Eighth line honours victory for Wild Oats XI

Bob Oatley's maxi enters the Rolex Sydney Hobart history books

Bob Oatley's maxi Wild Oats XI has claimed a historic eighth line honours, first home this afternoon in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.

In what skipper Mark Richards described as "the crew’s most hard-fought line honours triumph", Wild Oats XI held off the impressive challenge from Jim Clark and Kristy-Hinze Clark’s brand new maxi Comanche, from the United States.

Completing the race in 2 days, 2 hours, 3 minutes and 26 seconds, Wild Oats XI finished eight hours shy of the race record she set in 2012. Proud owner Bob Oatley watched from the water as his boat and crew surpassed the record number of line honours wins set by Morna/Kurrewa IV between 1946-1960.

“It’s been the hardest win,” said Oatley. “Comanche is an exceptional yacht, probably the most expensive yacht ever built. A wonderful boat. When she took off at the start of the race I was amazed." 

He added: "It’s a miracle – and we will be back next year, yes, we’ll definitely be back next year. She [Wild Oats XI] is the best boat in the world - she’s proved that.”

Richards was visibly ecstatic: “This is the sweetest victory by far. To rewrite a bit of sailing history doesn’t come along every day. To win a Hobart is a great honour but to win an eighth; I can’t believe I am here.

"This was by far the most satisfying (line honours win). We had a real race. It was long race, with a lot of competition from Comanche from the start.

"We worked hard from the beginning, and it paid off. Comanche was unbelievably impressive down Sydney Harbour and the whole first night she had the legs on us. It was definitely our toughest race. To have a boat so close for so much of the race, especially when she’s faster than you. I said to the guys ‘we’ve got to hang in there, hang tough, minimise our losses and wait for the first opportunity we get to attack’.

"It was a tough first night in the southerly as the boat sustained damage and we had to hang on in there as Comanche had the edge on us.” This edge lasted for the first 24 hours, at which point Wild Oats XI assumed control of the race."

The break came on Saturday morning in the middle of Bass Strait. Gone were the fresh conditions of the first day, to be replaced by a ridge of high pressure lying between the mainland and Tasmania - a wall of light air that would define the 2014 Rolex Sydney Hobart.

Wild Oats' Spanish navigator Juan Vila confirmed: “The key moment was crossing the light air patch in the southeast of Australia. It was important to keep as close as we could at the start to Comanche. The two boats have different characteristics and had their moments."

Wild Oats XI was first out of the ridge, excelling in the lighter conditions that suited her. She steadily pulled away from Comanche, opening up a 40 mile lead.

“It was a race to get past the ridge,” Richards agreed, ‘that was the whole thing. They actually slowed us down in the light weather. We went to leeward of them, but couldn’t get past, so we ended up taking a big pill, lost some ground to get to weather of them. But eventually it paid off, we got past them and away we went.”

Tactician Iain Murray added: .“Luckily for us, we just got through the gate. Comanche got there too, but they were slow out of it. We did really well to hang onto them in the rough stuff and still be side by side with her on Saturday morning, and then it was our turn.”

But as the winds built up again this morning, the balance swung back in favour of Comanche. As the pair raced down the Tasmanian coast she gradually reeled Oats back in. But with lighter air forecast in Storm Bay, Richards remained confident. “It was inevitable that they would gain on us,” Richards said, “but we knew that once they got us they wouldn’t get past us. We finished in our perfect conditions.”

Comanche finished 49 minutes after Wild Oats XI; the crew’s first Rolex Sydney Hobart experience – coming just months after the boat’s launch – was a rewarding one. “Huge credit to Wild Oats, they deserve their record. We tried hard to take it from them. Our team did an unbelievable job,” explained skipper Ken Read. “On one hand we are disappointed, on the other, proud of what we put together. Very rarely you go through a race like this and say in hindsight you should have done “x”. Both boats sailed a flawless race.”

As far as the America’s Cup winning skipper Jimmy Spithill is concerned, there is now unfinished business between Rolex Sydney Hobart line honours winner Wild Oats XI and the US supermaxi she beat across the finish line, Comanche. The Oracle Team USA skipper was one of six helmsmen on Comanche. “We can’t leave it at that,” he declared after finishing in Hobart. He says that on his watch this morning the boat reached a top speed of 32 knots and knows what she is capable of. “Everybody got to see the true potential of this boat at the start. I remember looking up at Kenny (Ken Read, the skipper) and he just had this huge grin from ear to ear. Unfortunately we just didn’t see those sort of conditions again until the end of Bass Strait.”

Read reflected on the crucial point of the race – the high-pressure ridge in Bass Strait: “We were about a quarter of the way into Bass Strait and expecting a westerly breeze, and all of a sudden Stan (navigator Stan Honey) came up from down below and said ‘I just got a new weather file, this is not looking good’.

“We were two miles ahead of them, in bumpy seas, and they literally went by us, probably going a knot or two faster at the time, and they just sailed into more pressure and just kept extending on the whole fleet. Both boats sailed a flawless race; but they had their day. They had 12 hours where they had Wild Oats’ weather, but that’s racing. You can already see Comanche is already changing sailing as we speak. It’s brand new, we’re just starting. Before this race started, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We knew we had a good boat right off the start line, the way it just took off on that windy reach. Unfortunately we’ve always known we had that one blemish in light air, and that became a dominant feature in the race, so that’s unfortunate for us.”

Following the retirement of Perpetual Loyal during the first evening, the battle for line honours became a two-horse race. When Comanche arrived in Hobart, the third boat on the water - Manouch Moshayedi’s RIO 100 (USA) – remained still some 100 miles behind.

With line honours sealed, the focus now turns to the progress of the remainder of the fleet and the quest to identify which boat will become the race’s overall handicap winner and lift the coveted Tattersall’s Cup. Almost all of the fleet have now negotiated the halfway point and are set for boisterous conditions during the third night. Currently leading on handicap is the race’s smallest and oldest boat, Maluka of Kermandie, owned by former line honours campaigner Sean Langman.

Coinciding with the arrivals came the sad news that New Zealander Jim Delegat’s Giacomo, formerly Franck Cammas' Volvo Ocean Race winning Groupama VO70 has been dismasted. She was sailing downwind in northeast winds gusting up to 35 knots, 21 miles northeast of Cape Sonnerat at approximately 5.45pm. All aboard are safe and the families advised.