DREAM TEAM FOR A DREAM RACE

THERE WERE MANY HAPPY ACCOUNTS FROM THE RECENT RUNNING OF THE NEWPORT BERMUDA RACE, BUT FOR THE WINNING TEAM, IT WAS INDEED THE RACE OF A LIFETIME.

- DAVE REED

IT’S hard to believe that Stan Honey, the Hall of Famer and navigational wizard of globe-girdling race boats big and fast, had never sailed the Newport Bermuda Race on his vessel. He’d completed the course plenty of times on boats built for line honors and setting records check and check). But there he was on a late June morning backing the family Cal 40 I/Jusioninto a slip at the Royal Bermuda YC not long after the big boats had arrived. In a few days, Stan and his teammates would be confirmed as Class 10 winners and the next engraving on the St. David’s Lighthouse Trophy. It would be the last time Stan and his Hall of Fame bride, Sally, would race their I/Jusionas its caretakers. Fittingly, it was, in Stan’s own words, a terrific experience.”

“Our race was all about preparation,” says the 67-year-old navigator, whose team sailed the 635-mile course in 87 hours. We had an unimaginably good crew, perfect sails, a perfect bottom, and we were lucky that we were the right-size boat.”

There’s a lot of truth to the saying that one makes one’s own luck, and it’s equally true that this team of five friends from the West Coast did indeed craft their own good fortune—and then some.

The Honeys have owned their Cal 40 Illusion for 33 years, with their first ocean race for the boat being the 1990 Pacific Cup from San Francisco to Kaneohe, Hawaii, sailing doublehanded, finishing second, and beating most of the fully crewed boats. That was fun,” Sally says. Stan raced the next edition singlehanded, and they followed that up by winning the Pacific Cup’s doublehanded division in 1996.

“When we bought the boat, it took longer than we thought to pull it back out of the state that it was in, which wasn't very good,” Sally says. There were bullet holes, fleas and homeless people living in her.”