The Big 5-0: Veteran Navigator To Make It Fifty Times Across the Pacific

© Herb McCormick

Two-time Whitbread veteran John Jourdane and Ragtime, the venerable West Coast sled aboard which Jourdane plans his 50th Pacific crossing in this summer's Transpac.

John Jourdane looked a little, well, peaked. But you couldn't really blame him. It was two days before Christmas and Jourdane had just landed in Australia after a flight from his home in Southern California to serve as navigator for Chris Welsh's Spencer 65, Ragtime, in the most recent running of the Rolex Sydney-Hobart Race, which was on schedule to begin in a little less than 72 hours. But the last thing Jourdane was looking for was sympathy.
    
"Actually, being jet-lagged is a pretty good way to start a race," he said. "You don't really know where you are, you don't know the time zone, so you just fall into whatever watch system they're running. It works pretty good."
    
As it turned out, things worked out exceedingly well for Jourdane and Ragtime, the sole U.S. boat in the field, which went on to win the IRC-2 division. For Jourdane, it was yet another victory in a sailing career that's been chock-full of them. But another, even more amazing highlight is just around the corner. For when Jourdane sets out aboard Ragtime this summer for the 45th edition of the biennial Transpac Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, it will be his fiftieth-as in five/oh, baby-transit of the vast, blue Pacific.
    
"Between deliveries and races, I've spent more than two full years of my life sailing from California to Hawaii (or vice versa)," said Jourdane, who counts fifteen Transpacs among that total. "And I'd do it all again."
    
Jourdane didn't start out with the intention of becoming one of the more accomplished and well-traveled navigators of this or any other era. It wasn't his goal to compete in two Whitbread Round-the-World Races (in 1985-86, aboard Digby Taylor's NZI Enterprise, and in 1989-90, on Grant Dalton's Fisher & Paykel); to cross the Atlantic a dozen times and record three circumnavigations; or to notch up over 300,000 offshore miles aboard several versions of Huey Long's Ondine, as well as such famous boats as Blondie, Silver Bullet, Pyewacket, and Magnitude 80.
    
Nope, before all that, John Jourdane was perfectly content teaching school.