Chieftain wins the Rolex Fastnet Race on corrected time

Ger O'Rourke's Cookson 50, Chieftain (IRL), has been confirmed as the overall winner of the Rolex Fastnet Race. The Farr-designed carbon fibre yacht finished Wednesday night at 19:43:44 local time with an elapsed sailing time of 55:04:43.

O’Rourke, the first Irish trophy winner, will be awarded the Fastnet Challenge Cup and a Rolex Yacht-Master timepiece at the prizegiving on Friday, 17 August at the historic Royal Citadel in Plymouth.

O’Rourke, a property developer from Limerick, Ireland has been sailing for the past 20 years, cruising on a succession of 30-40 footers along the south coast of Ireland, before he got the racing bug, sailing out of the Western Yacht Club in Kilrush, County Clare as crew on some race boats. He then started racing dinghies and worked his way up to bigger grand-prix yachts.

Chieftain was built in 2005 at Cookson’s in New Zealand. It was the fifth Cookson 50-foot design built at the yard, but with some key modifications including adding a single forward canard and removing the trim tab. The boat has had some good success, including this summer’s HSH Nordbank Blue Race (transatlantic race from Newport – Hamburg), where the boat was 2nd across the line, 2nd in class, and 1st in IRM class.

O’Rourke typically waits to finish a race before he enters the next one, “first of all I want to make sure I have a rig up.” Sailing in the Nordbank transatlantic race, Chieftain didn’t finish until six weeks before the Rolex Fastnet start and by that time the entry list had reached its limit of 300 and Chieftain was 46th on the waiting list. Eventually the list was whittled down as boats dropped out, and after completing all the safety checks, just 48 hours before the race start, the boat was officially entered. In addition to his regular crew that had been on stand-by, O’Rourke literally picked up a couple of experienced crew from a Hamble boat yard, including bowman Cam Marshall who “turned out to be a star.”

Chieftain only experienced about 25 knots the first night, not the 40 knots that many boats saw. Chieftain had a double-reefed main and O’Rourke felt prepared for the weather conditions, they had gone through all the procedures and had a fairly experienced offshore crew that had done a lot of miles. Still, It had crossed O’Rourke’s mind, “what am I doing here’, do I need this? But we persevered and it paid off. I was seasick myself as was another crewmember, it was wet, yeah it was grim. Two of us had dry suits and weren’t doing too badly.”

Recapping their strategy, O’Rourke said, “Our navigator, Jochem Visser (from the Netherlands) downloaded some grib (weather) files but available to everybody… the fact that the weather was changing 180 degrees when we got to the Rock kind of suited our size boat as opposed to the larger-sized boats. When we got to the Rock we were running back home and we made a fairly good speed from the Fastnet Rock to the Scillies …I think we did it in 10 hrs which is an average of about 19 knots which is good going for a 50-footer…Loki (the R/P 60) was ahead of us around at the Rock. She’s a large boat, but we passed her out…the winds and the gods were favorable to us.”

“We managed to make it around the Rock in 10, maybe 15 knots of breeze heading us, then got around and put up our R7 spinnaker and held it all the way. The wind slowly built as we rounded the Rock and the spreader bouy (Pantaenius) as she clocked around and slowly built to 15, right up to 20’s, 35 even. We were carrying a reaching-running kite, fairly heavy, just a fractional spinnaker, we carried it right up to the Scillies. We had a very confused sea, because you had winds from different directions, rogue waves coming from the side, more confused than I’ve ever sailed in before and I’ve done the Rolex Sydney Hobart, the transatlantic, and the Round Britain Ireland last year. It’s really difficult to control the boat, you had a 15-degree error margin, you had the rogue wave pushing you from the side. After 15 degrees, you had a few close wipeouts, but we managed to keep it on track, changing the drivers every half hour religiously, changing the trimmers for concentration, and we pushed it as hard as we could.”

