Tiburon Peninsula crew sails to third J105 title in four years

Two weeks before the world’s most prestigious J105 sailing regatta in September, Tiburon skipper Randy Hecht took a phone call in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was racing 4,000 miles from home.

His crew had just hauled their 7,750-pound keelboat more than 2,600 miles from Belvedere to Toronto in preparation for the J105 North American Championship on Lake Ontario. But the news wasn’t good.

“We had dropped the boat off in the yard in Toronto, and the yard decided to reposition the boat someplace else,” Hecht said. “The mast was on top of the boat, and they accidentally hooked the mast on the corner of some building and bent it.”

The boat, called Niuhi — which means “man-eating shark” in Hawaiian — desperately needed a mast.

“My thought was how can I possibly concentrate on the Copenhagen race and figure out how to deal with this broken mast,” Hecht said. “I got about two weeks to sort it out. I thought about throwing in the towel.”

He didn’t. Instead, the San Francisco Yacht Club-based crew went on to win its third North American Championship in four years, beating 17 other competitors including one of the world’s greatest sailors. The victory at the Sept. 17-20 regatta continued the dominance of a team that has made the Bay Area’s sailing community a national powerhouse in the J105 class — a 34-foot, one-design racing keelboat.

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