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  • Creature comforts no handicap.

Creature comforts no handicap.

Creature comforts no handicap.
Maxi sled

Creature comforts no handicap.

This year, the cruising yachts have made a comeback. Two of the top three boats are cruiser racers. Indeed, the best a purebred racer could manage was third.

Over the past 60 years, as the competition intensified, the skippers swapped comfort for speed and slowly the creature comforts were stripped out. Today the boat of choice for winning skippers is one with no accommodation, no unnecessary trimmings - stripped out interiors, carbon fibre technology, and absolutely no concessions to comfort.

This year, though, the cruising yachts have made a comeback.  Two of the top three boats are cruiser racers.  Indeed, the best a purebred racer could manage was third.

The IMS rating system has encouraged owners to build more versatile boats and still be competitive.

The American entrant this year, Zaraffa, is a case in point.  This beautiful, state of the art Reichel/Pugh 65 is built for speed and comfort.  After all she is in a four year round the world odyssey, and races with a six burner stove in the galley, a full sized heater in the cabin and two toilets, each with their own hot water shower and of course, a separate cabin for the owner.

 

The early Sydney to Hobart Yacht races were stately affairs, essentially cruises in company with a little competition thrown in.  Yachts often stopped for sleep overnight. These were cruising boats.  Heavy, overbuilt.  Speed played second place to safety and comfort. At the Maritime Museum in Sydney, you can go for a sail on one  - the Kathleen Gillett, which sailed in the first race before embarking on a world cruise, with artist Jack Earle at the helm.

Yet Zaraffa came to Australia with an extraordinary race pedigree.  Winner of the IMS and IRC divisions of the Trans Atlantic Race and in the 2002 Fastnet she won the Superzero class and placed second overall.

Then there is Tilting at Windmills.  Victorian Thorry Gunnersen loves his racing and his cruising.  He has just brought his lovely timber John Dory 42 back from a circumnavigation of New Zealand’s south island

In the horrendous 1998 Hobart Tilting at Windmills placed 2nd overall, and now, in 2003, as if to prove that this solid boat doesn’t need heavy weather to win, Gunnerson has done it again.  Second overall in the 2003 Rolex Sydney Hobart race.

And the winner is…..First National Real Estate.  Michael Spies and Peter Johnson’s Beneteau 40.7 is a classic example of the new breed of racer/cruisers.

She has a magnificent interior, fully trimmed galley, enclosed head (toilet) complete with shower and a comfortable lounge.

Some 500 of these boats have been sold worldwide.  Since acquiring her Spies has meticulously modified the boat, optimizing both her performance and her rating.  “I’d like to think that she’s the fastest of the 500,”  Spies says.  “We have remodeled the keel, this is her third rudder.  If I listed all the changes we’ve made it would take a couple of foolscap pages.

“Yet we can take her back to Sydney and transform her into a boat you would be happy to go cruising on for a week.  And we could do it in less than two hours.

“If there is such a thing as a freak boat, one that is equally at home on the race track, or at anchor in a quiet bay, then this is probably it.”

There is a still world of difference between the winning Beneteau 40.7 First National Real Estate of today and a Kathleen Gillett or a Rani, which won the first race in 1945, of course. 

But the performance of the cruiser/racers this year has shown the strength of the handicap system.  You don’t need a custom racing yacht with no concessions to win a Hobart these days.