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can get to Fiji and how good the first rum is going to taste.’ Run by the Royal Akarana Yacht Club, pre-race safety inspections for the event were rigorous and preparations included survival briefings from crewmembers of Volvo entry Team Vestas… which famously – or infamously – ran up on a remote Indian Ocean reef. The loss of Djangotwo years ago was a sobering reminder of how brutal these waters can be. Three young crew, Ben Costello, Rebekka ‘Beks’ Hielkema and Andrew Cooke, were caught in 60kt winds and breaking seas, running downwind under a storm jib. Every- thing was snugged down with the boat handling the conditions well, until a wave broke on the transom. ‘I was looking straight down the face of the wave and thought, “No way”,’ Costello recounted later. The boat broached violently and the rudder sheared, binding up and opening a crack in the hull. They were 170 miles northeast of New Zealand and the forecast was for the storm to continue for three days. With no prospect of affecting a repair and the hull crack steadily opening up, the crew broadcast a mayday. Ironically Andrew Reid himself was in London on business when he received a call from Djangoto say the crew were going to have to abandon his yacht. In the event, everything was handled with textbook efficiency.
A Royal New Zealand Air Force Orion circled overhead and, by chance, a Royal New Zealand Navy patrol vessel, HMNZS Otago, was not far away. The Django crew prepared their liferaft but stayed onboard. As the crack in the hull continued to open up, the yacht started flexing ‘like paper’ as it rode over the waves. Finally, just
hundred thousand miles at sea before something like that happened. Hopefully, there will be another couple of hundred thousand before I have to deal with something like that again.’ Owner Andrew Reid was similarly philosophical. Two years ago, when he sat helpless to do anything except worry in London, his only instruction to Ben and the delivery crew was to forget about the boat and concentrate on surviving.
Although the experience was sobering for all concerned it has not dimmed their love of offshore sailing. ‘I have done half a dozen or more races to Fiji and other events in the Pacific,’ said Reid. Berthed next to Anarchyis the family’s 50ft cruising yacht, which they frequently take up to the South Pacific Islands. ‘I just love the ocean and nothing has changed that,’ he said. On the race itself the fleet struggled to escape the clutches of New Zealand’s winter, drifting out of Auckland on a cold, clear, wind- less day. Once on their way, however, perfect southeasterly conditions provided an expressway direct up the rhumbline to connect with the easterly trades, making for fast times. Both the multihull and monohull records for the distance fell. Simon Hull’s Vodafone, with Ben Costello onboard, clipped a whopping 22 hours off the previous record, covering the 1,100nm course at an average speed just under 20kt. Winemaker Jim Delegat’s Volvo 70 Giacomotook out the monohull record. And Anarchycrossed the line in good shape apart, perhaps, from skipper Andrew Reid. In this welcome age of daily communication with yachts offshore, one of the stranger, more intimate injury reports came from Anarchywhen Reid called in by satphone to report that he had fallen and cut his scrotum.
Beks Costello, sitting at home in Auckland instead of racing to
Fiji on Anarchyas planned, counted her blessings. A nurse, one of her shipboard roles is medic and the prospect of treating Andrew’s damaged nether regions in the middle of an ocean race might not have appealed. One assumes that in the all-male crew left onboard Andrew was left to self-medicate. Ivor Wilkins
USA All’s well on the eastern front
New Zealand designer Brett Bakewell-White has been busy of late (as the Build Table confirms), with his latest launching this 11m IRC racer for Andrew Reid. Is this a sign of our buddies at a well-known website going mainstream… we certainly hope not
as dark descended, the Navy ship hove into view; but as it positioned for the rescue, the ship was caught beam-on and was rolled to 33°, perilously close to capsize.
With a Navy lieutenant then swimming a line across, Beks was the first to go. But as she was hauled up the side of the heavily rolling ship, she was swung out in a massive arc that gave her a frightening view of lots of antifoul on the ship’s bottom before she crashed back into the side of the hull.
Watching from the yacht, Ben Costello thought there was no way she could come through that without broken bones, but she was finally hauled aboard battered and bruised but otherwise OK. Cooke went up next and skipper Costello was last to step off the wallowing Django. He and Beks subsequently married and both were due to sail again in this edition of the Fiji race, Beks on Anarchyand Ben on the Orma 60 trimaran Vodafone; however, for Beks, family matters intervened and she had to withdraw at the last minute. As Ben prepared to leave on Vodafone, he said he did reflect on what they had been through two years ago. ‘It has made me put more focus on preparation, both for myself and the boat.’ A seasoned professional sailor with a Volvo Ocean Race on his CV, Ben does not make light of the Django experience and acknowledges the outcome could have been much worse.
‘I have been racing as part of my living for a while, with a fair few 16 SEAHORSE
The New York YC regatta is typically the season opener for the US summer after the keen teams have migrated north from their winter hunting grounds in Florida and the Caribbean. The 2016 turnout was solid, from classics and multihulls through to one-designs, racer-cruisers and the Maxi72s. Add in a healthy turnout for the Newport-Bermuda Race and it was a busy week indeed in Newport. This year’s 635-mile race to Bermuda is the 50th edition since starting in 1906, and it prides itself as the ‘oldest regularly scheduled ocean race, one of few international distance races, and (with the Transpac) one of just two of the world’s regularly scheduled races held almost entirely out of sight of land’. It’s this last part that triggers the use of OSR Cat 1 safety regs and compliance standards that are only relevant to most entries every two years for this race. The hurdles are high for many entries that want to participate but need to go through a rigorous measurement and inspection process, one that keeps the boatyards, inspectors, measurers, sailmakers and the US Sailing rating office on their toes for months, building to a crescendo in the two weeks leading up to this race. This is all good, of course, because with high standards there is less risk of problems during the race. It’s a race organiser’s nightmare to have accidents occur that could have been prevented through better training and planning, so hats off to the Cruising Club of America for continuing to maintain their strict safety standards. On the measurement side, however, they may want to consider a less stringent requirement than full measurement for the true cruisers. The spring measurement season this year was awful – cold and wet for weeks – and this became especially hard for the increasing number of 50-60ft cruisers that had to empty out tons of gear and pull off their roller-furled sails just to put themselves in the same measurement trim standard as the raceboats. Perhaps as with the Chicago-Mackinac Race, less strict standards could be considered
IVOR WILKINS
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