Rolex Sydney Hobart- Your Turn, Then My Turn, Then Your Turn!

by Crosbie Lorimer on 27 Dec 2014 With the front runners over halfway to Hobart, this year’s race is turning out to be quite a page turner already; and that’s just the big boats.

So let’s start with them.

Wind back to the start, first honours to Comanche in the shoot out to the first mark. To be fair it was akin to pitting a brand new Bugatti Veyron against some classy and quick Ferraris and Porsches. The result in those conditions was never in doubt. But the straight line speed? To use Ken Read’s Californian vernacular, man that was cool!

Out to sea and everyone expected Wild Oats XI to stretch her legs and leave Comanche pounding uncomfortably into the southerly, keen to conserve a largely untested boat. In truth that was never going to work for the American team. Give Wild Oats an inch and she’ll rob you 30 nautical miles in a blink. The warriors just had to believe in their chief and give it all they’d got.

Sure enough on Saturday morning the two boats were within an Indian arrow’s arc of each other as dawn broke and the high pressure ridge came into play. Impressive night work from Comanche.

But, all day on Saturday Wild Oats XI slowly hauled away from the Americans in the light westerlies as they entered Bass Strait (she had a lead of 22 nm at 2pm).

That said, she was going to need that money in the bank, according to her navigator Juan Villa on Saturday morning, because the predicted stronger westerlies later in the day in Bass Strait were going to favour Comanche again.

Villa’s call was that the next twist, with the pending northerly flow would shift the advantage back to Wild Oats along the Tassie coast as her narrow beam and large sail plan allows her to sail much deeper than Comanche.

Dizzying!

In reality the weather Gods appear to have favoured Wild Oats in the last six hours, at 6pm she was not only sailing faster than Comanche (12 knots plays 7 knots), but the telling figure was Wild Oats’ bearing; at 186 degrees she was sailing almost 20 degrees deeper than her nearest rival! That’s a lot of extra miles in Course Made Good.

At 7pm on Saturday Wild Oats was getting on a roll at 17 knots, as the westerlies built and Comanche was looking to reduce that massive wetted surface, levering her beamy back end out of the water and searching for some downwind VMG.

Alas, the weather news is not good for the Americans over the next twelve hours it seems. Predict Wind shows that the westerlies that would have got her powering down the rhumb line are looking patchy over night along the Tassie coast while the increasing northerlies offshore play to Bob Oatley’s boat which revels in downwind running.

The line honours contest is still far from being over yet. Anything can happen still of course, but for all that Ragamuffin 100 and Rio had enjoyed some faster sailing than their seaward rivals well west of the rhumb line for much of Saturday , at 11.30 pm on Saturday night they were in lighter breeze some 66nm behind Wild Oats XI, doing anywhere between 7-10 knots while Wild Oats was hitting 18 knots.

Remarkably, as the media office here in Hobart closed for the evening on Saturday, with suggestions that the leaders might not be in to Hobart til late Sunday afternoon, word had it that Roger ‘Clouds’ Badham had advised the Wild Oats XI team that they should be at Tasman light at 10.30 am on Sunday and at the finish for an early lunch.

OK, so that’s quite enough of the big boats; what’s going on with the other 105 boats in the race. Remember them?

The name that kept coming to the fore in discussions with various competitors on Boxing Day about the overall IRC win, was Wild Rose. Even skipper Roger Hickman liked the shortened odds at 9:1 on the tab.

Sure enough, late evening on Saturday, Wild Rose is leading the race overall on IRC handicap. So that means she’s leading her division of course; no, correction, she’s leading two divisions – IRC Div 4 and the IRC 20 Year Veterans.

But there’s a long way to go yet and there’s a few others vying for the overall prize. Not least those in Wild Oats’ own division and Div 3. Indeed all of the top ten current contenders for IRC overall come from Divisions 3 and 4.

And doesn’t this race just love Beneteau First 40s, with Ron Forster’s Aeriel and Jonathan Stone and Mat Vadas’s Breakthrough lying second and third respectively overall, just ahead of the former race winner Love and War, who’s leading the 30 Year Veteran’s Class and lying second in the 20 Year Division. Confused yet?

The 50 and 60 footers are still very much in the mix too. Much will depend on how quickly the northerlies build in the next 6-8 hours for them, but last year’s winner Victoire is presently leading IRC Div 0 form Caro and Ichi Ban (Principal Race Officer Denis Thompson likes Ichi Ban’s odds).

Tony Kirby’s Patrice is leading IRC Div 1, while Ed Psaltis is clearly looking to furnish his extraordinary Hobart CV with at least a division win in IRC 2 for his last race (St George Midnight Rambler leads Chutzpah and Khaleesi).

She’s The Culprit leads on PHS whilst Chancellor upholds the Corinthian tradition leading that all amateur division.

Of course all of these standings are entirely theoretical as they are simply based on a mathematical calculation of time, distance to go and rating. The system takes no account of what weather lies ahead and that’s the really the key for the next twenty four hours at least.

The critical issue for the 50 and 60 footers seems to hinge on whether the stronger northerly flow will reach all down the Tassie coast to Tasman Island soon enough for them to exploit it. For this group too the hope will be that they don’t get in caught in the notorious Derwent River over night closedown. Ichi Ban’s skipper and owner Matt Allen chose his boat design size to avoid that very likelihood.

For the smaller boats the forecast seems to look promising with strong northerlies building all the way across Bass Strait tomorrow and filling in down the Tassie coast. With an angle from due north too, the older boats with conventional spinnaker poles will enjoy the deep running to Hobart more than the lightweight flyers such as Chutzpah, who’d much rather see some west in that breeze. There's a strong cold front forecast for late Monday, so that could change things again.

But hey, which fool makes any rash predictions about where this race ends up. Like a good book the story is the joy, the ending the revelation.

We’ll wait and see.