Rolex Sydney Hobart: A hotter angle wins the Race for Comanche
by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World.com/nz 28 Dec 2022 21:00 PST
29 December 2022
Andoo Comanche steaming on the afternoon of 26 December © Andrea Francolini
Mattie Mason, a veteran of 12 Rolex Sydney Hobart Races, and many America's Cups, says the 2022 edition was a "great race, but one of the easier ones. Tactically, it was pretty tricky. There were some big shifts out there. And that was probably our downfall. Well, it was our downfall."
The popular line is that this year the 628nm Sydney Hobart classic was a race for the "fat boats" - a reference to the broad (25-26ft) beamed 100ft long supermaxis, Andoo Comanche, and Law Connect.
The relatively narrow-beamed Hamilton Island Wild Oats, a Reichel/Pugh RP100, has been owned since her launch in December 2005 by the Oatley family and has been heavily modified over the past 20 years. Her strength is downwind sailing in winds below 8kts - conditions which didn't occur in this year's race.
Comanche, a 100ft maxi design by VPLP and Guillaume Verdier, was launched in 2014 and holds the world 24-hour sailing distance record of 618nm; and has taken line honours in four Rolex Sydney Hobart races under three different owners.
The consensus in Hobart, after the finish, was that this year's race was won and lost early on the first evening as the leaders sailed down the New South Wales coast.
Andoo Comanche and Law Connect took the usually high-risk route well to the east of the rhumb line. The 17ft beam Hamilton Island Wild Oats stuck much closer to the shortest route to Hobart before losing their nerve and followed the other thin-waisted supermaxi, Black Jack (also 17ft beam), to chase the easterners.
"We missed the first big shift in the early evening of the first day", Mason recalled. "We stayed in shore because it suited our mode. We were the inshore boat, and the boats, the big beamy maxis, as well as Black Jack, all went offshore sailing at higher angles.
"Comanche is six or seven degrees hotter than us at their best. So that naturally took them off to the east as well. For the first hour or so, they were sailing some very similar angles, probably only three or four degrees higher than us."
"I think they realised that wasn't really working for them. Comanche has to sail hard, and it has to heel over. That is their optimum VMG angle."
"Then there was a big, big left-hand shift, which they gybed on, that gave them about 15 miles of leverage by them over us. That's massive. And that was it. Then it happened one more time. And we're on the wrong side of that shift as well."
" It's like any race. You want to get the first shift. That sets you up. But we didn't get it," remarked the four times America's Cup winner.
"Then we tried to play catch up, and nothing worked. We went down the middle and didn't push any edges; nothing went our way. It was one of those races."
Comanche, the world's fastest offshore monohull, is also the current Sydney Hobart record holder. Wild Oats XI actually set the record in 2017, but the result was reversed that year by a protest committee decision.
Paradoxically the 2017 record run was set in the opening stanzas of that race, thanks to a more favourable wind angle enabling the supermaxis to sail closer inshore, passing down the NSW coast, and point straight at Hobart.
The inshore course in 2017 gave a faster angle and more direct route, resulting in a better Velocity Made Good (VMG) than Hamilton Island Wild Oats was able to achieve in the 2022 race. A freshening breeze in the 2017 race gave Comanche and then Wild Oats XI a slingshot ride across Bass Strait and down the Tasmanian coast.
In 2022 Andoo Comanche was ahead of LDV Comanche's 2017 record pace for 8-10 hours. But the wind angle and strength were more favourable in the latter half of the 2017 race, and the race record was out of their reach for this year.
Winning confirms Comanche's numbers
At this point in the interview, John "Herman" Winning, the skipper of Andoo Comanche, walks past, and Mason puts him on the phone.
The Winnings are better known for their exploits in the 18ft skiffs, where the father and son team occupy first and second overall after three races in the 2022 NSW 18ft Skiff Championship. They helm separate boats in all weathers every Sunday afternoon on Sydney Harbour in the high octane 18ft skiff world. Both bring their considerable 18ft skiff and apparent wind sailing skills to driving the trans-oceanic 100ft supermaxi at not-dissimilar speeds.