O’Rourke is keen on running as Corinthian a campaign as possible, from the point of view of getting very good sailors. He said “we have about 30 lads at this stage and because the boat is a good boat it’s fairly easy to get crew. Trick is if you put the right people in the right place, you get good results.”

For this race, O’Rourke continued, “the Irish bowman, Cam Marshall, was outstanding. He went up the rig during the race to change the (fractional port) halyard that we broke and lost overboard in 30 knots in the Celtic Sea. Coming in here to the finish we were concerned that if the wind died, and we had to do a bare-headed change -- we had done our calculations and we realized we were really close (on time) to beat Rambler – it would make the difference (of winning or losing) so we sent him up the rig, and no problem.

There was another key breakdown before they got to the Lizard going out, when the GPS broke and they had to run a DR (dead reckoning), and get out the paper charts and go back to the traditional way of navigating. The crew were taking fixes every two hours and also didn’t have any weather forecasts.

Still, O’Rourke said, “We pushed hard to make all the tidal gates and we just about made them, we pushed hard to make all the weather changes and we were looking out for those. Luckily the race went our way, but it could have just as easily gone the other way.”

As for Chieftain’s prior race history, shortly after it was launched the boat went straight to Australia for Hamilton Island Race Week, where it came in 5th, it then won class in the 2005 Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race before being shipped to Ireland. Back home, Chieftain competed in all of the 2006 season RORC races and won class in the Round Ireland, won overall in Round Britain and Ireland Race, and were deservedly awarded Boat of the Year in Ireland in 2006. At the 2007 Antigua Sailing Week the boat beat ABN AMRO on handicap once, and then it headed north to Newport, Rhode Island and the transatlantic race earlier this summer.

Among one of the finishers this morning was the US-entry Snow Lion, Larry Huntington’s, Ker 50, which was the 18th boat over the finish line.

Huntington commented that, “the race was pretty straight forward, a lot of high powered reaching, a lot of water on deck but not super rough, we’ve been in much worse. A race like this is hard work, you’re changing gears all the time, changing sail up and down so a watch doesn’t go by that there aren’t three or four revolutions that require a lot of horsepower.

Huntington saw “35 knots in spurts, a lot of steady winds for hrs at a time around at 30 kts, nothing super great, nothing scary. We routinely had two reefs and a little jib, sometimes three reefs. Talking about the most weather they saw during the race, he said, “Coming back from the Fastnet Rock we lost our wind instruments…but we were running with the spinnaker up and hit 24 knots (of boat speed) on the edge of control.”

As of the latest OC Tracker position update at 1300 BST, leading on corrected time are Rambler (USA) in IRC Super Zero; Chieftain (IRL) in IRC SZ Canting Keel and overall; Courrier des Coeur (FRA) in IRC Zero; Scarlet Oyster (GBR) in IRC 1; Foggy Dew (FRA) in IRC 2; Persephone of London (GBR) in IRC 3, and PRB, in the Open 60 class.

As of Thursday at 1300 BST, 22 yachts had finished, 45 yachts are racing and approximately 204 yachts have retired from the race.

Friends, family, press and supporters can visit fastnet.rorc.org and click the tracking page to follow the race and results. Boats automatically report every 30mins (on the hour and half hour), and results and tracking are updated shortly after the report is received. The results will be overall and based on corrected time.

Further information about the RORC and the Rolex Fastnet Race may be found at fastnet.rorc.org

Joy and Pain of the Open 60 without a sponsor (from Peter Zimonjic)

In the end it was will that won out over punishing headwinds. At dawn on Wednesday morning the two-man crew of the Spirit of Weymouth and their accompanying Canadian reporter rounded the Fastnet Rock and its famous lighthouse. Triumph.

Let me just say that reaching the rock, turning the corner, letting the sails out and feeling the wind behind us felt like reaching the summit of a mountain.

