Victory for Hobart race veteran

Michael Spies First National Real Estate team comes out on top in Rolex Sydney-Hobart

Michael Spies had his second crowning glory today in his lengthy participation in the Hobart race, when his Beneteau 40.7 First National Real Estate took victory under both IMS and IRC. The only contender was the 34ft Impeccable sailed by 81 year old John Walker but they had to finish at 1425 local time today but at this time they had 15 miles still to go.

A 44 year Sydney-based funeral director and a former 18ft skiff champion, Spies was this year participating in his 27th Sydney-Hobart race, having missed one race due to other sailing commitments since his first when he was just 16.

Spies' first moment of glory in this race came in 1999 when he co-skippered the Volvo 60 Nokia to line honours victory and set the blistering fast official course record of 1 day 19 hours 48 minutes and 2 second. This record still stands.

"It wasn’t the hardest Hobart I’ve done, but it was challenging," Spies said earlier. "I think yesterday hard running downhill with the spinnaker up where we just knew we had to keep pushing it to have a shout of beating the boats we knew we had to beat - we were right on the edge there for a long period of time." First National like several other boats still racing at this time were basking in the strong broad reaching conditions. Spies said they lasted for 12 hours, around six of them right on the edge.

This was combined with a good run into the finish. "Coming up the Derwent was a bit better than usual. It wasn’t as big a problem as it usually is."

While his outrageously fast run on Nokia was clearly an epic occasion, Spies said that winning the Hobart race on handicap was much harder. "This is up there with Nokia, but it is hard to compare with a line honours boat. There are usually only two or three boats physically capable of winning the race on line honours - that was typified by what happened this year. When you are racing for handicap honours there are any one of 20 or 30 boats which have some sort of solid chance."

So is there too much emphasis placed on line honours? "If it was just a line honours race it wouldn’t be a race," says Spies succinctly.

On board First National Real Estate with Spies was co-skipper Peter Johnson, racing his first Hobart race and his regular crew Angus Roxburgh, Warren Miller and Gail Harland, one of the few women to have taken part in more than 10 Hobart race (race anoraks tell us the record is currently 13). In addition to this was Murray Hughes, Luke Ratcliff and Andrew Joyce, a 19 year old Launceston, here in Tasmania.

Spies was particularly impressed by his new nipper. "Andrew is 19 years old and he acts like he has been on the boat for all of his 19 years. He is tactically advanced beyond his years, he is a worker and doesn’t let anything go to his head. He’s just a good all round sailor and name you’re going to hear a lot more of."

This is the third time Spies has raced this particular boat in the Hobart race. "We knew the boat, there have been a core nucleus that have been there with us for a long time. We knew each other. We had one new young knew and a navigator. It was a really good package. The preparation of the boat was perfect and we were confident we were not going to break anything."

The boat is more or less a standard Beneteau 40.7 although Spies says it has definitely been optimised. "We have worked very hard to get the rating down. There are 500 which have been built worldwide and I’d like to think this is number one of the 500. If you look at it the boat looks very standard but under the water the keel has been largely reprofiled, it is the third rudder we’ve had in the boat and there has been an on-going sail development. If I had to list everything non-standard to the boat it would take up a couple of fullscap pages. But when I get the boat back to Sydney it will be converted back to a family cruiser. So I think the rule is doing its job and these are a good boat. It is designed by Bruce Farr and if there is such a thing as a freak boat this is definitely it."

Clearly Spies has done his homework. The leather seats down below were swapped for the race as were the floorboards. "We also put a couple of pipe cots in there but that is it. It is a two hour transition to put this back into a boat you’d be more than happy to go cruising in for a week."

On the race course Spies said there were several moments when it looked like victory was slipping through their fingers.

"Tactically we were sound. We were the right side of everything from the start basically. We didn’t go out on a limb. A couple of boats took fliers and they paid short dividends, but then the next flier they took came back to bite them. We stopped in Bass Strait for a couple of hours and I thought that was it, but it appears that the rest of the fleet maybe stopped for an hour and a half, so maybe we had a little bit of a deficit there and we stopped again last night coming into Tasman light and stopped again once we were into Storm Bay, but we kept the thing rolling pretty well."

Spies said his gameplan for the race was simple - to keep the boat pointed as close as possible to the mark and sailing at 95% of its maximum speed all of the time. "If you make sure that happens you usually get a pretty solid result. So don’t go out on fliers. Those who take fliers who put themselves out on a limb and can’t come back and fight you later."

They were also fortunate to have a fleet of Sydney 38 to guage themselves against that owed them time. "If we could finish mid-fleet in those guys we would be pretty solid because they would owe us four odd hours and in the history of the race normally dictates it is won by less than an hour. So I figured if we split them we’d be in pretty good shape - and that is exactly what happened."

Despite it being his 27th race Spies says he will be back for more next year. This year, ironically, he nearly didn't make it when his major sponsor pulled out. "We were in all sort of trouble financially to get this deal to the line and First National really bailed us out," he admits.