Line honours for Speedboat

Alex Jackson's supermaxi first home in a light airs Newport-Bermuda Race, reports Mike Sanderson

On Monday morning at 9:12:56 Atlantic Daylight Time, Alex Jackson’s Speedboat crossed the finish line at St. David’s light in Bermuda. Royal Bermuda Yacht Club Commodore Ralph Richardson and Cruising Club of America Commodore Ross Sherbrooke greeted the first boat to cross the line and the first to finish in the in the Open Class Division and her crew by delivering two bottles of champagne to the speediest boat in the fleet. Speedboat’s total elapsed time was 64 hours 42 minutes and 56 seconds.

Less than 18 months ago Alex Jackson and Mike Sanderson started to shape their plan to design, build and fit out a super-maxi that would debut in the Newport Bermuda Race. Last Friday, Speedboat was in the limelight as her 99ft long hull and towering rig waited for the start of the race. Within short order she passed the rest of the 198-boat fleet.

Pouring over navigator Stan Honey’s data early in the race, Sanderson and owner, Alex Jackson knew that this year’s Newport Bermuda Race was going to be “tricky”. Going into the Newport Bermuda Race, Jackson, Sanderson and yacht designer Juan Kouyoumdjian, were hopeful that Speedboat and a dozen or so of the TeamOrigin America's Cup crew, would break the unofficial Newport Bermuda Open record of 48 hours, 28 minutes and 31 seconds posted by Hasso Plattner’s maxZ86 Morning Glory in 2004.

Speedboat and her team wins the “First to Finish Prize” claiming line honours for being the first boat to cross the finish line, but as Sanderson commented: “If a race record is surprisingly slow there is often a very good reason for it. It usually means that the race is sailed in a pretty tricky piece of water…” This stretch of the North Atlantic proved to be just that. With winds from the south and southeast, the weather just did not “let us spend very long pointing at the mark!” said Sanderson.

Stan Honey, Speedboat’s command module pilot, commented: “the fleet was faced with a High as it headed toward Bermuda. There was a shift to the southeast, so we had to get east to have some runway to use up. We had a couple of good shifts coming into the finish.” The Gulf Stream did not play a big part in the navigational plans for the boat. “It was faster to foot and let the boat go fast rather than to go hard on the wind and try to get to the warm eddy. With a big boat, you are just not in the Gulf Stream as long as the smaller boats.”

Commenting on Juan K’s breakthrough design and the team’s performance, Sanderson said, “It was a tough forecast. We were always sailing into a high and lighter air. The race was a great opportunity to learn as much as we could about the boat. We are all really happy, the boat is performing well on its targets.”

Following the Newport Bermuda Race, Speedboat will head north and the crew will be on standby for the right weather window to scream across the North Atlantic in an attempt to break the west to east record. Alex Jackson, Speedboat’s owner said after the finish, “I can’t wait to get the boat going on a long reach.”

Speedboat crew list
Owner: Alex Jackson, Skipper: Mike Sanderson, Navigator: Stan Honey. Crew: Justin Slattery, Julien Cressant, Ben Bardwell, Mike Howard, Andrew Henderson, Pawel Bielecki, Nick Bice, Jeremy Scantlebury, Chris Brittle, Robbie Naismith, Bob Wylie, Mike Mottle, Brad Read, Flip Wehrheim, Rob Greenhalg, Bill Erkelens, Chris Higgins, Chris Coulson, John Hilderbrand, Pete Manion, Neal McDonald, Matt Wackowitz, Cromwell Coulson, Juan Kouyoumdjian, and John Schinto




Mike Sanderson reports:

Well the goal at the first meeting to frame the concept of what the New Speedboat was going to be, and its objectives was always quite clearly defined as to a line honors win in the 2008 Newport Bermuda race. And so at just after 8am this morning local time, we cruised across the line enabling us to tick that goal off. A 250 mile beat in 7-10 knots of wind meant that the record was long gone, but as I mentioned yesterday the time to be able to test and play around with different modes upwind has been priceless.

The boat has been faultless, a full credit to the big team back in Spain at Juan Yacht design that designed her, as well as the many thousands of hours that where put into her by the team here on Speedboat, Tom Faire and the guys at Cookson Boats, Matt Smeaton and his team at North sails NZ, Steve Wilson and the team at Southern Spars, Greg Waters and the crew at Central coast hydraulics as well as many other smaller teams and individuals that have all contributed so heavily to the speedboat program, it has been a pretty hectic 18 months since the trigger was pulled to go ahead.

How we end up in the race on handicap is now out of our hands, but Speedboat was never designed with a handicap place in mind. However we will take any good results in that game when they come along, it will prove to be a race for the smaller boats I am pretty sure, from the forecasts it looks like there is a good chance that the fifty footers will come reaching in at pretty high speed, but only time will tell how that all works out.

Now that we are here in one piece and the boat is all working well we can now firmly set our sights on being ready for a Trans Atlantic record attempt in July, let’s hope that the wind gods shine favourably on us and we get a chance to have a crack, I have no doubt that should we get a reasonable window that we have the hardware to give it a great shot.

So that's it for now from the 2008 Speedboat Newport to Bermuda race, it has been a great race to spend some quality race time on the yacht, a great race and opportunity to get 12 of the TeamOrigin team sailing together, but most importantly it has been a great couple of weeks building the Speedboat team, the feel on board is fantastic, all in all a great bunch of guys, but then I guess it was always going to be, Alex, Jane and the Jackson Girls are a lovely family to be around, what they have done here is so very cool, and I have no doubt that it will go from strength to strength.

Until next time.
Kind regards
Mike Sanderson