News Around the World
Champion 18-Foot Skiff sailor John Winning puts his other hat on to skipper one of the growing fleet of beautifully restored classic 18s that now race regularly on Sydney Harbour. Among the usual suspects taking part each year is a certain former big boat and America’s Cup skipper, Harold Cudmore, of Ireland and Cowes… ‘I wouldn’t miss this one for the world!’
Yet this seems to be as much a part of the sport these days as actually realising that in the third week of January every year there is an opportunity to test yourself and your team in one of the best venues in the US for competitive sailing. Maybe the bitching is just a mechanism to assuage the guilt felt for knowing you’re in a special place… yeah, that must be it. We can’t be getting that old and grumpy to not appreciate these things, can we? If so, we all need to shut up and push the reset button. To be sure, to race in Key West in high tourist season has got pretty expensive, bordering on the ridiculous, and is likely to be a factor in tempering its popularity. But Premiere Racing continues to soldier on and weather the discontent, real or imagined, perhaps a victim of its own high standards that saw a peak in popularity and attendance a few years ago when the offshore one-designs were in their heyday. The gripers look backwards and wax poetic about those ‘good ole days’, not remembering that daily harbour starts were at 0830, there were often long waits between races for the other classes to finish, and the big regatta tent was so large and so damned loud it was too intimidating to enter. So Key West Race Week is smaller now, but that’s OK: the refine- ments have adapted well to this being a more manageable and intimate regatta, where you’re more comfortable seeing people you know at the post-race party under the trees at Kelly’s, the event’s casual bar and restaurant (and birthplace of Pan American Airways!). Like last year, the J/70 class stole the show, grabbing interest as it has from not only die-hard one-design sailors but from a surprising number of older big boat owners who have tired of the hassle and expense of campaigning big boats for a week and feeding huge – in both senses – crews. Owners like Peter Cunningham, who a few years ago was here campaigning his TP52 Powerplaybefore it was sold to the Italians and won the 2013 ORC World Championship as Hurakan… he’s now in a J/70. Or John Brim, whose Reichel-Pugh 55 Rimawas also here a few years ago but is now for sale while he has fun racing on a J/70 with a young crew that includes newly crowned Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year Stephanie Roble, eager to have a go at pro sailing like her boyfriend, match racer Taylor Canfield. It’s interesting to see that this young talent that used to try to make a living in big keel boats is now trying to do the same in sportboats…
18 SEAHORSE
As is more established tactical talent like Tony Rey, doing the same keeping Cunningham having fun around the J/70 track. But an important question remains: how long will the J/70 owners like Brim and Cunningham remain in this class? Will they ever again come back to ‘proper’ big boat sailing? In a way it doesn’t matter too much: the Johnstones have done such a fabulous job of creating a platform to keep these guys in the game, and enjoying it, until they make their next move.
There was other young talent in the big boats: perennial Moth champion and recent Rolex award winner Bora Gulari spent the week helping get the team on Steve and Heidi Benjamin’s flagship HPR Carkeek 40 Spookie around the track as they climbed the learning curve with their new taller rig. They nearly lost to Bill Coates’s Ker 43 OtraVez, led by another young talent, Mike Buckley, perhaps because the Carkeek had only one day in five of full-planing conditions, and the heavier Ker design did just fine in the light to moderate air and flat water seen during the rest of the week. Coates and his team have a full season ahead of them: Caribbean 600, Voiles de St Barths, ORC Worlds in Barcelona, Copa del Rey, the Middle Sea Race, to name a few. With this ambitious schedule Otra Vezcould quite easily be the most travelled raceboat from the US this season, in part made easier for Coates because his career currently sees him based in Paris. Yet the boat that defeated Otra Vezand Spookiein both HPR and IRC scoring was Piet Vroon’s Dutch team on his Ker 51 Tonnerre, the carbon Knierim-built ex-Varuna. This boat was new to Vroon and his team, who were issued the first-ever ORC-generated HPR certificate (all others have been issued in the US) for racing in Key West. Regardless of the rating system, in the end size matters in a class of all smaller rivals, although one of them, the Kernan 47 True did give Tonnerre a scare in a few of the early light-air races.
There was also some not-so-young talent out there in Key West, notably our friend Terry Hutchinson on Hap Fauth’s Maxi 72 Bella Mente. With a firm mandate to win, it was hardly a surprise when Terry tried to get redress for a grounding incident that had Bella stuck hard on a buoy-marked wreck on the course (she draws over 5m); but we were surprised when the redress request extended to the second race, which the Bellastarted and finished
CHRISTOPHE FAVREAU
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