Update 12:45 Thursday, Feb 22: In previewing the RORC Caribbean 600 2024, we made the point that in its 15 years of annual staging, no boat under 50ft LOA had ever emerged as the overall winner, and the smallest top scorers have been canting-keel Cookson 50s, which rate higher than many a larger boat.
It seems the trend is going to be emphasized with the current race. The very much-up-dated 2007-vintage Farr Super-Maxi Leopard 3 (with Tom McWilliam on the crew) is long home and hosed as line honours winner, a good 15 hours ahead on the water of the hundred footer Aragon, which becomes almost invisible on CT. And as the hours tick by, other boats may be finishing, but none of them is challenging the Leopard IRC lead.
A zippy piece of work – the formidable new Carkeek CF250 Ran was looking good, but in the end sheer size seems to be winning the day
For a while Nik Zennstrom’s extremely zippy-looking Carkeek CF520 (with Cork's Justin Slattery on board - Ed) had looked to be carrying the flag for the 52 footers, but now she’s in and two hours behind Leopard on handicap, while the Askew brothers new Wizard - which is the old Matt Allen TP52 Ichi Ban – is showing on the magic calculator as a clear hour behind Ran.
WIZARD LINK TO DUBLIN?
Pausing only to reflect that the Wizard team of Charlie Enright and Dave & Pete Askew sound more like three ould fellas that you might meet in an ancient bar in The Liberties in Dublin, rather than one of international offshore racing’s hotter teams with a Fastnet overall win in their CV, we move down the listings for Irish and Irish Sea interest and find that Andrew and Sam Hall’s Lombard 46 Pata Negra of Pwllheli– with Transatlantic rower Mark Bolger of Baltimore SC on the crew - is our best hope at second on CT in IRC 1, with 110 miles still to sail and 7.0 knots on the clock.
Further back, the chartered J/122 El Ocaso (Simon Knowles, Howth YC) has had her moments in the frame in IRC 1, but currently she’s at 7th in class and down the line with 200 miles to sail with just 5.6 knots being made good.
Most of us would think of a J/122 as a larger boat, but with everything king-size in Caribbean sailing, she’s a little ’un. It’s a situation emphasized by the nature of the course, in which the final leg is 60 miles from Redondo to Antigua. If that’s the usual windward slug and night is making on and you know the big boat crews are already partying, it can seem as though Antigua is on the other side of the planet.
Tracker and results below
