31 teams kick off the 4th AEGEAN 600 in Attica Warm-up Race
by AEGEAN 600 5 Jul 2024 16:01 PDT
5 July 2024
AEGEAN 600 © Alen Alevromytis
As a prelude for teams interested in giving their crew some time to hone their skills at timing and boat handling, as well as the Race Committee from the Hellenic Offshore Race Club (HORC) to practice their moves, the Attica Warm-up Race today featured a Windward-Leeward course set just East of the main venue at Olympic Marine.
A wide range of boats ranging in size and speed from Nikolaos Lykos's SunFast 3300 ARETI (GRE) to George Procopiou's Volvo 70 AIOLOS hit the race course in perfect 10-14 knot conditions to test their skills. In fact, there were two Volvo 70's on this race course, the other being Joern Larsen's L4 (DEN), who got around the race track fastest with an elapsed time of 1 hour 14 min, with AIOLOS only a little over a minute astern at the finish.
Yet in corrected time in both IRC and ORC scoring the winner of the day was Farr 52 CHOCOLATE 3 (SUI), skippered by Francois Bopp of Switzerland. The remaining podium positions were filled by Sascha Schroeder's multi-national team from Germany, Italy and Spain on his Neo 430 Roma NEOMIND (GER) which was second in ORC, Franco Miggeler's Cookson 50 KUKA 3 (SUI) which was 2nd in IRC and 3rd in ORC, and Manolis Kondylis's Neo 570 CARBONITA (ITA) which was 3rd in IRC.
As is typical in competitive closed course racing among excellent teams, the margins between finishing positions in corrected time were often less than a minute after nearly 2 hours of racing.
These teams will take a break and continue to prepare for the main event starting on Sunday, with many taking advantage tomorrow of a trip to the ancient Temple of Poseidon, the imposing and iconic 700 BC archeologic landmark overlooking Sunday's start at Cape Sounio.
For more information on the Attica Warm-up race, the results are posted on the Official Noticeboard.