IRC East Coast Championship - Kirby/Butterworth a victorious combo

by Barby MacGowan on 1 Nov 2010 IRC East Coast Championship - With a well proven design and an almost all-Alinghi crew, Numbers wasn’t a shocker to win the Storm Trysail Club’s IRC East Coast Championship, but it didn’t walk away with easy victory either.

The 66.5’ Judel-Vrolijk design was minus its owner Dan Meyers (Boston, Mass.) but loaded up with plenty of go-power, including the young Rome Kirby (son of Volvo Ocean Race veteran Jerry Kirby) who helmed while Brad Butterworth (of America’s Cup fame) served as skipper.

According to the captain of Numbers, Pete Balash (Muskegon, Mich.), his team was constantly tested by five IRC-optimized 52 footers in the same class, in particular Richard Oland’s (Saint John, New Brunswick, CAN) Vela Veloce, which finished second. 'The 52s were tough to sail against,' said Balash. 'Especially when we were on a two-mile track and they were sailing in a totally different wind than us--they could be a lot stronger and coming up fast from behind.' Friday’s distance race saw 30 knots of wind, while the weekend brought 10-15 on Saturday and 20 on Sunday during buoy races that numbered five in each class by weekend’s end.

'The breeze was fantastic,' said Regatta Chair Dick Neville, 'more like San Francisco than Annapolis at this time of year, and it was nice to see Numbers vindicate itself after it missed winning this event three years ago, basically losing on the last run of the last race.' (Meyers’s 60-footer with the same name won the event in 2006.)

Neville pointed out that Numbers also won the event overall on the merit of having the fastest average corrected speed, calculated between the winners of the four IRC classes. (The IRC 52 Class and the Beneteau 36.7 Class were scored in their respective IRC divisions but were also scored in classes of their own to make six scored classes). The differential, however, was only nine seconds a mile faster than Pugwash, the winner of IRC 3. The J/122 owned by David Murphy (Westport, Conn.) posted a string of five first-place finishes in the buoy races for a series score of 7.25 points. In second was Flying Jenny VI, a J/122 owned by David Askew (Annapolis, Md.), which posted 16.25 points.

In IRC 2, Nightshift, a Farr 40 owned by Kevin McNeil (Annapolis) posted victories in all of his weekend races for 9.5 points to beat out Preben Ostberg/Todd Olds/ Bud Dailey’s (Rockville, Md.) Tsunami.

In IRC 4, Rush, the J/109 owned by Bill Sweetser (Annapolis, Md) also held a huge lead for first, with 8.5 points to 23 points posted by Kalevala II, the Grand Soleil 37 owned by Tapio Saavalainen (Washington, DC).

The only dedicated IRC rating event on the Chesapeake, the IRC East Coast Championship was the IMS East Coast Championship before 2005. This marks the tenth year that the championship has been organized by the Storm Trysail Club’s Chesapeake Station and the sixth year it has been run under the IRC rule. For 2011, the event will be part of the Storm Trysail Club’s Block Island Race Week presented by Rolex, scheduled for June 19-24.

For more information and full results, visit www.stormtrysail.org.