SAILING/SYDNEY TO HOBART: THE DISCOVERY of a fishy stowaway helped Australian maxi Wild Oats XI surge to an unprecedented fourth successive line honours victory in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race yesterday, according to captain Mark Richards.
The 30-metre carbon-fibre yacht, which had been trailing rivals Skandia for most of Saturday, was forced to stop to free the two-metre shark that had got tangled in its aft rudder early on Saturday.
Richards said the crew had already thought something had been impeding the yacht since it left Sydney Harbour on Friday before they struck the shark.
After the shark freed itself, Wild Oats XI surged ahead of the 2003 winner and crossed the finish line in the island state of Tasmania at 10.34pm on Saturday Irish time, an hour before Skandia.
"It was a godsend in the end, because the second we got him off the boat was back to its old self," Richards told reporters at Hobart's Constitution Dock.
"It might have been something off a spectator boat, I mean it was just a washing machine, a nightmare, you never know what could have happened," he said of the possible reason for its problems.
Richards said he had thought about sending a crew member over the side to inspect the keel, but the tight match race they were in with Skandia never gave him the opportunity.
"We just never stopped. When you are doing 20-25 knots all the time it's a hard thing to work out what to actually do.
"So we were sort of waiting for the opportunity, but in the end we didn't have one. We had to do it anyway."
Wild Oats XI, which equalled the record for three successive victories achieved by Claude Plowman's Morna from 1946-48 last year, failed to beat its race record of one day, 18 hours 40 minutes and 10 seconds.
Sydney yachtsman Bob Steel may be on the verge of his second overall win in the race. Six years after winning the race on corrected time with a previous Quest, Steel now has a nervous night's wait to see if he has won again.
Quest crossed the finish line at 3am yesterday Irish time, some four-and-a-half hours after Wild Oats XI, nearly twice as long in length, had taken line honours.
"A fantastic sleigh ride," is how Steel described his 16th Sydney Hobart race as he led Quest's two TP52 sisterships, Syd Fischer's Ragamuffin and Alan Whiteley's Cougar II, across the line by 12 minutes and 46 minutes respectively.
"It looks like we could do quite well on handicap, now we've just got to wait for the big result," he said.
"This Rolex Sydney Hobart was very kind to us, probably the easiest race I've done, but there were parts when you wished you were somewhere else," he said.
"We've got so much experience on the boat, around 160 Hobarts between us and we've got a very good yacht, one of the leading TP52s in Australia."
Just ahead of Quest across the line was Geoff Ross's Yendys. Ross has a similar story to tell having won the race in 1999 with a previous version of Yendys.
