Bruny Island Race 2022 at Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania
by Nick Hutton 14 Feb 2022 06:14 PST
12-13 February 2022
Eventual placegetters Sailient, Midnight Rambler and Whistler with Prima Donna soon after the start © Peter Watson
Midnight Rambler has once again stamped her dominance on the off-shore sailing scene in Hobart with a win in the IRC and AMS rating divisions of Saturday's Bruny Island Race.
Skipper Ed Psaltis sailed the Sydney 36 to her numbers to take the race from Drew Latham's MBD36 Whistler and Ian Snape's Cookson 12 Sailient. Midnight Rambler and Whistler match raced for much of the journey with less than two minutes between them after nearly 16 hours of racing.
Sailient took the win on PHS from Justin Barr's Rumbeat and Brent McKay's Jazz Player.
Grant Wharington's Botin 80 Stefan Racing took line honours by a comfortable margin, unsurprising as she is around twice the size of any other boat in the fleet. Light wind at the start and for the first hours of the race meant the race record was out of reach, but her line honours margin was over four and a half hours to Jazz Player with Andrew Jones' AdvantEdge in third a further seven minutes astern.
The fleet stayed bunched for the first third of the race until the freshening north-easterly breeze made for a quick trip across the bottom of the island and a solid beat up the D'Entrecasteaux Channel and into the Derwent, allowing the bigger boats to get away.
Stefan Racing was the only boat to finish on Saturday, with the other 18 boats arriving off the Castray Esplanade finishing box from soon after midnight until around 6:00am on Sunday.