Newport Harbor Yacht Club has relished a long-standing custom of arranging Newport to Cabo San Lucas Yacht Race. Since their very first race in the year 1971, sailors have relished the 800 mile race down the coastline of Baja to the warm weather as well as huge breeze of Cabo San Lucas. Over the past forty-plus years of hosting the Cabo Race, Newport Harbor Yacht Club has seen the grand evolution of yacht design as well as offshore sailing.

The typical entries in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the IOR boats with very unique downwind sailing features; the ultralight yachts arrived in the 80’s with Santa Cruz 50 introduced in 1981.

These offwind speedsters spread out the door to larger ULDB’s as well as the seventy footers started their reign of the Mexican Races in mid 80’s. Bigger, faster yachts evolved in the 80’s into the 1990’s (most of which you can now see if you yacht charter in the UK) with the development of 80 footers such as Magnitude and Pyewacket. These yachts brought along crooked spinnakers, canting keels, as well as daggerboards.

These days, the meet sees a revitalization of the legacy ULDB boats with the fifty and seventy footers coming back to the West Coast for offwind races such as Cabo and Transpac.

The sports meet also continues to draw in new designs in all size speeds and ranges to contend in these enormous offwind races. The most recent developments have been seen in the charter yacht Scottish Islands races, with some fantastic designs coming to the fore.