Audi Hamilton Island Race Week - Day 5
by Lisa Ratcliff 26 Aug 2016 13:22 BST
20-27 August 2016
The penultimate day of the Australian Yachting Championship battle among the four fleets contesting the standalone series at Hamilton Island played out in 12 – 15 knots SSE wind, gusting up to 19.
All Audi Hamilton Island Race Week fleets contested passage races of varying lengths around the islands and this afternoon two of the championship divisions are being controlled by New Zealand sailing teams - Karl Kwok's Team Beau Geste at the head of Rating division A and Simon Hull's Frank Racing, which is running away with the first-ever Multihull Racing top prize.
Rating Series
Sailing manager of Team Beau Geste, Gavin Brady, reckons Thursday was the defining day, particular for Matt Allen's Ichi Ban. "It was a big day for all the teams, there was no real method to the madness. That last race when Matt got fifth....it's a long way back from there. When Ichi Ban gets it right like in race three, they win races."
Beau Geste leads Ichi Ban by four points and there is no way the slick international team - headed up by owner Karl Kwok and so close to three straight Australian titles - is going to ease off.
The Rating Series is all about the battle for the top handicap performance, each boat trying to sail better than its rating, except for the two supermaxis. They'll never challenge the likes of the TP52s for the handicap trophies – for the 100-footers it's about being first to the finish line, especially in the lead up to this year's Rolex Sydney Hobart ocean classic.
Over the 25 or so nautical mile race on Friday August 26, the Oatley family's supermaxi Wild Oats XI, skippered by Mark Richards, left the same-size David Witt skippered Scallywag trailing well behind.
"It might have been oats for breakfast the other day, but it certainly wasn't that today," Richards said adding, "we must have beaten them by 15 minutes, we couldn't even see them."
"It's been a good week for us, we are significantly quicker downwind with the mods and we are stoked for Scallywag, they are going so well," Richards said, "We have a lot of work to do in the light air, they have a lot to do in heavy air. It's a good lead up to the Hobart." Wild Oats' crew wore yellow shirts today, to mark Daffodil Day.
Stephen Barlow's Forty continues to hold out Bruce McCraken's Ikon in division B.
Passage Rating
Ray Roberts' chartered Sydney 38 Team Hollywood has edged out Rob Date's Victorian Adams 10 Scarlet Runner after five of their six-race Passage Rating series.
Roberts has found this Race Week particularly interesting, "It's been challenging racing, breeze up and down in pressure and racing around the islands you can easily get into low wind zones and current, and you get mixed up with other fleets."
"The Whitsundays is always a very beautiful place to sail and when you come ashore it's a hive of activity, and where you meet people from different yacht clubs and states."
Racer Cruiser
Matt Owen's remarkable score sheet at Audi Hamilton Island Race Week isn't going to be tarnished anytime soon. Charles Curran's Murray 60 called Sydney caught up to the Owen skippered Sydney 32, Onyx, after the windward/leeward race, then in the final islands race both scored poorly. Owen has enough in the bank to retain the overall lead with a day to go.
It's been 11 years since the 17.5 ton Sydney was at Race Week, or "schoolies for old fellas" according to sailing master David Kellett. On the boat's return Kellett said it was a simple decision: "I put an email out and within two hours we had a crew."
Multihull Racing
Simon Hull's New Zealand based GC32 Frank Racing is in the final stages of tidying up the newest championship division, for hotted-up catamarans and trimarans. Only George Owen's APC Mad Max and Chris Williams' Morticia has come near the high-tech foiling cat, which is easily foiling others' designs on the silverware.
This afternoon the entire Australian Sailing Team, including the individual Rio 2016 gold medal winner Tom Burton and three teams silver medallists - Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen (49er men's), Lisa Darmanin and Jason Waterhouse (Nacra 17) and Mat Belcher and Will Ryan (470 men's) - were honoured with a tickertape parade down Hamilton Island's Front Street led by the local primary school children.
Tomorrow's forecast is for the most wind of the regatta, 18-22 knots of SSE wind to close out the 33rd edition of the famous yachting and lifestyle regatta that attracted a record fleet from every Australian state and the ACT plus New Zealand, and sailors from around the world.
www.hamiltonislandraceweek.com.au
Frankly spectacular foiling by Crosbie Lorimer
"I can't tell you the buzz you get out of sailing the GC32. I've spent years and years on the likes of TP52s and other keel boats eking out a tenth of a knot here and there, and with these things you just jump 10 knots, it's a quantum leap!"