Our first question was why did you go east?
"Because we can't sail as deep an angle as them," is Herman Winning's response. "Our sails are set up to go higher and faster. Our VMG angle is higher than theirs."
"Our boat is set up to go high and fast," he reiterates.
Winning agrees to some extent with Mason's analysis of the first hours of the 36-hour race.
"We think our VMG is probably better than theirs. Sailing hotter and faster," he says. "The breeze suited us, and we let the boat do the work."
Winning says they realised that their chances of breaking the record were gone "pretty soon after we realised that the race was going to be more VMG than down the rhumb line. We knew the record was pretty much out of reach, so we focussed on line honours as the challenge and defensively played that game."
"We took the corners wide in the Tasman and just gave away a bit of lead to make sure we played it safe and didn't get caught in a hole."
Pre-race, there was a lot of talk about the relative sweet spots between the fat-beamed boats and the skinny.
Under 8kts, the narrow-beamed Wild Oats XI and Black Jack were reckoned to hold the advantage. Between 8-12kts, the game could go either way and above 12kts, the 26ft beam "tennis courts" (Comanche and Law Connect) hold sway.
"We thought it was a good race for us," Winning agrees, but he makes an interesting point about the burden of being the race leader.
"We struggle being ahead because sometimes we hit the big lulls before everyone else. They can see us slow on the AIS, and they go away from it. But we usually dig back out and then get a bit of a lead on them. We're just playing a defensive mode," he adds.
Both supermaxis had their moments on the final 50 miles or so of the race from Tasman Island across Storm Bay.
Winning says they saw upwards of 35kts around Tasman Light.
"Around Tasman Light, we didn't have a reef in when we turned. We probably had the wrong rig set up with the J2. We got more pressure than we were expecting. But that was most wind we saw."
"We probably cracked around 30kts when we had the triple header up just before that," he added.
Over 90 minutes astern, Hamilton Island Wild Oats copped a caning.
"We got 50 knots," says Mason. "Coming into Tasman Island, we had 23 - 28kts. When we got around Tasman, it wasn't too bad. And then we rounded Cape Raoul, and it was honking there. We had a puff of 50kts there, still out of the same direction - from the east. We actually got laid on our side."
From there, for both, it was straight sailing to the finish in the River Derwent, but without the threat of protests from incidents in the first few miles as they jockeyed for position exiting Sydney harbour.
Both Andoo Comanche and Hamilton Island Wild Oats performed 720-degree alternative penalty turns after exiting Sydney Harbour and before passing Bondi Beach. Both Mason and Winning say the move was to absolve themselves of any sins committed during the chaos of the race start and spectator fleet melee.
"We learned a lesson from the Wild Oats XI incident in the 2017 race," Winning explains. "We figured it is better to be safe than sorry. And our routing had us three hours ahead anyway. So we took a 720 that takes you about two minutes instead of three hours."
Mason says that Wild Oats' logic was similar. "We got pretty close right at the first mark. There were flags everywhere. We tried to radio Law Connect to ask if they were appealing and whether it was an incident with us.
"We couldn't get through to them on the radio. We just discussed it on board and decided that we're not going to have another little incident on the harbour as has happened in the past, and we decided to do our turns."
He admits they'd practised penalty turns during pre-race training. "We had done a few on the harbour. It just clears the air for the rest of the race. We can do them in about a 1min 40secs - so in the big picture, the loss is insignificant."
After the finish, Mason was philosophical about the outcome. "In some ways, it was a disappointing race for us. But that's yacht racing.
"We had a great crew. A great navigator in Stan Honey and Murray Jones [six times winner of the America's Cup] with us, along with Mark Richards, the regular Wild Oats skipper and crew.
"But it's one of those races that didn't stack up for us. So it's back to the drawing board.
"Unfortunately, the first six or eight hours after the start dictated it for the rest of it us. Which it quite often does in the Hobart. That first 12 hours is a critical part of the race for whatever reason."
Wiser for their experience, both boats look set to resume their rivalry for a race win and record in the 2023 Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.