Top of the Gulf Regatta 2015 – Coronation Cup history in sight

by Guy Nowell, Sail-World Asia on 4 May 2015 Here we are at three-quarters the way through the Top of the Gulf Regatta. The dice are loaded and the scores are starting to sort themselves out. Scores in the divisions are close enough to be interesting. There’s a bit of sunshine, and a 6-8kts at start time. Who’s going left and who’s going right?

The RO sent the Cruisers away on a 25nm cruise to points west (Koh Rang Kwian) and points north (Koh Lan) but somehow the results have been absorbed by the ether and are not available at press time.

Closer to home base, and the Multihull, IRC 1, IRC 2 and Platus all started with a two-sausage windward-leeward course. When the big boats had cleared out of the way, the Platus started with defending champion Scott Duncanson mid-line and covering Easy Tiger (Chris Way) for the first tack out to the left before going right and cruising to the top mark. Kingdom Properties (Duncanson) led at the top mark, with Way rounding in 12th place among 13 boats, and narrowly escaped the traffic jam that ensued at the bottom mark as the Platu, IRC 1 and IRC 2 fleets all arrived at the leeward mark together. Duncanson held the lead for the rest of the race to finish a crushing 2m 45s in front of The Ferret (Alex Audibet) and then the rest of the Coronation Cup fleet. The breeze was dying all the time, with Amanda and Sansiri (IRC 2) having to work hard to finish at all in rather less than 4 kts of breeze.

In view of the substantially soft conditions, everyone – sailors and media alike – were a little surprised when the RO radioed the next race as trip out to the Koh Rin group and back again, some 25nm round trip. EFG Mandrake passed close by and requested the media boat to “order us some breakfast, bacon rolls and Bloody Marys” before the Race Officer relented and signalled another windward-leeward as being “more controllable”. Not to mention shorter. Phew.

The big boats and the Multihulls crawled away, and after a break in the sequence to allow the front runners to clear the start line, were followed by the Platu fleet. A seriously light airs race suddenly woke up when the went sharply left from 230° to 180° and started to build – Wan Ma Rang went from hero to zero on the wrong side of the shift faster than you can change mustard to custard, and EFG Mandrake collected the spoil. The Platu fleet suddenly found themselves reaching to the top mark and tacking for the offset before blast reaching to the finish in 14kts of breeze “with one hand on the vang, ready to release” as Scott Duncanson reported later.

Three days into a four-day regatta, and with enough races on the card to allow discards to come into play, and Foxy Lady VI leads IRC 1, Amanda (Lennart Fahlgren) still commands IRC 2, and (to borrow a line from M Python) “there is no IRC 3”.

Most intriguingly, Scott Duncanson is sitting atop the Coronation Cup score sheet with a 12-point advantage over The Fox (Ben Williams) in second place. Kingdom Properties needs to finish better than 11th tomorrow, and can duck the last race to allow Duncanson to become the first skipper ever to win the Coronation Cup two years in a row. The scramble for the remaining podium positions is likely to be fierce with The Fox on 24 points followed by Easy Tiger (Chris Way) on 25, Tigrina (Andrew Moore) with 29 and Le Vent (Wiwat Poonpat, Royal Thai Navy) at 30. We’ll be watching. We will report.

Full results (except IRC 4) at:
www.topofthegulfregatta.com/results or http://www.topyacht.net.au/results/2015/tog/index.htm