Tales of woe in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race

by Bruce Montgomery on 28 Dec 2016 The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is a cruel race: it builds you up and then it knocks you down. The doldrums are just as hard to take as the storms and the big seas.

Three more strong fancies for overall honours in the race – Ichi Ban, Varuna VI and last year’s winner Balance, dragged themselves out of the windless Storm Bay this morning after spending hours sitting around going nowhere and watching their chances of victory ebb away.

Ichi Ban, a JV TP52 owned and skippered by Australian Sailing president Matt Allen, had been in a good position, leading on corrected time as it came to Tasman Island and while it still had wind. Then it encountered Storm Bay. The NZ yacht Giacomo was the leader in the clubhouse but Ichi Ban were still a strong chance.

Allen said they had sailed a good race, no mishaps, no mistakes, sailing to the optimum, he had made the right decision to bring the smaller of his two Ichi Ban yachts but then the wind died within grasp of the holy grail.

Varuna VI, a German yacht owned and skippered by Jens Kellinghusen had come to this race seeking to emulate its predecessor’s win in IRC division 1 in 2013.

Navigator Guillermo Altadill described what happened.

“The last 11 hours were the worst. We had good win, but then when we passed Tasman Island, it changed the result of the whole race.

“In these types of races you expect to arrive on time with the wind, but the wind died behind the big boats. Basically, we did 30 miles in 11 hours.”

He thinks they will be back.

“Jens is never disappointed. He loves sailing with the guys. We thought we could be in the top three and get the same result as three years ago with the old boat.

“Racing is like that. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. I think he will come back. It is difficult for us to come from the middle of Europe, but Jens loves this race and I hope he will come back to try and win.”

Last year’s winner, Paul Clitheroe’s Balance finished 12th across the line, immediately behind Ichi Ban and Varuna VI.

“I was thinking to myself that it is hard to get two wins in a row,” he said.

“We look at our technology occasionally and see that we were in the top three in IRC and we had plenty of time on the V70 Giacomo.

“We rounded Tasman at what I thought was the perfect time, at 9 am, we were probably in 18-20 knots of pressure, we ran across Storm Bay at about 18 knots of boat speed, saw that Ichi Ban and a couple of others that give us a fair bit of time were stuck and we went right over to Bruny to do the ‘Buffalo Girls’, go around them and there was no outside. But the whole place just shut down.

“We sat in there for about four hours and watched time come and go, made sail changes, you know the routine.”

But he is philosophical.

“It looks like for the three years we have had the boat we have been the leading TP52 on IRC, there are plenty that have still to turn up and so we are very pleased.”

Clitheroe says that now the double overall win had eluded him, he would not contest next year. If he had won, the “chief of staff” might have let him shoot for the triple but instead she said:

“Look, sunshine, I am very happy you went again this year. How about a family holiday next year?”

Clitheroe says he had better not become a Hobart tragic, so “I’ll have a year off and start the campaign again after that”.