Thrilling finale for Swan Yachts during the 36 Copa del Rey MAPFRE

by Nautor's Swan on 6 Aug 2017 A record fleet of 31 Swan yachts from 12 nationalities have competed out of the waters of Palma during the 36 edition of the Copa del Rey MAPFRE regatta, where the impressive number of 138 boats set to line up carrying the national flags of 26 different countries.

Weather conditions were fluctuating all the week as the daily results of the competitors in the race. Class ORC 1 was dominated by Swan yachts, being Swan 45 Rats on Fire the leader and Swan 45 Porron IX in second place.

Six ClubSwan 50s, gathered for the first time, showed off their cutting- edge performance underlining the OD formula where the boats are all the same and human being is the only tip the balance.

The daily winners changed nearly every day, and four out of the six attending boats, won at least one race, thus giving great excitement to the fleet. Earlybird, with Hendrik Brandis at the helm and Jochen Schuemann as tactician, hold up the well-deserved trophy.

“I love this boat. It is light, it is one design and it is fast. All the boats are alike and anyone can win” commented Brandis during the week.

Cuordileone won the third and seventh race and Mr Ferragamo commented, right after day four: “I don’t think I have seen a one design class so competitive this early in the piece. Jochen Schuemann and the Earlybird team have done a lot of practicing, that is how it goes. Otherwise normally at this stage there would be one or two boats struggling out the back but that is not the case with this class. Any boat in this group could win a race.”

The same feeling had the Swan 45 class where Ange Transparent 2 won the first and the last day; Negra won 3 races, and K-Force got two first places. The final winner was 2016 World Champion, Christian Plump’s Elena Nova.

The Owner stated: “this class is still very competitive here, there is a good battle on the water and a good spirit ashore.”

Second place went to a team from Ecuador who raced for their first ever Copa del Rey MAPFRE on the chartered Negra with Azzurra’s Argentinian coach Guillermo Baquerizas.

Their skipper Andres Rizzo explained: “We are a family team, my brother, my father two colleagues from my office and so we have other crew from our team in Ecuador plus our Argentinian tactician. It took us the first day to learn the boat. We brought our sails from our Swan 45 in Salinas Ecuador. We are training to race the Galapagos Cup in Ecuador.”

On day three, in the ClubSwan 50 Class there was a first win ever for Skorpios, all the more remarkable considering that the Russian helmswoman is still very much a newcomer to sailing who has done less than 40 hours of helming.

Tactician Ekaterina Skudina, three times Olympian and European champion in Yngling, said “Our skipper is very talented but has only done 30 hours on the water so far. So Daria was doing well steering, she is learning fast. She can feel the boat and is very concentrated. We learn fast. We started with the Swan 50 so to win today we are very very happy. I honestly believe they will be perfect skippers in due course. They have talent”.

Andrea Masi’s Italian team on Ulika with the tactical talents of Portugal’s three times Olympian Diogo Cayolla, was the winner of race six and eight, confirming his third position overall.

The Swan 42 had a class with nine crews competing, representing five nationalities. The Swan 42 leader was, along all the week, Pez De Abril owned by Jose Maria Meseguer who left two races to Nadir (second in overall results), two races to Red Electrica Espana (third in overall results), while the last race went to the promising Italian team of Far Star.

The Nautor’s Swan attending yachts – 6 ClubSwan 50s, 12 ClubSwan 42s, 12 Swan 45s and one Swan 601 – had all lot of fun. The One Design yachts have used this great occasion to test their ability in advance of the final stage that will be the Nations Trophy of next October 10-14.