Transpac 2025: Last Starters are First to Celebrate
by David Schmidt / Transpacific Yacht Club 17 Jul 02:56 UTC
July 17, 2025
The Transpacific Yacht Race celebrated its first Trophy Ceremony for the 2025 edition of this biennial ocean race on Tuesday, July 15, at Waikiki Yacht Club, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Last night's celebration—the first of three ceremonies—welcomed an exuberant crowd of sailors, friends and family to honor the winners of four of the race's 10 divisions, plus several other trophies.
Established in 1906 and organized by the Transpacific Yacht Club, the 2,225 nautical mile race from Los Angeles to Hawaii is widely considered one of yacht racing's greatest offshore events.
Tom Holthus and crew aboard the Botin 56 BadPak claimed top honors in the Boatswain's Locker/Yanmar Division 1; John Raymont and his Fast Exit II team, racing aboard his Ker 52, won Mount Gay Division 2; Jack Jennings led the Reichel/Pugh 68 Pied Piper and crew to first place in Whittier Trust Division 3; and owner Don Wilson and his team aboard the Gunboat 68 Convexity2 were the fastest cat in the smithREgroup Multihull Division.
Bryon Ehrhart and his talented team aboard Lucky, his 88-foot Juan Kouyoumdjian-designed maxi, etched their names in history and on the prestigious Barn Door Trophy, for the fastest elapsed time of any monohull, while Raymont and his Fast Exit II team earned the Merlin Trophy for the quickest passage to Hawaii aboard a conventional monohull (read: with fixed ballast and manual winches).
Earning recognition in front of many of sailing's biggest names gathered in Waikiki Yacht Club's lovely open-air dining room is an accomplishment few sailors will achieve. For many, it represents the culmination of sailing careers that stretch back decades, if not generations.
Enter 20-year-old Kelly Holthus, a rising junior at Tulane University, who just completed his fifth Transpac Race aboard his father's BadPak. The younger Holthus first raced to Hawaii as a 12-year-old in 2017, and while he said he understood how the sails worked during his nascent night watches, the finer points of trim were above his greenhorn pay grade.
No longer: these days, he runs the bow aboard the powerful offshore steed.
"It's a night-and-day difference," said Kelly Holthus in a post-racing interview, of his learning curve, which he actively accelerates at every opportunity. "Now I'm a full, contributing part of the team," he said, describing making eye contact with BadPak's drivers before shimmying forward on the bowsprit, sometimes hundreds of miles from terra firma. "You're in the middle of the ocean going 15, 17 knots in five to 10-foot waves," he said. "I'm up there, and I'm comfortable."
Sarah Young, who just graduated from Dartmouth before completing her second Transpac aboard Vitesse, Tom Furlong's Reichel/Pugh 52, is another example of this historic race's generational momentum and the dedication to one's craft that's required to earn this coveted spot aboard a fast ride in this prestigious event. Young may be Furlong's niece, but there's zero chance she would be trimming kite if she hadn't earned her own All-American bona fides on Dartmouth's sailing team.
"Our Vitesse team was clear before we left the dock that everyone would be up on the deck for all sail changes, kite changes, gybes," said Young, describing one of Vitesse's smartest calls. "That was a really strong decision and made our team better because it's a lot safer to have everyone up."
Young, who was aboard Vitesse in the windy 2021 Transpac, said a 2025 crux involved wending their way around a persistent light-air patch that defined the race for many teams. "The toughest part of the race was just understanding the weather system, understanding how far south we had to go, and striking a balance between distance and weather systems," she said.
This same decision vexed far more experienced navigators.
?"The problem with going so far south is that it's a whole lot of extra distance," said Peter Isler, a two-time America's Cup winner and 2025 navigator aboard Pyewacket, Roy Disney's star-studded Andrews 70. "You sail a lot of extra distance, but you're trying to balance extra distance versus windspeed and boatspeed," Isler continued, noting that while Pyewacket plunged south this year to escape the worst of what Disney termed "the Pacific Pothole," he's voyaged closer to the equator on previous Transpacs.
