After sitting in her cradle since November, enjoying a rigorous schedule of refits, repairs and upgrades, the mighty Prospector returns to the water in fighting shape!  The Silver Canoe and her crew are ready to shake off any winter cobwebs and tackle the 41st annual Ft. Lauderdale to Key West Race.  Starting at 1300 hrs on Wednesday January 11, the 160 mile sprint to the Conch Republic will offer an exciting start to the 2017 campaign as the team looks to get back in race mode and have a crack at the course record of 10 hours 24 minutes set by Joe Dockery on the R/P 81 Carrera in 2005.

The weather briefing offers the perfect antidote to the snowy cold currently gripping the North East.  Temps in the upper 70s with 15-20 knot easterlies should make for a great ride to Key West, offering the opportunity to quickly get down to the many watering holes on Duval Street provided the team is able to find relief from a strong northerly flow of the Gulf Stream.

Challenging Prospector for line honors will be familiar foes like Wizard, Privateer and Chessie Racing - all of whom will be eager to kick 2017 off with a bullet.  Here’s hoping Prospector and her crew keep them in the rear view mirror!

Join the adventure!  Follow the race through the  official tracker and look for updates from on deck via @prospectorsailing on Instagram.

Porto Cervo

11 September 2016

It was an amazing day on the water yesterday for Team Prospector.  We needed a win to have any shot of improving our standings in the regatta.  We not only won, we smashed it.

We lead the race wire to wire.  Our lead increased at every mark of the course 1.5 minutes, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, 6.5 minutes, 12 minutes and finally 15 minutes over Lucky who rounded each mark behind us. Lucky is an exceptional yacht, sailed by a very talented crew.  She has a great pedigree, winning the Transatlantic Race in 2015 and the Sydney Hobart race in 2011.  We knew going in she would be stiff competition and a good benchmark for the new Prospector and her crew.

We sailed a perfect race. None of us could recall a single mistake over the entire 25 nautical mile course.  We had no drama.  Nothing broke.  The boat was the quietest it had been for the whole regatta.  Everyone kept their head down, a hard thing to do on such a scenically beautiful course, and did their job.  Sail changes and crew work were flawless, Peter’s tactics and Paul’s driving perfect.  I kept us from hitting anything.  Prospector responded to our efforts and was just fast, fast, fast.

I didn’t get to take a look at the results we were back at the villa for a post awards party celebratory dinner.  I knew from the splits above that we had sailed well.  To finish ahead of Lucky by that margin was instant confirmation that we sailed a great race yesterday.  When I reviewed the results quietly and saw the margins we won by it dawned on me what an accomplishment yesterday’s effort was.

We finished second, 2 points behind Atalanta II and 1 point ahead of Lucky.  The 6 points we got when we were scored DNF after we withdrew when our headstay broke in the second race was too big an obstacle to overcome in a short series.  Though it is hard to not to think about what the results would have been had we gone on to win a race we were leading before the headstay broke, we have no regrets.  Second place in our first event, in our first time at this regatta with virtually no time in the boat is a tremendous outcome.

After the race the crew loaded all the gear back on Prospector and Tery and a few of the crew took her back to Olbia to get her ready to be shipped back to the US at the end of the month.  Some headed to the airport to begin the trip home.  The rest of us took up residence in the bar at the Yacht Club Costa Smerelda and began a proper celebration that lasted through the awards party and dinner at the villa and long in to the night.

Prospector

Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup

Porto Cervo, Italy

10 September 2016

Our headstay failure and DNF on Thursday moved us from first to third in the regatta standings.  We knew before the start on Friday that to win the regatta we needed to win the remaining two races.  We also needed to get some help from the other yachts in our class by having them finish between us and Lucky. 

 

Tery, Quinn, Lu, Scotty and assorted others brought the Prospector back from Olbia first thing Friday morning.  After a little modification, the spare headstay was installed and we were ready to race again.  Hats off to them and a bunch of the crew who helped them with the repair well into Thursday evening.  We docked out at 1000, hoping as Paul wrote yesterday, for no more small things.

