A slow epiphany brought Ron Epstein and his boat to Australia as the only U.S. entry in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, starting Thursday.
“I’m not the poster child of who should be doing this,” he said.
Growing up sailing casually with family in Southern California, Epstein, a patent attorney, carried on the tradition when he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, bought a J/133 yacht and sailed with family and friends. He shared the experience of sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge, looping around Alcatraz or lazily drifting past the downtown towers.
Competition was not on his mind, Epstein said, until a guest said that his 43 footer was as much a race boat as a cruiser. “I told him, ‘I don’t think so. Look at all that wood down below.’”
That one comment, however, sparked two years of cautious experimenting as Epstein discovered that he could succeed at racing, and that he liked it, and that he might like it even more with a boat that did not have all that wood down below.
Eventually he embarked on an international search of designers and builders, leading to a boat yard in Australia that finished building his 39-foot JPK 11.80 earlier this year. With that timing, Epstein recognized an opportunity to compete in Sydney Hobart, one of the world’s classic yacht races. Shipping the boat home to California could wait.
To get to this point, he had support from fellow Bay Area sailors at his home Corinthian Yacht Club in California, and he hired Keiran Searle, an Australian sailor living in San Francisco, “to help me make good decisions,” Epstein said.
Searle was instrumental in selecting and outfitting the new boat. He also helped hone the talents of Epstein’s American crew and recruited some Australian pros to complement them and speed the pace to Tasmania.
The old boat name, Bacchanal, was transferred to the new, but racing on the ocean is still relatively novel for Epstein. He tried a 2024 Northern California racing series, and “I discovered that I enjoyed being at sea, watching the ocean go by,” Epstein said.
“Those became his spa days,” Terry, Epstein’s wife, said. “He could be in the grumpiest mood, and he would come back transformed.”
There was another thing, too. “I was 58 when I started racing,” Epstein said. “I had medical issues, and when I came out of that I decided to spend less time worrying about stuff and more time doing things that produce pure joy — for example, sailing with people who are happy to work as a team while we try to sail as well as humanly possible.”
Along the way, he had to learn how to manage a project involving complex machinery, physical challenges and an international team. “If people are going to take time out of their lives to sail with you, they want to know they’ll have fun, in good company, with a competitive boat,” he said.
“Cost cutting is a bad investment. The difference between good and great — the right equipment, full preparation — is 10 percent. Competitive sailors appreciate that you’re not going to waste their time. The new Bacchanal is a race boat, so we didn’t add a stove, just a burner to boil water for freeze-dried meals.”
With luxuries left ashore, and granting the risk of being thrashed by the weather on the way to Hobart, Epstein observed, “This is Type-2 fun. Sometimes you understand it better in retrospect.”
Division wins in a pair of recent tuneup races raised expectations of Type-1 fun as well, but Sydney Hobart is a different level. “Some years you see 20 percent of the fleet drop out, but in my first nine Hobarts each went the distance,” Searle said. “I’m looking for the same in the 10th.”
“I compare Sydney Hobart to short daytime races that use windward-leeward courses,” Searle said. “Windward-leewards have two marks laid straight upwind and downwind of each other, for multiple roundings. Upwind, turn. Downwind, turn. Going to Hobart, there are so many weather shifts, I call it a classic windward-leeward, except you never have to turn the boat around.”
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