Bell and her crew aboard her 50-year-old Cal 40 Restless crossed the finish line off Diamond Head with a corrected time of 8 days, 12 hours, 5 minutes and 49 seconds to win the King Kalakaua Trophy.

“We had champagne sailing conditions for about three hours on Monday afternoon,” Bell said of sailing to the finish in the notoriously windy Moloka’i Channel which delivered 30-knot winds and huge seas with Restless hitting double-digit speeds. “We were just going straight down the pike, headed for home. There was no need for big movements or adjustments—it was just dreamlike sailing.”

Bell grew up sailing on her grandfather Willard Bell’s Westward, the family’s Lapworth 50. Bell sailed the first of her five Transpacs in 2013 with two of her uncles and three of her cousins aboard Westward, a boat that she described as an older cousin to her Cal 40, itself a design with its own Transpac pedigree. 

Bell turned to her family when looking for crew for Restless, which include her husband Stephen Driscoll and friends Eric Heim and Greg Reynolds. When Bell bought Restless in 2019, her first call was to her cousin Graham Bell, who sails as navigator. Then, a lengthy work list began.

“Pretty much anything that could be touched, was,” Bell said. This included upgrading the boat’s hull-to-deck joint, replacing the toerails and the cockpit coaming handrails, and repainting the interior. 

 

“A bunch of people saw that I was upgrading the boat for the race, and they offered secondhand sails, boat parts and equipment to help us,” Bell said.

The Corinthian crew aboard the 50-year-old Restless with secondhand sails bested many newer, faster designs, with better sails and professional crews. More impressive still, the team topped the corrected-time leaderboard for most of the race.

“In a difficult race, with a lot of great performances, this one stands out,” said Bill Guilfoyle, Commodore of Transpacific Yacht Club and a five-time Transpac Race veteran. “It demonstrates that anybody with a well-prepared boat who sails well has the potential of winning. This should be an inspiration to anybody who doesn’t have the multimillion-dollar budget.”

Aboard the biggest and fastest boat, the 88-foot Juan Kouyoumdjian-designed maxi Lucky, the professional crew included Volvo Ocean Race winners and record-breaking and race veteran navigator Stan Honey. 

“This race had an uncharacteristic area of light air caused by an upper level low that slowly moved south over the fleet, we were able to make it across that while many got stuck,” Honey said.

Lucky blasted across the finish line at 24 knots with a time of 5 days, 21 hours and 23 minutes to take the coveted Barn Door Trophy for first to finish. The next boats to finish were the double handed Beneteau First 36 Rahan and J/111 Lodos.

“We pushed hard our last night,” said Jennifer Hoag, Lodos' trimmer, bow person and occasional driver as the team motored into Ala Wai Harbor for the race’s traditional leis, mai tais and cheeseburgers. 

She said they abandoned the watch schedule, hoisted their biggest downwind kite and white-knuckled through a 30-knot squall for 30 minutes to put a lot of distance on the boats behind. 

“We had one sunset where we had dolphins playing in our bow,” Hoag said, adding she was fortunate to share her first-ever Transpac alongside her dad John. “We had our kite up on a plane and these dolphins are playing with us. We’re going 16, 17 knots at sunset—it was just beautiful.”

Samantha Gebb, skippering her first Transpac aboard the Pacer 42 Zimmer found watching the boats ahead helped them avoid the worst of the low.

“We looked at the weather and were expecting a header to come down, and we were using the hourly YB information to see if that header hit the boats north of us first so that we could be prepared for it,” Gebb. “It’s interesting to be able to use the other boats on the course that are five to 40 miles away from us to see what the wind is doing.”

 

Gebb is a third-generation Transpac sailor, following in the wake of her grandfather and father, the latter of whom is crewing for her this year.

 

“I’m really excited about the number of women skippers,” said Bell, who is also the Transpacific Yacht Club’s rear commodore and communications officer, and also serves as vice commodore of San Diego Yacht Club

“We didn't do anything specifically to attract more women— we just try to attract sailors,” Bell said.

Skipper of the Santa Cruz 70 Mirage, Heather Furey said that while this is technically her third time skippering in Transpac, this is the first time she finally feels like a skipper. 

“Some of my mentors were very generous the first two times,” she said. “I try to talk the talk and walk the walk. I frequently have crew tell me that I’m an owner and I’m not supposed to do that, and I just smile and say, this is what we do together here.”

For full results, visit www.transpacyc.com