Fleet in final preparation for the 2023 AEGEAN 600
by Hellenic Offshore Racing Club 7 Jul 2023 14:02 PDT
7-15 July 2023
AEGEAN 600 © Nikos Alevromytis /
www.alen.gr
Activities over the last few days have helped prime the fleet of 45 entries from 16 countries for their start on Sunday of the 3rd annual edition of the AEGEAN 600. Besides the normal formalities of Registration and Inspections, organizers from the Hellenic Offshore Racing Club (HORC) have also offered a Safety Training Seminar yesterday evening for those teams who needed to meet the offshore safety compliance requirements, and earlier today the ATTICA Warm-up Race was held in the straits between Olympic Marine and the adjacent island of Makronisos to the east.
This race was a roughly Windward-Leeward race 10 miles in length and gave teams a chance to test their boats and their teamwork for the much longer race that lies ahead next week. Like the long race, scoring was made in IRC and ORC for the monohull entries.
In both IRC and ORC scoring, it may be no surprise that the team best honed from years of intense inshore Maxi competition at venues in the USA and Europe won the race by a fairly wide margin in corrected time after 1 hour 15 minutes of racing. George Sakellaris' Maxi 72 PROTEUS from the USA put these skills to work today, defeating their runner-up rival Maxi Farr 100 LEOPARD 3 from Monaco by 5 minutes in IRC scoring despite the larger LEOPARD finishing 4 minutes ahead in elapsed time on this relatively short course.
Another Maxi - Verder-Van Nieuwland's Maarten 72 ARAGON from the Netherlands - finished another 5 minutes back in IRC corrected time.
In ORC scoring the runner-up to PROTEUS was Maksim Nemchenk's Farr 45 FAVORIT from Ukraine 8 minutes back in corrected time, and Francois Bopp's Farr 52 CHOCOLATE 3 from Bulgaria yet another 8 minutes behind in third place.
Despite this clear predominance of the Maxis in the results of the ATTICA Warm-up Race, this may or may not relate to what happens in the main event next week. The reason is that the AEGEAN 600 race will test each team's much larger set of offshore racing skills than those demonstrated today. These skills would include having to analyze the weather conditions and how they will change across the complex course that winds itself among the Aegean islands, choosing the right sails to use in these conditions, ensuring that nothing breaks in the rig, sails and running rigging, having coordinated team work to execute efficient maneuvers when needed and sailing the boats at its fastest potential in all conditions - light and heavy - that these teams will encounter on this course.
Both Sakellaris and PROTEUS captain Reggie Cole have emphasized that their top priorities are to be thoroughly prepared and to keep the boat and crew safe and to complete the course successfully, whether or not it would be in new monohull record time.
Sakellaris also has another agenda. "We want to promote among our Maxi class colleagues that Greece is a fantastic place to sail. There is always wind, the sea and sky are clear and warm, this is one of the best places in the world to sail."
At today's Skipper's Briefing, local sailor and weather forecaster Michalis Aftias provided valuable info for the teams, from where to download GRIB files for weather routing programs to local wind effects that are common in certain regions of the race course when the prevailing northwesterly Meltemi breeze is at full strength. He explained that the windiest place on the course is at its very southernmost point, at the island of Kasos, and in particular in the channel between this island and Karpathos. Here the wind speeds can accelerate from an ambient 20+ knots to >30+ knots, only to die off in the direct lee of these and other islands on the course.
Tomorrow fleet members will enjoy a day off, with some taking advantage of a planned visit to the ancient Temple of Poseidon at nearby Cape Sounio which overlooks the area where the AEGEAN 600 will start on Sunday at 1400 local time.
For those unable to participate themselves but interested in sailing the race digitally, there is a Virtual Regatta ready for them...more information at aegean600.com/vr.
Once the race starts on Sunday the event's YB tracker system will display the positions, boat speeds and headings during the race. This is available at this link: cf.yb.tl/aegean6002023.