"That wasn't a new one for me," Isler said, noting that the team ultimately sailed about 2,350 nautical miles on the race's 2,225-nautical-mile rhumbline. What's new are the tools for route divination.
"Starlink opens up the satellite imagery game—being able to read the clouds and trying to infer from above what's happening down below," he said, referring to the fast and cost-effective satellite-communication kit that all but one boat in the fleet carried this year. While Isler, a past holder of Transpac's outright course record, reported that he wouldn't have looked at different weather models prior to Starlink, the system affords the ability to study high-resolution satellite imagery of coming clouds.
"That can be a game-changer if you understand how to put your weather knowledge together and how to read it," he said.
GRIB files and satellite imagery aside, spectacular downwind sailing has always been Transpac's biggest magnet.
"The last five hours of the race were super exciting," said Keahi Ho, who just completed his fifth Transpac aboard Merlin, Chip Merlin's Bill Lee-designed 68-footer, describing driving the sled for the team's fast final miles under clear, moonlit skies.
But fast-and-furious sailing isn't without hazards. "The boat was going as fast as it possibly could," Ho continued, noting that the team was sometimes tickling 28 knots of boatspeed. "We stuffed the bow super deep—we thought the whole boat was going to go end-over-end, but somehow it came back up."
Ho first crossed the Pacific at age five with his dad; now 51, life's ephemeral nature was front of mind when considering this race. A firefighter in Lahaina, on nearby Maui, Ho lost his house and boat to the tragic 2023 fire that ravaged his hometown while he was working to save other people's lives.
"I thought about maybe not going this year, but I'm glad I did," Ho said in a post-race interview, noting the importance of taking advantage of life's great opportunities. "After the fire, we've been super grateful for all the things we get to do—it reminds us how precious life is."
Twenty-three-year-old Max Roth, who grew up in Honolulu and recently graduated from Cal Maritime, echoed Ho's sentiments of gratitude, but for different reasons. Roth sailed his first Transpac in 2023 as a crewmember aboard the Andrews 77, Cal Maritime, but this year he returned to his home state as skipper of T/S Cal Maritime-Oaxaca, a Santa Cruz 50.
"It was a lot more rewarding because I got to be the skipper for a group of my friends," he said, noting that his crew consisted of Cal Maritime students and recent alumni, including five Transpac first-timers. His race, he said, was made possible by Cal Maritime and the school's donation program.
"I didn't feel the pressure of being the skipper as much as I thought I would," Roth said in a post-race interview, noting that he surrounded himself with offshore competence. "My navigator and my other watch captain are very experienced, and I was able to rely on them. It didn't weigh on me that I had to be up every hour to make sure the boat sailed well or safely."
While Roth leveraged well-timed jokes and Welch's Fruit Snacks (a crew favorite) to conjure cockpit levity during the race's inevitable low-tide moments, he described watching the team's younger members grow and mature, both as sailors and people, during the race.
"It was one of the best experiences I've had in my life," Roth said of skippering.
The Transpac race runs deep in Roth's world: His father, Michael Roth, is the race's chief judge ("We're doing our best not to see him," joked Max), and the race concludes on the waters where he learned to sail. "I came home to family and friends that I grew up sailing with," he said, noting that his Laser was patiently sitting on Waikiki Yacht Club's docks. "They were all there—I got to see my coach of 14 years at the dock."
As for future Transpacs, Holthus, Roth and Young were clear that their journeys across the Pacific have just begun.
"My ultimate goal is to be able to run a program of my own," said Holthus, who has spent his second decade studiously absorbing the wealth of sailing knowledge aboard BadPak and the other programs with which he's involved. "I'll have a lot of work to do before that, but every time I go out there, I'm learning from people, and I'm one step closer."
Find out more at transpacyc.com.