AdvanTec Marine Sponsoring Team Mojo at the Van Isle 360 Sailing Race

With the success of our last year’s sponsorship for the Vic-Maui sailing race, AdvanTec is pleased to announce that we will be sponsoring yet another yacht who will be participating in the Van Isle 360 race annual sailing race on June 1st 2019. We are excited to sponsor team “Mojo” featuring AdvanTec’s own Isa Rosli as part of their crew.

The Van Isle 360 is a bi-annual yacht race that occurs in the odd-numbered years alternating with the Vic-Maui race. The course is a circumnavigation of Vancouver Island in 9 “legs”, which can be considered individual races that have overnight stops at designated host communities. 2019 will be the race’s 20th anniversary

The Van Isle 360 is known to be one of the most grueling exercises in seamanship in the Pacific Northwest and only attracts the most well prepared, capable and qualified sailors. This year the race organizers have limited the race to 39 participating boats, including boat Mojo.

The race can be divided into four phases; the first two legs from Nanaimo to Comox and Comox to Campbell River take them to the north end of the Strait of Georgia.

The next three legs are from Campbell River to Hardwicke Island, where there is no convenient port to stay at, so we tie up to a fish farm, then to Telegraph Cove, and finally to Port Hardy. These three legs cover the full length of Johnstone Strait, with it’s persistent, strong headwinds. Port Hardy represents the end of what we call the “inside” legs. Many boats, including Mojo, have a crew change at this time and an extra day to prepare for the “outside” of Vancouver Island, and the start of the third phase of the race.

Port Hardy to Winter Harbour is the first overnight race and it takes them over the top of Vancouver Island past the magnificent Cape Scott and its wonderful sunsets, into the open ocean. At 130 nautical miles, Winter Harbour to Ucluelet is the longest distance and sees them sailing outside Brooks Peninsula and Solander Island, renowned as one of the windiest places on the wild and rugged British Columbia coast. Ucluelet is one of the most unique and fun destinations. The local grade school children select a boat to follow during the race from the start in Nanaimo. During the rest day in Ucluelet the children are invited to visit their chosen boats, receiving a tour and introduction to the crew, who are busy performing the inevitable maintenance at this stage of the race. The Ucluelet to Victoria leg is the last offshore, and generally a downwind ride passing by Cape Flattery, in Washington State to finish near Beacon Hill park in Victoria.

The final phase of the race is from Victoria to Nanaimo, where they have a multitude of choices to go through or around the Gulf Islands as competitors work the way to the final finish line and complete the circumnavigation. A combination of good choices could lead to victory, bad ones could lead to disappointment. In this leg, they are joined by boats that are participating in the GIN Race, or Gulf Islands-Nanaimo, who are only able to participate in this one race.

Mojo has completed the Van Isle 360 twice before. The first time was in 2011, under her previous ownership, and again in 2017, during which we managed the most consistent performance of all the boats in their division, placing third in two legs, second once and winning twice, including the final finish in Nanaimo. This earned them a first place overall in out of 13 boats.

Mojo is a 2005 J Boats J/109. The model number refers to the overall length: 10.9 meters, or just slightly more than 35 feet. Mojo has a retractable carbon fibre sprit built into the bow that is used when flying one of the spinnakers. With the sprit fully extended, Mojo’s length grows to just under 41 feet. Mojo carries 6 spinnakers for downwind sailing, 4 headsails (or jibs) with different sizes for upwind and two mainsails. The largest spinnakers are 120 square meters, or about 1300 sq feet. The 6 crew members and skipper put all this sail area to use to maximize race performance under any conditions that are thrown in their way. In the 5 years Mark and Shawna Hansen have owned Mojo, they’ve participated in 140 races, including 3 Swiftsures, 4 Southern Straits, 5 Round Salt Spring races.

To keep up with how team Mojo is doing you can track the race on the Van isle website which will be available on race day https://www.vanisle360.com/.

An informal sail past and introduction of boats will take place on the visiting vessels pier emceed by the Race Committee. Boats are asked to participate by sailing close to the pier for an introduction to the spectators during the pre-race warm-up at 9am.

If anyone wishes to see the crew off and wants to visit Nanaimo, they could go to W. E. Mills Pier in Nanaimo Harbour to view the start line at 9:30am on Saturday, June 1st.