Rolex Sydney Hobart Dutchman will come back despite the Derwent

by Jim Gale/Rolex Sydney Hobart Media Team on 30 Dec 2008 Atse Blei, the owner/skipper of the Dutch S&S 41 Pinta-M says he will just have to leave his boat here and come back for a crack at the real Rolex Sydney Hobart, with the violent southerly fronts and the cold hard, dead of night bashes into big steep seas it is renowned for. That is the kind of Hobart race this Fastnet veteran has always imagined, and the kind of race his strong, 1972 IOR classic would revel in.

Four days of relentless downwind running and reaching is definitely not ideal an IOR boat. Still, when he stepped off Pinta-M this morning Atse declared he had thoroughly enjoyed himself.

'It was beautiful,' he said. 'It was obviously not what we came for so we may have to do it again. It was a good race and very enjoyable. It is a lot better than the Fastnet. More tactical. Yeah, I'll leave the boat here and do it again. '

Atse estimates that he spent about 80,000 euros ($160,000) bringing Pinta-M to Australia and preparing here for the race. So were the last 4 days worth 80,000 euros? 'No,' he laughs, 'but it will be cheaper next time. We can divide it by two.'

'We had a rough night the second night. Twenty eight knots of wind and a lot of sail changes. We blew out our big spinnaker on the first night which didn't help very much. We had to do the rest of the race with a smaller one. If we had kept that big spinnaker we would have finished earlier and missed the last 3 hours on the Derwent River.'

'How can you finish an ocean race on a river,' a bemused Blei asks. 'We got a text message this morning that we needed to finish by 10:44 to beat Winsome,' another vintage Dutch S&S 41 sailed by his good friend and Fastnet rival Harry Heijst. 'We only had to do 3 miles and we had more than an hour to do them in.' In the end it was to take Pinta-M more than two. 'We had wind shifts over a hundred degrees so we were constantly on the wrong side of the river. We saw our windex go round 4 times. After beating all the way from the Iron Pot we actually managed to finish under spinnaker.'

A moody Derwent River cantankerous enough to drive even the toughest skipper to distraction. At least Atse Blei experienced one component of a typical Rolex Sydney Hobart after all.