They say that winning a sailing race is a matter of making fewer mistakes than anyone else, and then knowing when to go for it writes W M Nixon. Fourteen hours into the contest, and the annual 628 mile Rolex Sydney-Hobart Race 2017 - the 73rd to be staged - has been giving us object lessons in knowing when to avoid trouble even if it means short term loss, and then putting the foot to the floor when the road is clear and straight.
When you’ve the biggest boat in the race, a mighty machine which only needs clear seas and a bit of real bite to the breeze to do a horizon job on everyone else, then you stay conservative when a messy start is shaping up in a crowded harbour.
Jim Cooney and his team on their magnificent monster LDV Comanche knew that once they got clear beyond Sydney Heads and into the freshening east to northeast breeze, then their powerful extra-beamy hundred foot machine would be in business. But the in-harbour starboard-tack start – admittedly in a lightish breeze – offered all sorts of opportunities to get into a tangle.
The Rolex Sydney-Hobart Race may mostly be open water sailing, but the tricky bits at start and finish get much of the attention
So they elected to play it safe and use the less favoured pin end. Then, even though helmsman James Spithill was beginning to get the big boat up to speed, the acknowledged light air flyer of the hundred footers, Peter Harburg’s Black Jack (ex Alfa Romeo), simply rolled over them, and took the lead in the tacking procession towards open water.
That brief upwind tacking session was in lumpy seas and still
lightish breezes, which LDV Comanche doesn’t like at all, so although Mark Richards in command of the Oatley Family’s legendary hundred footer Wild Oats XI had made a hames of the start, he was sailing like a man possessed in conditions his boat enjoys.
As they approached the exit from Sydney Harbour, he looked to be about to cross LDV Comanche on port, although it would be nip and tuck. But in the end it was something which rhymes with nip and tuck, but isn’t, Richards had to throw a tack, and as the photo shows, there’s now a protest riding on it, as so far Wild Oats has admitted no intention of taking a 720.
One for the sea lawyers? Wild Oats on port tacking ahead of LDV Comanche on starboard
Getting clear of the harbour, Black Jack was first up with the big Code 0, and zoomed straight south down the coast, while Wild Oats XI favoured the time-honoured tactic of getting further offshore, meanwhile piling on the knots. But for a few horrible moments which seemed like hours, LDV Comanche was going nowhere with a sail ballooning in the water. But after that has been sorted, they were in business and then some.
Once she’d got ahead of the other two, with every mile sailed LDV Comanche lengthened even further away, as the very favourable winds were fresher to the south, and she was first to reach them. Hour after hour, she was logging 24, 25 knots and sometimes even better, while the others were around 22 to 23. After a while, that begins to show significant gaps, and as of writing time, she was all of 17 miles ahead of Wild Oats XI, while Black Jack had gone back to fourth as Christian Beck’s Infotrack (ex Perpetual Loyal, the course record holder), has found her speed to move into third.
Race tracker here
With speeds like this for the hundred footers, any talk of “settling into the race” scarcely makes sense – LDV Comanche is at Bass Strait, and they’ll soon be at the halfway stage while working out how those pesky Derwent night breezes are going to affect their finish.
But among the “real” boats in the middle of the fleet, there’s a genuine distance race contest shaping up, and the pace is being set by the TP 52s, where Gordon Maguire doesn’t seem to have put a foot wrong with the new Ichi Ban (Matt Allen). They’re leading overall on both IRC and ORC, and are six miles ahead of Quest, the next TP, and eight miles ahead of the third, Christopher Opielok’s Rockall.
A bit of a wild card in all this is the American former Volvo 70 Wizard (David & Peter Askew), which last year as the New Zealand Giocomo was overall winner, and at times has been on top of the leaderboard this year. Dublin-born Noel Drennan is in her crew, so we have another favoured boat.
Another option is Vincenzo Onorato’s Cookson 50 Mascalzone Latino 32, currently lying 12th overall, and with Ian Moore as navigator, never out of the equation. As ever, the Rolex Sydney-Hobart race is just the job to shake us out of the post-Christmas torpor.
