News Around the World
The sight every Hobart sailor longs for… the Organ Pipes at Tasmania’s Cape Raoul mark the beginning of the final stretch of the race before entering the Derwent… where among the tighter groups the whole thing often starts all over again! That was certainly the case in the 2023 race when yet again the line-honours battle between the leading 100-footers was plagued by the lightest of shifty, streaky winds. In previous races the giant ‘power boat’ Comanche often struggled against slender rivals like Wild Oats XI (absent this year). But under the Winning family’s expert stewardship the VPLP-Verdier monster seems to have found a new set of legs in what used to be its absolute worst conditions and this year Andoo Comanche carried the fight to LawConnect right into the final metres
The last yacht to exit the harbour was the 30-footer Currawong,
one of 18 two-handed entries in this year’s fleet and looking to improve on last year’s result as the last boat to arrive in Hobart… But for the competitors large and small, here on this 628-mile race south, progress was slow. Two days before the start of the 78th Hobart race leading
met-man Roger ‘Clouds’ Badham was still unsure. The models were not aligning and it was all very complex. Extreme weather had hammered the east coast of Australia and so the Hobart fleet was nervous. What was clear was that the first 18 hours would be light and tricky, with a light noreaster, sunshine and high humidity hovering over Sydney for the race start. Chatting with Tony Mutter from LawConnect just before they docked
out, Mutter said they expected troughs and a cold front, with storms and hail, ‘and not just any hail – Australian hail!’, while holding up his fist, nervously indicating what he feared… And so the fleet eased south, with LawConnect retaking the lead
and Scallywag completing a 720° turn off Bondi to exonerate them from any future protest hearing. But by the first evening of the race all of that was history as Scallywag became the first retiree after her bowsprit snapped. The first night saw five boats retire after the southwesterly front
came through with 25-40kt, sustained lightning and three hours of solid rain. As Tony Mutter later confirmed in Hobart, ‘That first night out was heinous... really bad. The breeze was flicking 180° in the high 30s, and then the following morning we pushed too hard, launch- ing the boat. We race it like we don’t own it and I think I actually got it out of the water! We then blew up our J-Zero which came down in shreds…’ That was just the beginning, as Iain Murray onboard Andoo
Comanche confirmed: ‘We were probably a bit conservative at the start and the boat in that light and sloppy stuff just struggles. We also had the wrong jib on for a while. But then we worked our way out from under those clouds to get out in front, ripping away doing 26kt. With a 10-mile lead we sailed at the micro-weather system about 200 miles wide in Bass Strait with no real choice but to head into it; then we muddled through that for another 10 hours or so. But it was pretty violent.’ What the leading boats were dealing with were thunderstorms and variables from the west-southwest up to 50kt, with torrential
28 SEAHORSE
rain, which saw Andoo Comanche heading north for a while in atrocious conditions, as Murray confirmed. ‘You are sailing with a number 2 jib and a reef in 20kt, and suddenly
there is a 30-plus degree shift and it’s 47kt! So you feather through that for a while, then we headed east to get ourselves out of all that, still constantly slamming into the waves. It was hard on the boat, but she is solid. She made some horrible noises but dealt with it, a big testament to the designers and builders. Their choice to go for a monolithic skin concept in the bow was a great one, allowing the whole area to flex rather than break.’ The two frontrunners exchanged places with Andoo Comanche
now leading by 14 miles until they ran into the no-wind zone off the southwest of Tasmania, which saw LawConnect close up before Comanche hit the southerly and roared off again… With a two-mile lead entering the Derwent, Comanche looked to
have done enough to secure the win, but the crew on LawConnect never gave up. After a slugfest that saw the lead change five times, and with just 50m to the line in the patchiest of breezes,LawConnect eased around Andoo Comanche’s bow for a dramatic victory by just 51 seconds. An extraordinary and agonising finish, as Iain Murray described. ‘Honestly we did well to stay in that fight. They were clearly much faster in that light stuff and so we had a fist-fight down to the finish... We thought we could make the line and just couldn’t, so they sailed over us. ‘We really shouldn’t have given them that opportunity but it was
all in the heat of the moment. Right then there is no plan really – it’s martial arts, reactionary fighting! They punch and you counter- punch, that is match racing and we didn’t do as good a job as we should have. LawConnect sailed a really good race, all credit to them.’ Finishing at 08.03.58 after a race time of 1d 19h 3m 58s Christian
Beck was delighted. ‘I can’t believe that result, honestly I never thought it was possible! Because they took the lead pretty close to the finish line we thought there was no way we could get it back, but we got some pressure and it all happened. ‘What a team we have. And after three second places the
bridesmaid finally got married!’ For skipper Chris Nicholson this was a massive achievement and he was very clear how the team secured an audacious win. ‘That Hobart wasn’t won at the end, it was won in the middle of the race where we just held on to give us the opportunity to take it to them in the Derwent.’
KURT ARRIGO/ROLEX
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