IMS winner found

Gant Gotland Rund update from Bob Fisher

"We were very happy with our start at the boat end of the line," said Holmatro’s skipper, Hans Horrevoets. "You have to be careful and we were nervous because a mistake can cost you the race, but a gap appeared and we went for it." That good start in the Gant Gotland Runt put the crew morale high and according to Horrevoets, "we could easily maintain that".

Holmatro is a Grand Soleil 44 that won her class in last year’s Rolex Fastnet Race and owner Jaap Meyer, who is also the sponsor, has a youth encouragement policy for the boat. From a group of 200 applicants, nine of the race crew were selected and it was they who were largely responsible for the steering and sail trimming of the boat. Horrevoets was in charge and the navigator is the highly experienced Peter Tens, who was with Horrevoets on Brunel Synergy for the 1997/8 Whitbread Round the World Race.

From that good start, Holmatro was able to capitalise, chasing the boats that had started 15 minutes earlier in the IMS Swedish Championship fleet on the beat to Almagrundet and only Hasso Plattner’s Baltic 70, Loftfari, and the Arcona 460, Bladaren of Torgny Jansson, were ahead of them at the light tower. The beat continued all the way to the mark off Nynashamn and by then they were chasing the lead boat in the IMS championship fleet, the Sinergia 40, Data Communication.

A jib reach to the top of Gotland Island and the Faro lighthouse followed - a relatively slow leg for this IMS boat without overlapping headsails. "The wind was to strong for us to use our Code 0," explained Horrevoets, "but we kept all the crew on the rail to make maximum speed." He admitted that later they were sending one man down below to sleep for an hour and a half and after they had been sailing for 30 hours they were sending two men at a time down for sleep.

The one mistake to which he admitted was to stay inshore down the east coast of Gotland. "The boats that went offshore gained on us, but we were not far behind Data Communication as we approached Hoburgen. We had overstood slightly but the Sinergia went looking for a non-existent mark and we closed with her. It was probably the amount they lost there that lost them the overall race."

There was 15-18 knots of south to southwest wind at Hoburgen and the Code 0 was set in pursuit of the Sinergia that had an asymmetric spinnaker set on the course to Knolls Grund. "We changed to a spinnaker when the wind freed," said Horrevoets, "and gybed at the mark, holding low on the course for Visby. That was telling as Data Communication went into less win that freed and we had a better angle to the mark."

Once around the buoy at Visby, Holmatro held high to get clear of the land effect, reaching fast with a true wind angle of 120-140 degrees, leaving Data Communications to the stern chase. The wind freed and turned the leg into a VMG run. "We were worried about the performance of the Baltic 70, but they were almost 12 hours ahead of us on the water, and there was nothing we could do about that," said Horrevoets. It proved later that there was no need for the Holmatro crew to worry - they had almost three hours in hand over the big boat on corrected time.

Not only that they were almost three minutes better on corrected time than the Sinergia 40, Data Communication, and that ensured that Holmatro had won the overall Gant Gotland Runt trophy for IMS boats.