Key West Race Week - Farr 40s get rumbling

The Farr 40 One-Design is the second biggest class at this year's race week with 37 entries from 12 countries, trailing only the 59-boat Melges 24 class, a typical size fleet at race week for the popular sport boat. An owner/driver class first introduced at Race Week '98, the Farr 40 has steadily grown in size.

Aboard John Thomson's fine yacht Solution, it is the boat's first regatta since last October. Thomson has had good success in Key West, winning his division five times since 1994, including the Farr 40 class in 1998 and '99. But the class' level of competition has skyrocketed in the last two years, leaving an air of uncertainty as to our chances.

Unsurprising - counted among the 37 tacticians in the fleet were Russell Coutts, the two-time America's Cup winner, aboard Ernesto Bertarelli's chartered Cavallino. The boat's crew is comprised of members from the Swiss America's Cup challenge, bankrolled by Bertarelli and skippered by Coutts.

The match-race world champion and Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker is aboard Hasso Plattner's Morning Glory. Star class gold medallist and ISAF World Sailor of the Year Mark Reynolds is aboard Philippe Kahn's Pegasus. Terry Hutchinson, who signed up with Team Dennis Conner for the next America's Cup, is aboard Jim Richardson's Barking Mad. England's Ado Stead and Ian Walker are aboard Mark Heeley's GBR 25R (named for its sail number), and Oscar Strugstad's Dawn Raid.

Those are just a few of the luminaries in the class. To list them all would create a story longer than you'd want to read. Showing their sportsmanship, many played fairly on the first day of racing and little screaming was heard at the mark roundings, where there were typically five to ten boats trying to round within five boat lengths of each other.

The winner of each race -- George Andreadis' Atalanti (defending class champion from Greece) in Race 1 and Heeley's British boat in the second -- got around the first windward mark in good standing. The start and first beat in a class of this size are critical to a good placing. The consequences are having to tack too many times, often from one clump of boats to the other, and sometimes disaster at the windward mark where you have to jibe off the starboard layline because a parade of boats has sucked away the wind pressure.

It can happen to anyone, just ask Coutts. He and Bertarelli had to jibe out at the first windward mark when they lost way because of a wind vacuum. A similar scenario played out in the second race, which was sailed in 12 to 14 knots of wind, slightly more than the 10 to 12 knots of Race 1. The stronger pressure separated the fleet a bit more on the first beat, which made the rounding among the top five less congested. Jeffrey Siegal's chartered Appreciation/Conspiracy fought for the lead with Heeley's British crew, just ahead of Marcus Blackmore's Emotional Hooligan from Australia, and Solution.

On our boat in the second race, we had a better start and were able to sail our own race. We started at mid-line, worked the left side of the beat, found a nice lift on port tack and rounded fourth, which we held to the finish after temporarily climbing up to second. Heeley and Stead won, Appreciation/Conspiracy placed second and Brack Duker's Revolution, with America's Cup winning navigator Peter Isler calling tactics, placed third.

There were gains to be made on the sides of our racecourse. The middle seemed dead, probably because of the confused wind flow from 37 boats. There were slight shifts in the northeasterly wind to make gains, but mostly boatspeed was king. We had good speed on Solution and were able to pinch off a couple of boats from leeward. That's always a good motivating factor for the crew.

Race 1 didn't work out as well partly because we were rusty and also because our instruments were offline. Our boatspeed transducer went dead about 12 minutes before the start, which brought the system down. Therefore, we weren't too discouraged by the 19th place. The feeling is that everyone could be saddled with a double-digit finish before the week is out. It only seems inevitable in such a big class.

First published on QuokkaSailing.com, republished with permission.