A building breeze and an early finish to Sunday’s Bay Tour capped off this year’s Rolex Big Boat Series. Sometimes you don’t know which fleet will be most exciting. You might first fixate on the biggest boats in IRC-A, of which Akela won the length honors and line honors, but not first place. You might be gratified by the presence of foreign boats, and wonder how and why they came to San Francisco. Your attention might be drawn to the hot new sportboats in the Melges 32 fleet.

But at the end of the day, on the last day, on the last leg of the last race, the most exciting competition turned out to be in the J/120 fleet. Separated by two points going into the final race, Mr. Magoo and Chance fought it out all the way to the finish line. Aboard Mr. Magoo, Tom Allard describes the race: “It was racing the way it was supposed to be, and at the end of the day the best boat won. We had a race post-mortem on the boat for an hour to try to come up with any idea how to protect our lead, and in the end and we came up blank. Four boats finished within seconds of each other in the last race. That’s one design racing at its best.”

Barry Lewis, owner of Chance: “We've had very close finishes during the past four years of the Big Boat Series with Mr. Magoo. It hasn't always gone our way, but it's better to have tough competition and not win than to win easily.” Doug Nugent, tactician on Chance, agreed: “It came down to the last windward mark. We had been trying to push Mr. Magoo back as far as we could during the whole race, and when we were slightly ahead of them at the end, the only choice was to head them up and hope for a couple of boats to drop in behind us. It worked.” And Chance emerged victorious.

Boats traveling great distances just to race here on our little ol’ Frisco Bay contribute greatly to the cachet of this series. The accessibility of racing greats on the local docks adds to the thrill. Gavin Brady sailed aboard the New Zealand entry Vincitore, an R/P 52 optimized for IRC, and commented, “This is a great regatta to learn to sail your boat fast in flat water and a variety of wind speeds. You start off in light wind in the morning and by the end of the day you're in 20-25 knots with the small sails up. There’s nowhere else you can do that. In the end we lost to Samba Pa Ti by only one point, but we learned a lot about optimizing the boat and will be better in the future.” Seven Kiwis, three Aussies, one Irish and three Americans made up the international complement of Vincitore. (At least everyone speaks some variation of English!)

You meet some of the friendliest, most enthusiastic sailors among the visitors from out of town. Fitting that description and hailing from Puerto Vallarta was Lorenzo Berho, who sailed the J/145 Raincloud with boat partner Manuel Villarreal and a bunch of family in IRC-B. “This race is much better than we expected,” said Lorenzo. “We bought the boat three years ago with the plan of it being a family racer/cruiser, and after the TransPac one of the family said, ‘Lets do the Big Boat Series.’ I thought they were crazy, but after a lot of hard work we made it. This race is much more than just the four days of racing with all the prep and practice involved, but it’s really worth it. Everyone is very supportive, and the location couldn't be better.” Eugenie Russell of J/World supplied local knowledge.

No less enthusiastic were a new Bay Area team on Don Jesberg’s Melges 32 Viva, formerly Southern Cross. We chatted with crew Forrest Gay and Andy Casey after the race on Sunday. Said Forrest: “Today was our sixth day of sailing together - not much time, but we did better. We got a second today, and with more practice time we should improve. The problem with these boats is you can't fall down and not get back up. That’s slow. In this series we went up against mostly pro teams with a lot of experience on a relatively new boat.” Andy added: “The difference between the Melges 24 and the 32 is pretty close. We were plenty fast, but having seven on board instead of four makes it interesting. And the loads are bigger.”

Having a whole season to sail together really helped the winning crew of White Dove, a Beneteau First 40.7 sailing in IRC-D. Said tactician Jon Stewart: “The biggest reason for doing so well in this regatta is the teamwork, and the experience we have by doing the whole new IRC series. Everybody just gelled this season and had a good time.” (Another team member enthused that owner Mike Garl is “just the nicest guy” - that sure doesn’t hurt!)

Before racing got underway on Sunday, the yachts paraded one at a time through the finish line off the host club, St. Francis. Each boat dropped a single white rose into the water as a tribute and farewell to the legendary yacht designer Olin Stephens, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 100.

Results can be found at the St. Francis YC website. We tried to restrain ourselves but nevertheless shot hundreds and hundreds of pictures - the best few hundred can be enjoyed via our Photo Gallery pages, with more to come tomorrow.