The Marina del Rey to Seal Beach race is 30 miles of downwind sailing which takes the racers through some of the windiest places Southern California has to offer. This is a great race for the Open boats, plenty of wind, plenty of waves and spinnaker up the whole way. This year we took the Open 6.50 and although we were unable to fly the spinnaker around the first point we were still doing really well in our class. With the kite up we were keeping up with the Viper 830 that had caught us after starting 5 minutes behind. With some nice breeze and following seas we were happily skipping down the coast at 15+ knots. However, it wasn’t our day and after a particularly violent gybe resulting in a painful broach just past Hurricane Gulch we tore our spinnaker from head to foot effectively ending our race. We limped to the finish line only managing to do 12+ knots of boat speed with the main and the jib only. Of course the bonus with the Open 6.50 is that rather than motor/sailing back for 6+ hours the next day we just packed the boat on the trailer and drove the 40 minutes back up to Marina del Rey.