 

Thankfully, we got most of what we were hoping for.  We got out to the starting area and for the first time this week went through our prestart routine with no drama.  What at difference to be able to focus on getting the boat ready to go and set up early for our start without having our heads in the boat dealing with some pesky little issue that needed to be sorted before we could start.

 

The RC called for a coastal race with a drop mark for a two mile windward leg followed by port roundings of the islands of Monaci, and La Madelena, then down Bomb Alley, to a drop mark just south of Porto Cervo and a finish off the entrance to Porto Cervo. 

 

We had a good start and quickly pulled to the front of our fleet.  The wind, which had been 12-16 knots at 320 quickly, began to lighten to 6-10 knots and vary between 280 and 320.  Sometimes it was better to be left, other times better to be right.  Near the mark it become very unstable as the yachts in the fleets that started ahead of us chopped the wind up on their approach.  Lucky and Atalanta II, caught the last shift and rounded ahead of us.

 

That didn’t last.   Peter Isler called an amazing next leg, stepping us up to stronger winds on the north side of the next leg and keeping us in phase with the shifts.  It is a pretty cool thing to be alongside one of the best in the business when he is doing his thing.  By the next mark we had built a sizeable lead which we never relinquished. 

 

We rounded the top of La Madelena and progressed through our sail changes as we went from beat to reach to run.  First we put up a genoa staysail under our J1, then our masthead AO with a spinnaker staysail, and finally an A1.5 and ss.  The crew work was amazing, all those sails went up and down on time flawlessly. Paul did a great job driving and we were going fast and extending on the boats behind us.

 

As we began gybing down Bomb Alley we could see the wind getting lighter and shifting in front of us.  It looked like the 10-12 kt westerly we were enjoying was going to become a very light northwesterly.  Tery heard a garbled announcement from the RC that sounded like our course was being shortened at our next mark.

 

We put our heads down and did all we could to make the Prospector go as fast as we could.  It was our best sailing sequence of the regatta.  In preparation for the shift to a light northerly we furled and sank the ss and got a J1 ready, hoisting it half way.  When we hit the shift the J1 went up the rest of the way and the A1.5 came down, but was kept in ready position on the deck to redeploy.  Next we readied the AO.  As we progressed further we went from J1 to AO and then back to A1.5 all in minutes as we neared the finish.  Dave Tank, the hardest working man in sailing, lead his bow crew through these changes masterfully.  We were now really legging out on the boats behind us.

 

There was just one minor problem.  We couldn’t see the finish boat.  We reread the SI’s and the course chart to make sure we hadn’t overlooked something.  We hadn’t.  We searched Bomb Alley with binoculars but saw nothing.  Confused, we decided our best course of action was to record our own time and sail the rest of the course.  When we crossed the original finish line we recorded our time again and headed for the dock.

 

When we docked in Peter and Larry headed to the race office to try to sort things out.  As we were walking down the dock a YCCS official approached us and told us that the Principal Race Officer wanted to see us.  We now knew for sure something was amiss.  When we got to the race office Peter Craig, the PRO confirmed what we had already surmised.  The RC had no record of our finish.  He asked if we had heard the shorten course announcement.  We told him we had, but that it was garbled and we thought the course was being shortened at Kilo.  The RC told us that the course had been shortened at Lima the mark BEFORE Kilo and that they were checking the tracker to confirm when we went through that finish line and filing a request for redress on our behalf.

 

It turned out that we went through the shortened course finish line three minutes BEFORE the finish line was set.  We compared our log files with the tracking results with the jury and were granted redress.  When the dust settled we finished second, behind Atalanta II and ahead of Lucky.

 

So we didn’t get a completely drama free day.  Though at least this time it had nothing to do with the boat or the crew (Matthew Landry managed to stay aboard the boat).  Shortening the course cost us first place because we had continued to gain on both Atalanta II and Lucy after the short course finish.  The point we lost, together with the four or five points we lost on Thursday, likely limit us to at best a second place finish in the event.  That is a bit of a shame because if we got all those points back we would have a commanding lead in our class.

 

It is tough to be disappointed though.  We sailed very, very well.  Particularly when things got light and shifty.  As we have written before the sequence of sail changes is easy to write but incredibly difficult to execute.  We handled them spectacularly.

