News Around the World
The man’s not kidding you… when Rob Kothe (below) talks about being crowded off the racecourse at Hamilton Island Race Week by these magnificent creatures he knows well of that of which he speaks. For sailors from Sydney the 1,000nm trek up the coast to race the triple of Airlie Beach, Hamo and Townsville can be an adventure in itself but when you do arrive you’ll quickly discover these big boys beat you to it by several million years
But then in 1989 Cyclone Aivu hit the Whitsundays in the middle
of race week. It was obviously time to think again; Melbourne-based Warwick Hoban, the PRO from the first event onwards for the next 18 years, was the driving force behind a planned move from the cyclone season to the southern hemisphere winter that finally took place in 1992. By now Airlie Beach, the nearest mainland port, just 15 miles
away, was looking enviously at the Hamo event and it was little surprise when entrepreneur Don Algie launched Airlie Beach Race Week for the week before Hamo in 1990. In 1992 that event then mirrored Hamo’s change back to August to preserve its strong position as lead-up regatta. However, while the strong southeasterly trade winds in July and
August make the northerly delivery passage quite easy and the racing conditions magnificent, going home can be a different story. Punching into 20-25kt winds in a tropical afternoon race can be exhilarating, but doing it for 500 miles shorthanded heading south down the Queensland coast can be quite unpleasant. Those south- easterly trades blow until mid-September when they turn to the northeast, making the voyage south a pleasure again… So in 2006 Townsville Yacht Club staged the first Sunferries,
now SeaLink Magnetic Island Race Week. Run a week after Hamo, 139nm further north and just nine miles by SeaLink ferry from the major city of Townsville. Queensland yachting icon Bob Robertson explains, ‘Spending more time on the far north Queensland coast before heading south just makes good sense. Perfect timing, great venue. You can be on the startline 15 minutes after leaving the dock and, with all the accommodation options here, you get a lot of regatta for your buck.’ Townsville’s certainly picturesque, with lots of wildlife including
koalas and wallabies who roam around as if they own the place (as once they did – ed). It’s spectacular from the water too with rocky coves with massive granite boulders along eastern and northern shorelines which can only be reached by water. So that’s the reason the three regattas exist –but what problems
there are in getting there. Denis Thompson, one of Australia’s most respected regatta
organisers, took the baton from Hoban in 2007 as race director for Hamo as well as for the two events either side of it: ‘In 2016 there were 250 yachts at Hamilton Island with some 130 at Airlie – but only about 25 of those went across to Hamo. Then we had
22 SEAHORSE
60 or 70 at Magnetic yet only a few of them were at the other events. ‘Of course, those people who do two or maybe even three
regattas, their crews keep changing so there are a lot of sailors going to north Queensland in that period. Some of them take a long time to sail here, making a holiday of it, with crew coming off and on at various ports… some of the real cruising boats out of Melbourne might be away for four or five months. Then there are boats that come by road from western Australia and stick around for a bit of cruising afterwards. ‘But for boats sailing the Northern series, the feeder races are
increasingly key for the raceboat fleets. The Sydney-Southport will always be strongest as it’s the first race of the CYCA’s Bluewater series. Some teams will not do the Southport but instead will do the Brisbane to Keppel. There is always a bit of leapfrogging going on. Either way, sailing north out of Sydney the average distance travelled is some 1,000nm. It’s a long haul.’ And as the fleet numbers heading north increase so too are the
numbers of whales that share the same waters – and with them the whale-yacht interactions… Taking my own Reichel/Pugh 43 north, off the south Queensland coast on a moonless night there was the whoosh of a whale surfacing then a bang as our rudder took a hit. Looking behind us in the sheen on the water a decent chunk of rudder promptly popped to the surface. How much rudder did we have left? We thought maybe a metre,
but this is an area where if the crocodiles don’t get you, the sharks will, so we did not send anyone overboard to check. We kept heading north... now with bigger wheel movements. It was not until we slowed to enter Hamilton Island harbour some
500nm further north we realised we had very little rudder left at all. On haul-out just 1ft, 300mm. An older rudder from the same boat, expensively flown in from Victoria, allowed us to continue the programme and collect some Hamo silverware. It’s a long coastline so many boats are now towed up by road,
but that has its dangers too. Driving trailer boats from south Australia, Victoria or NSW is easier on the flatter open inland spaces, but from dusk to dawn kangaroos abound. A roo bar on the front of a fast-moving 4WD towing a trailer impacting an adult kangaroo offers little engine protection, so most prudent drivers restrict their driving to daylight hours. Pushing hard that is 1,200km a day; it seems like a lot of ground covered, but if you’re coming from Perth, 5,000km away, it’s an
ANDREA FRANCOLINI
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