Scugnizza first home

Tricky conditions for the overnight race at the Adria Ferries ORCi World Championship

It was indeed a long night for the fleet at the Adria Ferries ORCi World Championship, but dawn has brought a welcome 10-knot southeast breeze to bring the teams home to the finish at the venue at Marina Dorica. The fleet was battered overnight by extremes of weather, from dead calm to thunderstorms and heavy squalls of 25-30 knot winds.

First to cross the finish line here for their long Class B race course of 83 miles was Vincenzo De Blasio's NM38S Scugnizza. The reigning World Champion for this class finished at about 0930 local time, the first of both classes to cross the finish line, as the Class A boats are still out completing their longer 130-mile course. Seven minutes later Giuseppe Giuffre's M37 Low Noise crossed the line, correcting over Scugnizza by three minutes.

"We had a good first start, but it was canceled [because many boats could not cross the start line in time]," said De Blasio. "The second start of the race then was very interesting for us because we've been sailing all very close, very compact. It has been a great battle, we have really strong opponents and this motivates us to do better. Our strongest opponent is Low Noise, and though we got first in real-time, we owed them 10 minutes in this race."

And while the complete corrected time results are evolving as the boats continue to come in to the long race finish, Giuffre and his reigning ORC European champion team did score second at the 36.80 mile scoring gate off Numana last night after 12.5 hours of racing. The winner at this short race gate was Alessandro Consiglio's First 35 South Kensington, but only by three seconds over Low Noise, with Scugnizza finishing third.

This puts Low Noise on scores of 1-2 in the first two races of the event, and with a good result likely in this long race a healthy lead in points in the standings for Class B.

"We went very well because we got second in the second race," said Giuffre, "but the start of this race was so complicated and difficult with the calm wind and strong current. We had difficulty in starting, but we managed to position ourselves for the expected wind in the night. You also need to get lucky and we were able to get out of the doldrums in which others stumbled who were only a few minutes behind us. At this point we flew toward the finish line, taking three violent storms including one with 30 knots of wind: situations where you have to have good qualities of seamanship. Anyway we went fine until now, but tomorrow we have to reset everything and start over. Scugnizza, Port of La Spezia and Uka Uka are the boats that we have to keep our eyes on."

At the Class A short race scoring gate of 57.46 miles last night, Piero Pannicia's canting-keeled Cookson 50 Calipso IV defeated their nearest by a significant margin, namely 9:35 over the GS56R Marina Kastela and 16:30 over Giorgio Martin's TP52 Aniene. Race 1 winner, Enfant Terrible, finished in fifth place in this race, so its likely the Class A standings will be very tight going into tomorrow's resumption of inshore racing.

But at 10:30 local time, much of the Class A fleet is now becalmed again, and while the fast boats are not far out, the remainder of the class is not expected in for another 8 hours at the current rate of progress. This puts them and the remainder of the Class B boats in jeopardy of hitting the 32-hour time limit for this race...this means a long fight for wind is still ahead, and corrected time results likely not available until the end of the day.