So says Simon Hull, Kiwi skipper of the foiling GC32 catamaran Frank Racing which is presently leading the Racing Multihulls division of the Australian Yachting Championship at Audi Hamilton Island Race Week, and turning heads as it passes in a blur.
Hull knows a thing or two about fast boats as the skipper of the Orma 60 trimaran Team Vodafone, which recently set a new record time for the Auckland to Fiji run.
Not satisfied with one record in a year, Hull has the boat berthed in Noumea in the hope of beating the race record in the Groupama Race around New Caledonia in October.
For all of the thrill of fast ocean racing in multihulls, it's the huge learning curve that the Frank Racing team is on - acquiring the fine points of foiling and most importantly staying up on the foils as long as possible – that has Hull absorbed at the moment.
"As a change from the last six years racing the Orma 60, it's great fun to be back to seat-of-the-pants racing again. But we're a bit out on a limb in NZ," says Hull, referring to the limited numbers of GC32s in the southern hemisphere when compared with Europe's large fleets.
"We don't have others to race against, so we're not that close to the class's learning curve. When the Kiwi guys who sail these boats in Europe come home, we get them on board and learn from them."
The GC32 is now the chosen class for the Extreme Sailing Series, which stages spectacular, short course 'stadium sailing' in the heart of some of the world's great harbour cities – a very different setting to Queensland's Whitsunday islands.
"These boats are really designed for flat water harbour racing, so the island courses at Race Week are a bit of a challenge in any seaway," said Hull.
"But we're learning the art of 'skimming' by not lowering the foils as deep. It's not as fast as with the foils fully deployed, but the average speeds are higher as the boat tends not to crash as badly when it comes off the foils."
The Frank Racing crew at Race Week comprises most of Hull's Auckland-based sailing team, but when one of his regulars was unable to come at the last minute, the skipper managed to secure Aussie sailor James Wierzbowski, who races a GC32 on the Extreme Sailing circuit aboard Oman Air, the current series leader.
"I've been to Hamilton Island before but never for Race Week, so I jumped at the chance when Simon called me," said Wierzbowski.
"My role description is bowman, but really my job is controlling flight by adjusting the foils and the rudder angles. We don't sail to the numbers or compass bearings on these boats, it's really all about what feels right," he adds.
Travelling at 'flight' speeds in excess of 25 knots on foiling multihulls comes with its dangers, so safety is foremost in Hull's mind.
"I am involved in the NZ Multihull Yacht Club and I'm their rep on Yachting NZ's safety committee. We've studied the America's Cup team safety strategies to see what they do and we've adopted this as best practice through the Sport Multihull Regulations, which are now formally adopted by Yachting NZ. Australian Sailing is allowing us to trial these safety regs at Race Week."
"You're sailing these things on the edge, pushing them hard and so crashes hurt. It's not a keel boat that can lay down and kick 'til someone cuts away the halyard and it sits back up. It's a multihull and there's a good chance it will end up upside down, and if you get caught underneath there's no way you'll quickly get to the side; so you've really got to be prepared.
"We have a mandatory support vessel with lots of safety equipment on board and it must follow us around the full course. All the crew wear helmets and must have a knife on their PFD; we also have a re-breather on board which can provide four to five minutes of air underwater, and we have comms with our chase boat and the race committee."
At the end of the 33rd edition of Audi Race Week which officially finishes tomorrow, Saturday August 27, 2016, Frank Racing will be packed up into a single 40-foot container and shipped back to New Zealand in preparation for summer racing.
"We may go to Europe next year," said Hull. "We're not expecting to push the pros from the America's Cup campaigns but we'll learn plenty and have a whole lot of fun."
And what of the future of foiling? Hull is convinced it will fast become mainstream.
"Foiling is the future, and we're starting to see some of the development programs using foiling cats," says Hull, also recalling his days as a youngster sailing Paper Tigers, "after all, kids just want to go fast and anyway, you go yachting to go faster than you did yesterday!"