Mid Tasman Match Race for Solo Sailors

by Lindsay Wright on 13 Apr 2010
Jennifer Fitzgibbons and Trevor Hill have been racing yachts against each other for as long as they can remember, from dinghies to keelboats.

The ultimate challenge for the two Queenslanders was to be the 2010 Fitzroy Yachts Solo Tasman Challenge from New Plymouth to Mooloolaba. 'We figured it’d sort the boys from the girls,' Hill joked.

But yesterday, after seven days of hard out singlehanded yacht racing in a variety of weather conditions, the two old foes were coasting along in light air about 20 metres apart with about 400km left to sail between them and the finish line.

'Trevor’s had a few problems with his toilet,' Fitzgibbon reported, 'and he chose to empty his bucket right then – whew.'

It must have done the trick because Hill’s yacht, Apriori, had opened a 25km lead on Soothsayer, sailed by Fitzgibbon, by last nights radio schedule.

Any one of the five yachts in the middle of the fleet could take the Fitzroy Yachts Trophy for the first monohull to finish, home from Mooloolaba with them. Apriori’s leading the bunch right now with 403 km to go, but the 2007 race monohull winner, Ian Lillie, is working his Farr 1220 Island Girl, hard in the light southerly wind and is only 12 km behind.

Fitzgibbon is next in line with 440km to go followed by Mephisto (Alan Yardley) and Island Time (Matt Paulin) with only a kilometer between them.

The race always looked like being a tussle for supremacy among the fairly similar mid fleet yachts but nobody would have picked that, after seven days of sailing through a mixed bag of weather conditions, they would all be so close.

Nobody would have guessed either that Nitro, the high tech 10.6m Chamberlin catamaran that Steven Arms built in a shed beside the Waitara River, would still be back in mid fleet with them. Even cousin Bruce undertook a radical weight reduction campaign in Big Wave Rider for extra speed if the smaller sistership started getting too close. But last night, Nitro was still 420km from Mooloolaba and closing on her goal at 9-10 knots.

Meanwhile, a week’s relentless offshore racing was beginning to take its toll further back in the fleet. Aucklander Trish Lewis spent some of the first day of her 49th year, hove to while she affected repairs to her 7.6m Wishbone and Rhys Boulton reported that he had taken a knock on the head from his yacht Spellbound’s mainsail boom. 'There’s a fair bit of blood around,' he said, 'but I’ll be right.'

Boulton (29) is a veteran of six years as a foreman welder constructing a new base at the South Pole, has sailed his 10.5m steel Ganley solo to the Pacific and the Auckland Islands and is no stranger to adversity. Last night he had the boat back up to 10 knots. He had also been in touch with Blondie Chamberlain, sailing An Cala, about 180 km closer to New Plymouth from him, for help if he needed it.

The light air and sloppy swell had slowed the smaller and heavier boats at the tail end of the fleet down and Carl Harmer in Strider still had 650km to sail. Boulton, with bandaged head in Spellbound, was 680km out followed by Lewis in Wishbone with 779km to go and Chamberlain was seven kilometers behind her.