AUSTRALIA The battle south We all know you can’t win the 628-mile Rolex Sydney to Hobart Race on the first day but you can certainly lose it. Jim Cooney helming Comanche at the Boxing Day start must have been wondering if the gods were against him as he was the last line honours contender out of the harbour – and pipped to the turning mark by the Carkeek 60 Winning Appliances. The problem was the breeze. Forecast light, it increased minutes
before the 1pm gun, suddenly allowing the 85 boats the opportunity to get a steady run to the line, with Mark Richards on Wild Oats XI nailing it mid-line with clean air and plenty of breathing space. But, as every local sailor knows, Sydney Harbour can be fickle. With the breeze flicking annoyingly around the top-right quadrant, the first turning marks fell under the influence of towering North head with even the 100-footers stalled at times trying to wriggle out to sea. Peter Harburg’s Black Jack with tactician Brad Butterworth,
navigator Tom Addis and skipper Mark Bradford stayed on the east side of the harbour and mastered the tricky stuff for early gains, before leading the fleet around the corner to slice south in the building noreaster. The matching pair of Reichel/Pugh 66s, Alive and Ocean Respect, were close behind, but for the rest of the fleet it was miserable, flopping around in a washing machine caused by the massive spectator fleet rushing out through the heads. Outside it was a different
matter.Black Jack powered south, followed
by Wild Oats, Sun Hung Kai–Scallywagand Christian Beck’s InfoTrack with Bouwe Bekking, Stu Bannatyne and Chris Nicholson onboard keeping things sharp. Of course it wasn’t long before Comanchekicked into gear using that massive ‘torque’ to swerve trailing spectator yachts and start hauling in her rivals for line honours. But as the race progressed the conditions were so variable it
was hard to see a pattern emerge. The defending overall champion Matt Allen on TP52 Ichi Ban was up and down the leaderboard by 10 or 20 positions each sched. Other early contenders were Bruce Taylor’s Caprice 40 Chutzpah, Winning Appliances and Ray Roberts’ Farr 55 Hollywood Boulevard. The Ker 46 Patrice was also looking on fine form until it hit a solid bank of fog off Flinders Island and parked up for four painful hours. This year’s race was also one of reflection for the 1998 Sydney
Hobart in which six lives were lost at sea. The tragedy was formally commemorated at 1700 hours on 27 December during the sched- uled fleet radio report, by David Kellett, who sailed the 1998 race and read out to the fleet the words originally spoken by then CYCA Commodore Hugo van Kretschmar at the 1998 memorial service at Constitution Dock: Mike Bannister, John Dean, Jim Lawler, Glyn Charles, Bruce Guy, Phil Skeggs… May the everlasting voyage you have now embarked on be blessed with calm seas and gentle breezes. May you never have to reef or change a headsail at night. May your bunk be always warm and dry. For the four 100-footers still in the race it was all on, and with
some outstanding talent on every boat. As Wild Oats navigator Juan Villa said later, ‘It was so changeable; you may come out of one scenario feeling like it had all gone bad for you… before finding that had actually set you up for a transition into the good stuff!’ In the closest multi-boat line honours contest in Hobart history
the four 100-footers could see each other, trading places across Bass Strait and down Tasmania’s east coast while never separated by more than four miles. Early in the morning of day three Comanche was leading down to Tasman Light with tacticians and navigators all furiously crunching strategies to stay in pressure and outsmart their rivals. Then, just after dawn, Wild Oats went wide to enter the Derwent River first. Yes, there was wind, but not much, and with the sun breaking through the cloud cover there was a fear of the pressure shutting down completely, increasing the tension in the spectator fleet. Particularly for the Oatley family watching from abeam of their big silver maxi… But the Oats crew didn’t disappoint and the final gybe to the
finish saw a spike in emotion onboard the spectator vessels. After what Bob Oatley’s widow Val described as ‘three miserable years to this moment’, Mark Richards handed the helm to Bob’s grandson
Dan Oatley, competing in his third Hobart race, to slide over the line in a time of 1d 19h 7m 21s, the crew delivering an emphatic win on their 13-year-old boat. That’s nine line honours for Reichel/Pugh’s enduringly successful maxi racer. Peter Harburg’s Black Jack was second over the line, followed
by Comanche, after the pair battled gybe for gybe after rounding the Iron Pot. Christian Beck’s InfoTrack made it four finishers in just under 15 minutes when it crossed at 08.51.17, a strong performance in conditions that were very far from ideal for Juan K’s mighty beast. As ever there were boat-on-boat contests all the way to Hobart.
With just 12 days’ training back in Sydney, Stacey Jackson and crew onboard Ocean Respect enjoyed a sensational match race with the other Reichel/Pugh 66 Alive. But damage to an A2 earlier in the race saw the Respect team without that critical sail for the Derwent, and so it was Phillip Turner and his crew on Alive who eased away to take the overall win on handicap – only the fourth Tattersall Cup win by a Tasmanian entry. The result was also a fantastic showing for Reichel/Pugh designs,
with both line honours and handicap first and second places going to Wild Oats, Black Jack, Alive and Ocean Respect Racing. As for those further back who were still at sea… well, early on
29 December the breeze built quickly once again, with competitors soon being slammed by gusts of 48-50kt trying to cross Storm Bay and finally get to a warm shower.
And then the protest The race committee was advised by rival Black Jack skipper Peter Harburg that Wild Oats had competed without its AIS transmitting throughout the race; the committee duly lodged a protest. The Oats defence was their AIS was always on, but had been damaged by uploading Channel 7 footage from the boat at the start using the station’s powerful commercial telecast equipment. Amid the growing dockside noise there was no doubt the big
boat’s AIS was functioning as it was ‘visible’ on boats moored nearby; it could transmit but the strength of that transmission was unclear. However, there is no rule (yet) on the strength of an AIS transmission so the Oats defence looked solid. It was never tested. In the event the protest was thrown out, not
for anything to do with AIS regulations but because the referral to the jury involved a conflict of interest on the part of Black Jack, who were told that had they filed a protest themselves it would have been valid and held in the normal way… The jury ruled against itself. Stepping back a moment, the Oats crew were the subject of a
fair bit of tough talk but they are big boys who have been around long enough to know how it goes in these situations. But you needed to have some sympathy for Black Jack’s committed owner Peter Harburg, who only later realised that had he not quite casually mentioned a suspected AIS ‘void’ there would have been no incident – a protest it seems was never on the cards. Like everyone else, Harburg, who for this race had traded up to the former Alfa Romeo (the original Oats sistership) from his VO70, wanted simply to move on. Amen to that. In the final analysis it’s more instructive to reflect that today’s
big raceboats – particularly a canting-keel Maxi – are seriously complex beasts. As every sailor knows, motors stall under load spikes and on ‘power-dependent’ giant yachts such a stall means PLCs tripping out all over the place and having to be rebooted… among other consequences. Whether or not this particular technical direction is good for yachting is a question for another day, but the fact is that complex systems that live in a salt environment some- times just fail (always, it seems, at 3am beating into 25kt). On a ‘purist’ note, this year’s Sydney Hobart saw Tony Ellis equal
Tony Cable’s 51 Hobart races with Bill Ratcliff reaching his dream of 50 starts at the age of 82. Plenty of other sailors hit 25 races this year, including Wild Oats strategist Iain Murray. It wasn’t a bad result for his crewmate and tactician either – Glenn Bourke in his first ever Hobart winning one from one. Next year’s Hobart will be massive – the 75th edition, and
definitely one to compete in. Sunny Australia in December and January? Bring the family. They will love you for it. Blue Robinson
q SEAHORSE 27
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