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Wild Oats XI enters the history books

Wild Oats XI enters the history books
Heading towards a back to back line honours win, Wild Oats X sailing off the 'organ pipes'

Wild Oats XI enters the history books

"We were the race favourites so there was a lot of pressure. It was a very important race, to prove a lot of things….that the win last year wasn’t a one off. It’s a great team and a great boat.”

The Australian maxi Wild Oats XI has taken back-to-back line honours wins in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, the first since 1964 and only the sixth time in the event’s 62 year history.

Wild Oats XI, owned by Bob Oatley and skippered by Mark Richards, crossed the finish line of the 628 nautical mile race at Hobart’s Castray Esplanade at 9:52pm tonight giving her an elapsed time of 2 days 8 hours 52 minutes and 33 seconds.

This is 14 hours and 10 minutes outside the record she set last year when she took the Rolex Sydney Hobart race treble – line honours, the race record and the winner of the Tattersalls Cup (overall handicap winner).

The last back-to-back line honours winner of the race was Astor in 1963/64, which also won in 1961. Other boats to have achieved the rare feat are Morna (1946-48), Margaret Rintoul (1950/51), Kurrewa IV (1956/57) and Solo (1958/59).

This year’s Rolex Sydney Hobart was a race of attrition in which Wild Oats XI’s line honours challengers fell away.

She led the fleet out of Sydney Heads on Boxing Day into the teeth of headwinds that persisted throughout the race down the NSW coast, across Bass Strait and down the Tasmanian east coast.

From the 1.00pm start on Tuesday the crew of Wild Oats XI never stopped looking over their shoulders, only giving up the lead once for a short time to the Volvo 70 ABN AMRO ONE until they and the New Zealand maxi Maximus lost their rigs.

Wild Oats XI’s trifecta last year was special. No other yacht had ever won line honours, overall handicap and broken the record simultaneously. But Bob Oatley and his team felt they had something left to prove and tonight they did. 

“It was a dream run last year and a lot of people were mocking us saying if it had been a tough race we wouldn’t have got there,” Wild Oats XI skipper Mark Richards said dockside moments after crossing the finish line.  “Well you don’t get much tougher than this year and we’re here.”

Navigator Adrienne Cahalan, now a three time line honours winning navigator, said the whole crew felt the pressure.  “We were the race favourites so there was a lot of pressure. It was a very important race, to prove a lot of things….that the win last year wasn’t a one off. It’s a great team and a great boat.”

Wild Oats’ tactician, Iain Murray said the different set of conditions in 2005 and 2006 posed very different tactical issues.  “We had Alfa Romeo on our tail all last year and because it was a fast downwind race, small changes made big gains in speed whereas this year it was get in front and try not to leave any crumbs for the others to pick up.”

Cahalan said that a crucial decision early in the race was whether to go offshore to pick up the current and stronger winds or stay closer to the coast where the seas were flatter but potentially there was less wind.

“We opted to go inshore and stay out of the current which meant staying out of the big waves and just looking after the boat for the first night. That’s what we did and it paid dividends.

“The smoother water saved us for sure,” said Richards.

Richards had had strict riding instructions from owner Bob Oatley: “Play it safe and the boat will do the rest. And it did.”

Once they had survived that tough first night Wild Oats XI then switched to a covering strategy, with the maxi Skandia and the modified Volvo 70 Ichi Ban never more than a few miles astern.  “We were so close that we had to make sure that we were in the same patch of water as them so that if we had a bad sail change or if we stopped for a couple of hours they couldn’t sail away from us,” Cahalan said.

Richards says that he didn’t feel he had a decisive lead until the final hours of the race: “Probably not until midday today. Early this morning we ran out of breeze behind Flinders Island so we actually stopped for four hours, which was really frustrating because the other boats pulled forty miles out of us, but then we got through the hole and we were okay from there.”

At last, with her rivals well behind her, Wild Oats XI finally passed the Iron Pot around 9pm tonight and entered the Derwent River.

With eleven miles to go to the finish line and as night fell, she flew her big black spinnaker for the first time in the entire race as she sprinted up the river ahead of a lively 18 knot southerly breeze. 

Waiting for her was an ecstatic Bob Oatley. Even though she was 14 hours off record time, this was a great victory for the Wild Oats XI team.  “For the conditions this is a fantastic time,” he declared. 

Matt Allen’s Jones 70 Ichi Ban is the second boat to finish the 2006 Rolex Sydney Hobart, with a finish time of 1.42am this morning. Ichi Ban passed Grant Wharington’s Skandia around 65 miles from the finish to beat the Victorian 2003 line honours winner Skandia into second place.

Skandia is the next boat due to finish, with an ETA of 2.00am.