Victory is nothing without struggle- Kwok

by Helen Hopcroft on 21 Aug 2007 Karl Kwok likes to win but he doesn’t like it to be too easy. The 1997 Sydney to Hobart winner observed that winning without a good fight is largely a pointless exercise. We spoke to him after yesterday’s racing at Audi Hamilton Island Race Week and asked the Hong Kong businessman what he thought about the standard of competition in Australia. Beau Geste, his Reichel Pugh 45, is currently running in fourth place behind Wild Oats X, Quantum Racing and Yendys.

‘When you go to a regatta you need competition. There’s no point to be there and beat everybody by hours. You’d rather lose by a second than beat people by hours, so it’s good. I guess most of Sydney’s racing fleet are up here, those that really want to do this race and it’s a good time to play with them.’

He was inspired to race at Hamilton Island after hearing numerous positive reports from fellow members of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club.

‘They kept coming back and saying this is the way racing ought to be done, so I finally found an occasion to do it.’

Despite professing a love of close competition, Kwok has clearly recruited a very talented crew to increase his chances of a win at Hamilton Island.

These include highly skilled BMW Oracle tactician Gavin Brady fresh from this year’s Louis Vuitton Cup. Brady said that he was enjoying the local competition.

‘It’s good. I think that it’s where the top IRC boats in the world are at the moment for this type of racing.’

He commented that the conditions favoured exciting racing and that the type of designs that were doing well were ideally suited to the Whitsunday conditions.

‘All the boats here, you don’t see any displacement boats here. In the UK and America you see a lot of the heavier boats which are just upwind boats, and here the upwind boats really suffer.’

‘It’s windy so it’s an advantage to have big sails and planing hulls, which makes the sailing a lot more fun. Going downwind at 20 knots is good; sailing downwind with a spinnaker pole at nine knots is not as much fun. It’s as simple as that.’

Brady said he was impressed by the pace of Ray Roberts turbo charged Cookson 50 Quantum Racing.

‘We were sailing boat for boat with them, and they put six boat lengths on us, they’re just quicker. The moment we get that choppy water they’re just gone… But we were only two boat lengths behind Ray at the top mark so we didn’t do too badly.’

The conventionally ballasted Beau Geste was also able to make up ground by being able to point higher than the canting keeled Wild Joe. Wild Joe is also a Reichel Pugh design but is 15ft longer than Beau Geste.

‘We were actually taking bearing out of Wild Joe for a while who was well to windward of us. I think if we haven’t have done this we would have been further back than we were.’