With the warmth of the new Thursday morning beginning to make its presence felt in Tasmania, the chances are increasing of a favourable breeze to bring the Super-Maxi Andoo Comanche (John Winning) to the line honours victory in this often obtuse Rolex Sydney-Hobart Race 2023. It should all happen for the big boat just as this update is being posted, with the other leading Super-Maxi, Law Connect (Christian Beck), close astern.

Who knows, but the weather pattern has been so uncooperative (think thunderstorms, rain so heavy you couldn't see the stemhead from the cockpit, sudden violent squalls, and the main lines of wind of completely opposite directions within a few miles of each other) that simply being in Hobart, and the job done, could be a race winner.

MONEYPENNY STILL OVERALL LEADER

But as we write approaching 2000hrs Irish Time Wednesday, the overall leader is still reckoned to be Sean Langman's RP69 Moneypenny with Will Byrne of the National YC in Dun Laoghaire in the pivotal position of bowman, while second is the Tasmanian RP66 Alive aboard which Adrienne Cahalane has played a blinder as navigator/tactician, so either way there could be celebratory dancing in the streets of Dun Laoghaire and Dromineer.

In the rest of the fleet, the red-hot TP52s of Division I are slugging it out, though Sebastian Bohm's Smuggler (NSW) put significant miles between herself and Caro, Highly Sprung and Celestial by being on a more westerly line approaching Tasmania. However, as they all still have 250 miles or more to get to the finish, it's much too soon to make a final call.

Division 4, in which Richard Williams' Cookson 40 Calibre 12 held the lead for the first couple of days with Stephanie Lyons ex-Kinsale on the bow, is somewhat bewildering in checking the estimated final placings.

For Calibre - by no means the highest-rated boat - is shown at 345 miles from the finish, yet she's posted as being back in 11th slot, but the only classmate nearer that elusive Hobart line is Daniel Edwards' White Noise at second, with 342 miles to race. Yet the similarly-rated White Noise is shown at that second place, but Calibre 12 is shown as nine
places further back. Perhaps as normal office hours arrive in Hobart, we might see some re-ranking....

CINNAMON GIRL BACK UP TO THIRD IN TWO-HANDERS

A similar inexplicable wandering among the rankings has occurred from time to time with the Two-Handers, but now Kinsale's Cinnamon Girl (Cian McCarthy & Sam Hunt) is back in the frame as nature intended and indeed as the Jeanneau Board-room might have hoped, as her sister Sunfast 3300 Kraken III currently holds the lead. But again, it's bewildering, as Cinnamon is 366 miles from the finish and making 9 knots, while Kraken is 365 from the line but slightly slower. It's the eventual alignment of this sometimes conflicting data that is part of the fascination of following a 628-mile race on the other side of the world, in an area where the seasons are the exact opposite, the weather systems rotate in reverse directions, and they're having darkness when we're in daylight.

Race Tracker here 

For sure, it’s very easy to make too much of the power of the Irish global diaspora. After all, these days just about everybody in the creative arts – particularly writing, acting and music – will determinedly claim an Irish granny at the very least. And in sport, you soon find something similar, even if the links are sometimes stretched extremely thin, but needs must when we have to build a national football team.

Nevertheless, we don’t need to dig very deep into the entries with crew lists in next Tuesday (December 26th’s) starting lineup of 120 very varied boats in the annual 628-mile Sydney-Hobart Race to find strong shades of green. That said, the only boat entry registered as Irish is the Sun Fast 3300 Cinnamon Girl-Eden Capital being campaigned by Kinsale’s Cian McCarthy and Sam Hunt, famed for their home boat sister-ship Cinnamon Girl being the hottest offshore two-hander in Ireland, frequently beating fully-crewed boat while she’s at it.

A touch of the green - Irish Sydney-Hobart Race two-handed entry co-skipper Cian McCarthy of Kinsale with the chartered Antipodean Sun Fast 3300 Cinnamon Girl–Eden Capital in Sydney, and beside him on the pontoon is the famous extra-long bowsprit from the very successful Irish-based Cinnamon Girl Photo:  Andrea Francolini

ALAN CONDELL OF LIMERICK REMEMBERED

Their charter of a local Sun Fast 3300 was organised in by Lee Condell, originally of Limerick, who in the 2022 race campaigned another Sun Fast 3300 in honour of the memory of his father, the great Alan Condell who did so much for Limerick Estuary and Lough Derg sailing. The second place that Lee Condell achieved in 2022 in his first crack at the Hobart Race as part of a duo was a fitting memorial for one of Irish western sailing’s greats.

However, for individual star power in all the offshore majors, few can rival Howth ex-Pat Gordon Maguire of Sydney, whose firsts overall in the Hobart dash are in a large and varied list right back to 1991, when he won everything possible in tandem with Crosshaven’s Harold Cudmore on John Storey’s Farr 43 Atara.