Like any great climb, however, the Summit is only the beginning of the return home. Trouble still lurked ahead for us but, at least this time, the wind was in our favour. Not long after leaving Fastnet Rock we lowered our headsail and put up the bright yellow spinnaker to maximise our speed.

For the first two hours Captain and owner Steve White, 34, took the helm off autopilot and drove the boat himself taking great pleasure in watching his craft accelerate down the waves as the yellow threads of his spinnaker stretched with each northerly gust.

Having been up most of the night Steve decided to retire to his bunk to catch some rest. I remained on deck with co-captain David Melville to enjoy watching the boat hold an average speed of 15 knots, faster than most yachts in the world would have been able to travel with winds of only about 17 knots.

A few minutes after Steve closed his eyes the wind surged, overpowering the boat, forcing a broach, the boat flipped totally on its side and the sails hit the water.The boat soon came back up but the only tragedy here was that the bright yellow spinnaker became trapped in the waves and tore from head to foot, as the boat flipped upright again.

I watched as this beautiful sail was reduced to shreds in a matter of seconds,and then, as it broke off and sunk before anyone had a chance to save it.

Steve's sleep would have to wait. Within seconds he was back up on deck attempting to clear the mess. Had this been any of the other Open 60s in the fleet the next move would have been to simply shrug one's shoulders and put up another sail. But Steve has no sponsor. He is funding this race, and this boat, himself, through loans and re-mortgages. This sudden blow cost him £10,000 and it shone heavy in his eyes.

The two crew put up a smaller sail and before long we were once again making miles towards the Isles of Scilly just off the southern tip of Land's End, although at a speed less desirable than before the broach that derailed our mid morning.

As the day drifted into afternoon, and the three of us were restored to vitality with a bowl of curry and rice, Steve once again started to plot putting up more sail. Up went the staysail and before long the Spirit of Weymouth was sailing down waves at a blistering 20 plus knots, to be aboard at such speeds is something special.

The sensation was enough to erase the previous two days of misery in the rain and storms that battered our 60-foot-boat all the way to Fastnet.

The joy and child like excitement of sailing that fast through the sea contrasted with the hardship of pouring rain and nasty headwinds, in many ways, crystallizes what it means to love this sport. True there are cold nights, wet clothes, horrible food and discomfort at every turn, but blasting across the Irish Sea at 20 knots in the sunshine with sea spray leaping into the air and a pod of common dolphins diving in and out of the boat's wake, makes the toll worth paying.

One cannot see the brightness of the rainbows, the vitality of the sea life or feel the sensation of commanding nature from one's living room. To celebrate the sun setting over a choppy sea or rising over a calm one it to be out where things are more beautiful than they could ever be on a television screen or in the pages of a book. It should be no surprise that those treats come at a cost.

In a practical sense we have been rewarded not only in experience but also in miles and time. It took us nearly 24 hours to cross from Land's End to Fastnet Rock but we have made the return journey in the ten hours of Wednesday sunshine.

The tiny islands of Scilly have claimed hundreds of ships and sailboats over the centuries and as we passed them at sunset Wednesday night it was easy to think of the seafarers before us who came this way and never made it home again.

As night fell we settled into the last leg towards Plymouth. The estimates are that we will make it into port in time for a late breakfast.

Update from Miranda Merron / 40 Degrees

Having rounded the Fastnet Rock yesterday, we have been enjoying the downwind conditions - and every so often passing a boat going upwind on its way to the Rock, delighted that we have got that bit out of the way. We took the spinnaker down in 30+ knots at dusk, since the seaway was getting difficult, and while various crewmembers were doing their utmost to keep breaking the 20 knot speed barrier, there are many more miles of racing this season. So a bit of boat preservation during the night (shooting stars etc, very occasional water over the deck, HUGE improvement on previous two nights!). We passed the Scillies before dawn, and now are heading towards Lizard. The chat on board occasionally touches on beer... more later. X Miranda