A 628 mile match race

• NEWS
• 29 Dec, 2015 05:00:00 PM

A 628 mile match race

While the super maxis were fighting it out for line honours, a few miles astern an absorbing match race was played out by the two grand prix sixty footers, Matt Allen’s Carkeek60 Ichi ban and Rupert Henry’s JV62 Chinese Whisper.

Allen and Henry are good friends and rivals at their home club, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, and the duel pretty much kicked off as the two yachts battled their way through the race-start spectator fleet at the Heads.

It was finally resolved off Hobart’s Constitution Dock about 1:15 this afternoon when Chinese Whisper slipped across the line 11 minutes ahead of Ichi Ban.

“There was hardly a time in the whole race when we couldn’t see them,” Allen said.

 “A 600-mile match race. Fantastic fun,” said Henry. “We knew it would be on. They’re similar boats with similar speeds.”

“We didn’t plan it, we sailed our own race,” Allen said, ”but they have that extra waterline length and a slight ratings advantage over us so we always knew they were going to keep track of us. They did that the whole race, even tacking up the Derwent River. We tacked, they tacked.”

Ichi Ban is configured for downwind and reaching, and pulled away from Chinese Whisper in the opening hours of the race, but when the southerly cracked in, the advantage turned to Chinese Whisper and it pretty much remained an upwind race the rest of the way.

Both boats came through the tough first night unscathed, though Ichi Ban lost her wind instruments, doing without them for half the race until it calmed down enough to send someone up the mast to cobble things back together.

“We didn’t back off,” Allen said, “we kept the hammer down all the time. We managed the boat over the waves, and had a number 5 headsail and two reefs in the main.

“It wasn’t pleasant. At one stage we had driving rain – it felt like your skin was getting a dermabrasion. We had a youngster on the helm while the rest of us were below, hoping we weren’t going to get tapped to have a drive until it was over.”

“The front hit us really quickly,” Henry said. “We were running in 20 knots and all of a sudden we were going upwind in 45 knots. The transition took less than five minutes.

”These were the most testing conditions since we got Chinese Whisper and she’s solid.”

And then it turned light.

“Yesterday was very frustrating,” Henry continued. “We flopped around for a couple of hours, which wasted a lot of the work we had done.”

Testing conditions but an interesting race, was how Henry summed it up.

“It wasn’t nearly as tough a race as 2004,” Allen said. “That was a lot windier and wetter. We went to storm jibs a number of times that year. But this was certainly a long race.

“We thought we were at sea approximately enough, as some people would say.” 

Jim Gale, RSHYR Media