunday morning and racing back to Richmond.

While many take the race very seriously, others seemed oblivious to their placement and were content with having spent a beautiful day on the water with their crew. Valverde himself said that while he takes the race seriously, he was more concerned with beating his local yacht club rivals. 

A few boats in the fleet came with price tags that rival the median cost of a Vallejo home, including a Beneteau-branded boat which entered to help promote its sale with a price tag of just under $700,000. Still, Valverde, who has more than 40 years of sailing experience, emphasized that money isn’t everything on the water. “You can dump a bunch of money on a boat and lose to someone who got theirs for free,” he said.

Silvia Keita, the rear commodore of the Vallejo Yacht Club, answered what makes a good sailor: “it’s all about wind, but you can’t see wind.” She explained that one has to learn to “read the wind, look at the waves, the tide.”

The next local race, called the Jazz Cup, will be held in Benicia on Labor Day weekend.