News Around the World
NEW ZEALAND With fresh southwesterlies in the forecast, the gun boats in the 40th anniversary New Zealand Coastal Classic Race would have relished the prospect of a fast run north with a sunset finish in time for cocktails and dinner ashore in the Bay of Islands. Hopefully they provisioned with more than lunchtime sandwiches, however, because it was just short of midnight before the first boats drifted across the finish line. The rest of the 164-boat fleet were left strung out along the coast, with the last official finishers trailing across the line a full 25 hours after the leaders. The changing conditions not only confounded expectations, but
also the established conventions of this 119-mile race from Auckland up to Russell, with monohulls pushing the multihulls well down the leaderboard this time to dominate the top six line-honours placings while small boats achieved the rare distinction of claiming the major handicap prizes. Although the race is run under the auspices of the NZ Multihull
Yacht Club the monohull divisions always outnumber the multihulls; but over the course of its 40-year history the line honours over- whelmingly belong to the two- and three-wheelers. The current race record of 5:00:37 was set by Karl Kwok’s MOD 70 trimaran Beau Geste in 2019. Monohulls have taken line honours only three times before. In
1989 Graeme Woodroffe’s Davidson 55 Emotional Rescuecrossed the line first after 19h 7m of upwind slog – with 50kt around Cape Brett, guarding the entrance to the Bay of Islands. In 2009 Neville Crichton’s supermaxi Alfa Romeo set a new
outright course record of 6:43:32, wiping out the 14-year-old time set by the pink catamaran Split Enz and enjoying conditions that provided a rare dream run of sustained 20kt southwesterlies – exactly what this year’s fleet was hoping to repeat. Then in 2020, in a painfully light, fickle breeze, Bianca Cook’s
Volvo 65 NZ Ocean Racing ghosted across the line two minutes short of 4am. Only 16 boats managed to record official finish times, 135 retiring at various points along the coast. In all three of those cases a multihull was second or third across the line – making this year’s line honours board all the more exceptional. For 40 years the Coastal Classic has featured as an annual ritual
on the New Zealand racing calendar. The course takes the fleet on a scenic track north, with the numerous islands along the way posing some interesting tactical questions.
26 SEAHORSE
Timed for the Labour Day long weekend at the end of October,
the hope is that the race heralds the beginning of a glorious southern summer. However, that is often a triumph of optimism over expe- rience… the dress code more usually tending towards sweaters and foul-weather gear than bikinis and T-shirts as squally spring equinox conditions generally prevail. Sinkings, capsizes, lost rigs, lost rudders, injuries, general
mayhem and multiple abandonments have attended the more boisterous races, while light-air drifters have also tested the skills and endurance of competitors over the years. The race was conceived from a suggestion by Roger Dilly in 1982
at a time when multihulls occupied a fringe existence well outside the mainstream with little opportunity for racing. ‘I was tired of being the poor cousin,’ he recalled. ‘People who sailed multihulls were still considered fruit loops.’ Twelve yachts lined up for the first race in 1982, which was
divided into a single multihull division, with further monohull divisions defined by length. In its early years with no sponsorship the prizes mostly comprised secondhand items like power drills and food mixers plundered from Roger Dilly’s secondhand store... It has gone on to become a rite of passage for most racing sailors,
including many who have gone on to achieve glory in round-the- world races, Olympic Games and America’s Cups. Maxis, super- maxis, Whitbread and Volvo raceboats, big racing cats and tri- marans, even an ex-IACC America’s Cup yacht have joined the fleet, along with international race yachts stopping off in New Zealand on their way to Sydney for the Hobart race. This year the promise of a fast sprint up the 119-mile track from
Auckland to the Bay of Islands quickly faded as the brisk south - westerly that had spinnakers billowing in the early stages encountered a new easterly breeze halfway up the coast. As countervailing winds wrestled for supremacy, the fleet leaders stalled in no-man’s land. First across the line was Brian Peterson’s dark blue V5 at
23:46:23. After waiting for hours into the night the markers on the finish boat suddenly had a busy 11 minutes recording the first six finishers, all of which were monohulls comprising four TP52s and two Melges 40s. The first multihulls across were the 18.5m Roger Hill catamaran Cation, in seventh, followed by Volvo veteran Erle Williams’ Murray Ross-designed cat Apache. However, it was a close-run thing all the way to the finish. ‘I wasn’t sure we had won until right at the very end,’ says Brian Peterson.
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