38 Breeze Magazine
Slow start, fast finish in small boat bonanza Story and photos by Ivor Wilkins After crawling off the startline in painfully light, shifty conditions, the 2023 Coastal Classic fleet romped up the coast in a building SE breeze, which offered a fast reach to Cape Brett, a single gybe into the Bay of Islands and a 20-mile blast to the finish line. For the 133 crews competing in this iconic annual NZ Multihull Yacht Club ritual, executing what sounds like a simple formula demanded a multitude of decisions, skills and sail changes as they shifted gears and worked to extract full advantage from every opportunity. Notwithstanding the slow start, the conditions held the potential for fast times, but a startline change due to the major sewer line failure in Auckland shortened the course, which meant none of the existing race records would be threatened. As it happened, at least three of the competitors – the Melges 40s Clockwork and Sassinate, and a 41-year-old Ross 930, Hotdogger – set faster times than their respective category records. In the battle for line honours, the conditions favoured monohulls, with the hugely successful Brett Bakewell-White modified TP52 Wired, owned by Rob Bassett, taking the honours, 8 minutes ahead of Whitbread veteran Erle Williams’ 54ft catamaran, Apache. Monohulls dominated the top-10 across the line, by 6-4. On handicap, the race was a small boat bonanza. Overall monohull
honours went to RNZYS Past Commodore Steve Mair’s Melges 40, Clockwork, followed by Mike Sanderson’s Shaw 35, Rehab, with Sinisa Grujicic’s Ross 930 Hotdogger completing the podium. Squadron yachts filled the top five monohull places overall and won divisions 1A, 1B, 4, Y88 and Double-handed. All three podium finishers basically adopted the same strategy of prioritizing speed over strict course-keeping – and, after some manoeuvres to escape the light wind start, managed to complete the race with a single gybe at Cape Brett. “We had a plan to sail as fast as possible,” said Mair. “If we found ourselves a bit off of the rhumbline, we were fine with that. We just wanted to get north as fast as we could.” Switching several times between full main and a single reef and between a masthead A2 gennaker and a fractional reaching code zero, kept Clockwork within a mile or two of the TP52s and the gun catamaran Apache all the way. “These boats are so exhilarating to sail, although they do ship a lot of water,” said Mair. There were hopes of building a class of Melges 40s in New Zealand, but sadly the trend is in the other direction. Of the four that came into the country, one has already been sold to Australia. And, as Mair’s Clockwork completed the course, he received a WhatsApp message from Croatia. “I had been talking to this guy
