Wild Oats XI is faced with the first serious Christmas Day sail of her distinguished Sydney to Hobart history, as she bids to make up for four days of lost preparation time.
Bob Oatley’s imperious super maxi, which is striving for a record eighth line honours win, broke her boom last Saturday and skipper Mark Richards said his team had been working round the clock to fix the issue.
It won’t stop the boat participating in the race, but it has bitten deeply into her final week of preparations, for a race featuring four other super maxis.
“We’ll be sailing all day Christmas Day,” Wild Oats XI skipper Mark Richards told AAP.
“We’ve missed four days of important preparation and we’ve got to try and make that up tomorrow.(Thursday).”
Richards doesn’t anticipate his boat’s race record of one day 18 hours 23 minutes 12 seconds will be challenged this year.
Perpetual LOYAL owner Anthony Bell said the weather forecast didn’t appear to significantly favour any of the big boats.
“For us to do well in this race, we probably have to chance our arm a little bit,” Bell said.
The 117-boat fleet are still expected to have a bumpy first night at sea, with southerlies gusting up to 30 knots and choppy conditions.
“We’ll all work our hardest to keep our Christmas dinners down,” joked Comanche skipper Ken Read.
He suggested the heavy weather on that first night could mitigate against the boat’s co-owner Kristy Hinze-Clark sailing in the race.
“She keeps making threats (about racing), but 30 knots for your first ocean race ever and 30 knots and bumpy seas for the first 12, 15 hours, I don’t know,” Read told AAP.
Read is keen as everyone else to find out how his brand new boat performs in testing race conditions,
“We (will) try to keep it in one piece, we try to anticipate the best we possibly can, but this is a completely untested boat at this stage.” Read said.
“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, It’s time to go see what this thing can do.”
Syd Fischer, who at 87 becomes the oldest person to participate in the race, was quietly confident about his renovated super maxi’s prospects.
“We think we’ve covered the bases and the boat is ready for all kinds of weather,” Fischer said.
Asked if he was going to steer the boat out of Sydney Harbour, Fischer, the master of the pithy one-liner said “I’m old and stupid and I don’t steer anymore, I haven’t got any balance left.”
Manouch Moshayedi, owner of the other super maxi, RIO 100, felt the forecast wasn’t too bad for his boat.
“Canting keels and water ballast and all the other gadgets that the big boats have makes things more complicated and we have the simplest (super maxi) boat,” Moshayedi said.
Darryl Hodgkinson, owner and skipper of last year’s overall winner Victoire doubted he would go back-to-back despite a forecast that suggests the smaller to mid-sized boats would benefit from favourable weather after the big boats finish.
“History is certainly against me, it hasn’t been done in the modern era, but saying that I’d probably be the most elated man in yachting if I could pull this one off, but I don’t expect to,” Hodgkinson said.
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