It took a thousand or so miles of sailing with the long, powerful waves of the Pacific Ocean for Hannah Jenner, a rising star in ocean racing, to get comfortable in this year’s Transpacific Yacht Race. Jenner, a 31-year-old from Britain, is used to racing ultralight 40-footers across oceans. But in the Transpac this month, Jenner was sailing Dorade, a 52-foot wooden sailboat from 1930 that is trimmed in varnished mahogany and adorned with polished bronze hardware.

“When I first was asked, I said: ‘Really? How old is this boat? Isn’t it going to break?’ ” Jenner said. “I’m used to boats that become more stable the faster they go. This boat rolls like crazy. It’s like learning all over again.”

Dorade, considered the forebear of modern ocean racing yachts, won the 2,225-nautical-mile Transpac race from Los Angeles to Honolulu in 1936. And 77 years later, the slender white hull with tall spruce masts rolled to victory again, beating the most modern carbon-fiber ocean racers to win its division and the overall King Kalakaua Trophy.

Racing classic wooden yachts is not unusual, but the sailing is often restricted to coastal day racing around buoys. Dorade’s owner, Matt Brooks, has a more ambitious goal of racing his yacht in all the great ocean races the boat won in the 1930s and ’40s. He said he was told that the Dorade was a “piece of antique furniture” and that “it couldn’t be done,” but Brooks and his crew received the overall winner’s trophy for the Transpac on Thursday, which should silence skeptics.