Matt Allen’s Botin/TP 52 Ichi Ban, with Gordon Maguire of Howth as Sailing Master and a crew including Sean O’Rourke and Dublin-born Noel Drennan, has received the benefit of a remarkable reversal of fortune in the current Rolex Sydney Hobart Race, with her apparent loss of overall first place by three minutes to Sam Haynes’ lower-rated TP 52 Celestial being reversed by the Race Committee following Protest Committee findings on a situation which involved Celestial being out of VHF contact for 90 minutes.
The Federal Transport Authorities take safety very seriously in Australian offshore racing, following the six deaths in the storm-tossed 1998 Sydney-Hobart Race. Thus while youth offshore is often encouraged elsewhere, in Australia you have to be at least 18 years old to take part in a major offshore race. And continuous VHF watch is mandatory, mainly in order to prevent unnecessary SAR moblisation when a PLB alarm is accidentally activated.
Thus when Celestial proved to be uncontactable when this happened, it had inevitable after-effects. When Ichi Ban was made aware that the relatively close Celestial appeared to be having difficulty, she diverted for a few minutes, and has consequently been compensated by three minutes by the Committee.
But more severely, Celestial herself has been penalised by 40 minutes, which pushes her completely out of contention and leaves Ichi Ban as overall winner unless Sean Kearns little S & S 34 Azzuro can sail the final 30 miles to Hobart through the calm of the night at a freakish speed.
For Celestial’s crew, it’s a cruel outcome. Yet there’s no denying that Ichi Ban lost time by going out of her way to see if help was needed, and to alert them to their contact failure. And in fact, in looking at the demeanour of Celestial’s crew in Hobart after the finish, with the Protest Meeting in the formal board-room of the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania looming on their personal horizon, you sense they knew they were in trouble.
Part of the trouble is that the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race is such a high profile event, because it is in the middle of the Christmas/New Year holidays and maximum attention. Following on from that, the slightest perceived cutting of any slack in the very stringent safety requirements by the race authorities is simply not something to be contemplated at all.