Yeah, we know you’ve seen this before, but this record of how it all started with the 1991 Sydney-Hobart Race is now Holy Writ, and it’s also a useful reminder of what a good-looking boat was to be found with the classic Farr 43 Atara

GORDON MAGUIRE’S EXCEPTIONAL OFFSHORE RACING CV

With Volvo World Race victories included in his star-studded CV, Maguire can clearly cut the mustard on any size of boat. But his particular brand of individual input, both through magic helming and boat-tune skills, have perhaps been best shown recently in the TP52s.

Gordon Maguire in Hobart after another overall win with the coveted Tattersall Cup (left) edging into the photo

On Tuesday, he comes through the famous Sydney Harbour Four Lines Simultaneous Start aboard Max Klink’s Botin 52 Caro, whose crew includes Cian Guilfoyle of Dun Laoghaire who – unlike Maguire, who was doing that race with Sean Langman’s eccentric gaff cutter Maluka – was on Caro’s crew when she swept the board in the 2023 Fastnet Race.

Caro sweeps into Cherbourg to win the 2023 Fastnet Race

Early days. A young Cian Guilfoyle (left) and Dan O’Grady (centre) with Anthony O’Leary after the latter had won the Championship of Champions racing J/80s at the National Yacht Club in October 2014. Photo: W M Nixon

Caro supposedly fits into the TP52 guidlines, but she has so thoroughly shown her stern to so many other TP 52s during 2023 that it’s easier to think of her as a new breed of boat altogether, and the Botin 52 classification seems to be the one that sticks. And if she can add the Sydney-Hobart 2023 overall to her notches list, it won’t be the he first time Max Klink has been in the frame, as he won the 52ft Division in the 2022 race.

THIRTY-ONE OFFSHORE RACES FOR OFFALY

Another top ex-Pat Irish sailor who is a Hobart regular is ace navigator and technican Adrienne Cahalane, whose family left Offaly for Oz when she was just a kid, but her sailing relatives still in Nenagh – such as ILCA ace Aisling Keller – still regard a Cahalane success as another gong for Lough Derg YC.

The canting-keel 66ft Reichel-Pugh Alive will be navigated for her 31st Sydney-Hobart Race by Offaly-born Adrienne Cahalane. Those who suggest that such boats are reminiscent of a Swiss Army knife in their underwater profile could well have a point, or indeed several points

This time round she’s calling the navigational and tactical shots for her 31st Hobart race on the Reichel-Pugh canted-keel 66-footer Alive, and this past week she has voiced the concerns of many of her navigation colleagues at the sheer unpredictability the weather patterns along the course have already been demonstrating this year, and particularly in recent days and weeks This is such that some boat taking an outrageous flyer might do very well indeed, in which case some pundits will argue that the hyper-successful boat wasn’t taking a flyer, but everyone else clearly was.

Meanwhile, other boats of special interest include the attractive Calibre 12, a handsome 40ft Cookson 12 owned by Richard Williams with Stephanie Lyons - now of Sydney but still a Kinsale YC member - sailing her fourth Hobart Race as Bowman. This is arguably the most demanding and dangerous specified role on any boat, but when we first mentioned Steph’s job description, The Sisterhoood reasonably responded by saying she should be called The Bowperson.

Sharp end woman…Steph Lyons, outport member of Kinsale YC, will be doing her fourth Sydney-Hobart Race as the Bowman on the Cookson 12 Calibre 12, and she says the job description is Bowman and not Bowperson, and that’s the way it is

KEEPING THE JOB NAMES AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE

However, Steph - a former Kildare horsewoman of noted fearlessness - retorted that she wanted to be known as The Bowman. For apart from anything else, in a hard-driven racing boat, people will never use a longer word when a shorter one will do, even if some of those shorter words could never be used in a blog with a family readership.

In the rest of the fleet, Mickey Martin’s veteran TP52 Frantic is pretty much green and green all the way through. Not only is the skipper happy to acknowledge his ancestry and friendships in Ireland, but originally she was Eamonn Conneely’s first Patches, the boat that introduced Ireland to the TP 52 class if you set aside the fact that Ger O’Rourke’s all-conquering Cookson 50 Chieftain was a basic Bruce Farr-designed TP 52 hull with 2ft of the stern chopped off, and the gross inconveniences of a canting keel and dagger boards installed.

Cork sailor Grattan Roberts Junior is sailing on the 100-footer Scallywag, Syd Fischer’s ex-Ragamuffin 100.

