Stan Honey was growing up in southern California when the Cal 40 stormed onto the racing scene. Conceived by racing sailor George Griffith and designed by Bill Lapworth in 1963, the breakthrough boat drawn to the Cruising Club of America (CCA) Rule had a fin keel, spade rudder, canoe hull, and flat bottom—all eye-opening characteristics among the round-bilge, full-keel boats of the time. With a displacement of 15,000 pounds, the OG SoCal sled was capable of surfing at 15 knots plus, unheard of in monohull keelboats.
They were fast, radical, and fun, and Stan—who crewed for Griffith—raced the boats but also earned spending money for college delivering them back to LA from Hawaii after they’d blasted over in the Transpac. Of all the boats he’d sailed and would go on to sail, the Cal 40 was the one that sailed the sweetest.
“They were the hot ocean racer. All the best sailors were sailing on them,” Stan says. “They were really just easy to sail offshore. I really enjoyed the way the Cal 40 went through the water and decided one day I would get one.”
One day came after he and his wife, Sally Lindsay Honey, had successfully campaigned in 505s for about 20 years and decided it was time for a bigger boat. (Stan may be best known for his professional offshore navigating, including winning the 2005-06 Volvo Ocean Race and 11 Transpacs. Sally is a two-time Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year and, as Gary Jobson writes of her on The Sailing Museum website, “Her list of victories in one-design classes would fill a phone book.” Both are inductees in the U.S. Sailing Hall of Fame.)
They’d noticed a Cal 40 moldering away in a nearby boatyard where boats often ended up dying of neglect and abandonment.
“It had bullet holes in it because it was parked within site of the freeway, and it had homeless people living in it,” Stan says. Sally adds, “It was full of fleas and exploded cans of unknown stuff.”
In short, it was a wreck, but it had never been modified, neglect in this case serving as a blessing. It also had a good chance of being something they could afford, since “we didn’t have any money.” But when they asked the yard owner if they could buy it, he told them that the storage contract stipulated he couldn’t tell them who the Cal 40’s owner was. So, they wrote a letter “To Whom it May Concern” and made a low-ball, cash offer. A while later, a yacht broker they didn’t know called them and said he’d been commissioned to sell them the boat, still concealing the owner’s name.
In the end, they learned that the boat had been co-owned by Vince Monte-Sano and Emil “Bus” Mosbacher, the America’s Cup skipper whom Sports Illustrated once named “the greatest helmsman of our time.” They’d called the boat Illusion because she was so fast, she’d vanish on the competition.
Stan and Sally bought her in 1988 and commenced the considerable work to bring her back to life, which meant a stem to stern refit.
“We did a ton of work,” Stan says. “We did everything except for the paint and the serious glass work like the hull-to-deck joint.” They hired local boatbuilders to handle those aspects and others, like installing a new engine and refurbishing the woodwork.
They had bought the boat with the intention to go cruising. But, as Stan says, “old habits die hard,” and in 1990 they entered the doublehanded class of the Pacific Cup from San Francisco to Hawaii—“and that was frankly an overreach.” They’d only launched the boat for the first time about a week before the race and had barely sailed it at all. Still, he says, “Cal 40s are easy to sail, and we got second in class. We loved sailing the boat.”
Six years later they did the race again doublehanded, this time winning overall and beating all the fully crewed boats. In 1994, Stan raced Illusion in the Singlehanded Transpac in 11 days and 10 hours, a record that still stands for the Cal 40 from California to Hawaii.
“In the singlehanded, the boat was light. And I had an epic autopilot that could steer with a kite through anything,” Stan says. “I just had to collect the courage to jibe in the squalls. I remember being on the bow jibing in these squalls when it was blowing 30 and thinking, ‘Is this the stupidest thing I have ever done?’ ’’
All told they’ve raced Illusion to Hawaii five times, including the 2005 Transpac when Sally led an all-women crew and finished second of 14 Cal 40s.
“It was the first ocean race I navigated, and I learned a lot,” Sally says, “mostly to respect Stan’s navigation abilities even more than I already did.”
One year, after crossing to Hawaii, they decided not to return directly to California but instead to ride the Pacific high and see where they ended up. That was Vancouver Island, where they meandered for a bit. They left the boat in Victoria, BC, for the winter, and the next summer took her north to Glacier Bay, Alaska.
“We didn’t have dodger, we didn’t have a windlass, and we had a German shepherd who loved to swim, so we had a wet dog all the time,” Stan says. “I think we had more fun than we had any other summer, but it was exactly the wrong boat for that cruising ground because you’re either dead upwind in these skinny little channels or dead downwind, and you don’t have enough power to get through the whirlpools.”
But the idea that cruising could be as fun as racing took hold, and they developed a long-term plan to cruise from California to the East Coast, arriving in time to race Illusion in the 2020 Newport-Bermuda Race. They took two years meandering the Sea of Cortez and the Mexican coast, and two more in Panama, Central America, and the Western Caribbean. Though in cruising mode, they kept the boat fairly lean of gear and always in top sailing form. They shocked other cruisers when they’d think nothing of bashing to weather in the Caribbean against the prevailing winds and seas.
“We knew how to sail the boat and set it up and knew what it was going to be,” Stan says. “They thought we were mad.”
“Sailing around San Francisco, that’s all you get,” Sally laughs. “It was beautiful sailing.”
When Covid cancelled the 2020 Bermuda Race, they spent two summers exploring Maine, then prepped for the 2022 race, stripped Illusion of cruising gear (it takes about two weeks to get her back to measurement certificate form), took on two top crew, and proceeded to win the whole shebang—not only their class, but the coveted St. David’s Lighthouse Trophy, which goes to the boat with the fastest overall corrected time.
“We hear people say you can’t have a racer-cruiser anymore, and we think that’s nonsense,” Stan says. “We think doing both in the same boat makes you better cruisers and better racers. You know it better and you have a lot more hours in it.”
Racing or cruising, Illusion is just fundamentally a joy to sail, balanced, easy to handle shorthanded even in a blow. Those characteristics that Stan appreciated so much in the early days continue to define the boat and her capabilities 60 years later.
The boats “have a really good manners and they are easily driven, so if you have too little sail, they still perform well, and if you get caught and are overpowered, they still handle well, they don’t round up,” Stan says. “We almost never sailed Illusion fully crewed in the traditional sense, we would sail with four.”
Modern boats with their wide transoms, he says, “are trickier to sail, they require just the right amount of sail. They’re just harder to sail well. So for a racer-cruiser and a boat you like to cruise and race with a shorthanded crew, the older, more symmetric hull form just goes through the water more gracefully.”
“I grew up sailing and racing an 8 Meter and then a NY32,” Sally says. “The Cal 40 felt very familiar to me. It just felt like home.”
In 2022, after 34 years of loving and sailing Illusion, Sally and Stan decided to shift to cruising under power. Closing a full circle, they bought George Griffith’s 48-foot powerboat called Sarissa—a one-of-a-kind “sailor’s powerboat” Griffith conceived and asked Michael Peters to design—and sold Illusion to their nephew, John Vrolyk, keeping her in the family and giving her a new mission.
“John has done a lot of racing,” Stan says, “but I think he’ll be using her to raise a family, which is probably the single best use of her.”
June/July 2025