CLONTARF, DUN LAOGHAIRE AND WICKLOW

The much more straightforward Frantic is basic TP52 throughout, though in the early days of Martin ownership, there were times when she did rather live up to her name. However, this year she shipped aboard ex-Pat Trevor Smyth of Clontarf for the new 1250-mile Sydney-Auckland Race in October and won overall, and there’s fresh input from Ireland for the Hobart Race, with Conor Totterdell from the National YC in Dun Laoghaire and Cillian Ballesty from Wicklow SC now out in Oz for a Frantic race.

Mickey Martin’s TP52 Frantic was originally the first TP52 called Patches, owned by Eamonn Conneely whose home place was in Connemara. In the 2023 Sydney-Hobart Race, her crew will include input from Clontarf Yacht & Boat Club, the National YC in Dun Laoghaire, and Wicklow SC

BUSINESSLIKE APPROACH

Taking a no-nonsense businesslike approach, Denis Power of the Royal St George YC in Dun Laoghaire - noted for his links to the successful J/97 Windjammer in Dublin Bay - has “bought a berth” on the interesting 55-footer Arctos, a Radford/McIntyre creation which is reminiscent of one of the Bill Lee Transpacific sleds that have evolved in California to do the San Diego to Hawaii Race (think Roy Disney’s 72ft Pyewacket), while in Arctos’s case the CV includes a swift global circumnavigation.

The 55ft Arctos giving a couple of larger boats a bad time as they exit Sydney Harbour in the early stages of a Hobart race

FEW SCOW TYPES

It’s interesting to note that in Australia there are few of the latest French-style scow-bow offshore racers. For as super-navigator Stan Honey pointed out in his recent privately-circulated New York Yacht Club talk-in about the race’s special challenges with Sydney-Hobart multiple success skipper Matt Allen, the wayward East Australian Current which runs south along the first half or so of the race offshore off the coast of New South Wales can sometimes achieve a brisk 5 knots. When that is making against the notorious Southerly Buster, it’s like trying to go to windward as fast as possible in the biggest tide race you’ve ever seen.

The 628 mile Sydney-Hobart Race has been sailed annually (except for one Covid year) since being inaugurated under the inspiration of Captain John Illingworth in 1945. Features of the course include the possibility of the south-going East Australian Current reaching up to 5 knots off the coast of New South Wales, making for tide race conditions in a strong southerly, while in the final 60 miles, increasingly flukey conditions can be experienced as the land narrows in to the finish in the Derwent River on the Hobart waterfront (see inset)

Stan has done most of his Sydney-Hobart Races in Maxis or Super-Maxis, and has frequently taken line honours and sometimes won overall in most of them too. So when he says that even in a hundred-footer like Comanche, racing in those conditions would be very scary if you’d time to be scared, you’d better believe it. And as for what it would be like in a flat sectioned French offshore scow, it defies imagination.

MISTAKES? HE’S HAD A FEW…..

The great navigator was refreshingly candid about his few tactical errors, but you needed to follow the discussion closely to see where this modest genius he had got it exactly right in continually adjusting strategy and tactics to adjust to happening and expected changes.

The message for those who would mistakenly expect to have their routing and tactics marked out from the off is clear in offshore racing as in other challenges, with the great boxer Muhammad Ali expressing it at its most succinct: “No plan survives the first punch.”

Navigation legend Stan Honey with owner Sandy Oatley aboard the starring maxi Wild Oats XI before the start of a Sydney-Hobart Race

We can only hope that in time the Honey-Allen Sydney Hobart Race talk-in goes up on YouTube, for its eminently sensible conclusions included the fact that races of more than 600 miles – which of course includes the Round Ireland – are regarded as Classics because the average boat cannot do them as a sprint, and the fact that there are those who attempt to do so explains why so many Classics see marked changes in the leading placings in the final 150 miles.

But it may well be that the world’s best-known navigator’s management won’t allow him to be seen in such a homely and laid back mood, yet it was that which made this show very special indeed.

Stan Honey doesn’t just navigate other people’s big boats. He and his wife sally (a former Olympic dinghy sailor) once bought a derelict vintage Cal 40 in a rough neighbourhood in California in such an abandoned state that there were bullet holes in the hull. Yet they undertook a huge restoration job personally, and the result was this, the successfully raced and much-cruised sloop Illusion

Meanwhile, Stan Honey and everyone else with the slightest drop of salt water in their veins will be gradually moving the focus more intensely to southeast Australia as we work our way through Christmas Day, and then escape in mind and attention to Sydney Harbour on Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day or whatever you’re having yourself. Because for sailors, and particularly those in the Northern Hemisphere in the darkest days of winter, the 26th of December sees one of world sailing’s greatest and usually sunny spectaculars unfolding as the fleet heads in unison for the open sea, and the singular challenge of getting to Hobart as fast as possible - and preferably in one piece.