 

So, on to Saturday, the last day of the event.  We are raring to go and intend to do the only thing we can to help our standings, win.  Everything else will sort itself out.

Prospector

Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup

Porto Cervo, Italy

8 September 2016

A Maxi racer is a big complicated piece of machinery. Inevitably small things go wrong. The challenge is to make sure that a small thing doesn’t turn into a big thing. We failed that challenge today.

 

After yesterday’s blow out and no race, today dawned beautiful with a steady northeast breeze of 15 to 20 knots that was forecasted to ease during the day. The race committee set us to another coastal race and we warmed up as usual sailing upwind and getting a feel for the day. All was well until we noticed that the hydraulic cylinder that adjusts the head stay was failing to hold pressure causing the mast to rake backwards in the boat. This…in case you hadn’t yet deduced it…was the small thing.

 

No big deal and the boys set about swapping out the hydraulic line and recharging the cylinder. Unfortunately the repair couldn’t be completed in time and we had to do an emergency ersatz lashing of the head stay figuring we would deal with it later in the race. Time waits for no man in yacht racing and we pressed on in the starting sequence. The pin was strongly favored and we fought for position down there. We weren’t perfect but Peter Isler put us in a decent position and we tacked away. Despite a less than ideal rig setting, we picked our way up the first beat and got to the top mark in first.

 

We gradually ground out a decent lead on the second leg and just as we were getting ready to set the chute as we rounded a rocky outcrop, Matt Landry decided he was too hot and promptly fell overboard when the top lifeline broke. Very fortunately the winds were light, the water agreeably warm and it was broad daylight. We quickly executed our man overboard procedures and got him back into the boat in less than ten minutes.

 

Once aboard, he got back into his job immediately and we got the chute up and headed back down the track still definitely in the hunt. Once we settled down, the boys turned their attention back to getting the head stay as we say – sorted. Just as we prepared to jibe, Dave Tank our foredeck expert looked down and saw the carbon fiber eye of the head stay where it attaches to the boat had somehow shattered and broken while we tried to effect repairs.  The big thing.   And our race was over.

 

We stabilized the mast quickly (if that had fallen over that would be a really big thing) and tried to figure out what do next to get it repaired. Larry and a contingent were nearly immediately picked up by the support RIB from Spectre. A very heartfelt thank you to them. While they whisked ashore to grab tools and vehicles, the rest of us turned the boat towards the shipyard in Olbia 20 miles away where as luck would have it, we have a spare head stay on an old mast. 

 

We got the boat there in good order and promptly stripped the head stay off the old mast. Nothing is of course standard on these boats and while it doesn’t fit perfectly, as of this writing, the crew thinks we can figure out a way to manage the connection points and get back out on the racecourse tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

 

So a small thing…a tiny leak in a hydraulic line just before the start, turned into a big thing with a broken head stay an hour later and with that we were done. Another small thing, a sheared pin on a lifeline put Matt Landry in the water. Had that happened at night, in a big sea and cold water…that little thing could have turned into something much worse.  So a day of lessons for us starting with Murphy is alive and well.

 

After such a strong start, we are of course disappointed. But we aren’t out of it yet. It’s a small class and the damage was contained. Our best bet is to do what we do, go out and race the best we can and let the chips fall where they may. Just please no more small things tomorrow.

Racing was abandoned yesterday due to a northerly gale and rough seas. 

Here is a link to the Regatta write up of yesterday's decision to abandon racing:

http://www.yccs.it/en/regate-2016/maxi_yacht_rolex_cup__rolex_maxi_72_world_championship/comunicati/wing_gods_stop_play_again_at_maxi_yacht_rolex_cup-254.html

Most of the Prospector team took advantage of the early lay day with a range of activities, tennis, walks, around Porto Cervo, drives to other towns in northern Sardinia or tending to work.  The travel squad of 16 had an amazing lunch in a restaurant on the beach in Porto Pollo.  Very reminiscent of our Nikki Beach outing in St Barths at 1/10th the cost!

Tery, Quinn, Lucien, Scotty, Dave Scott and Dave Tank went to Portisco and worked on the boat.  On a 68 foot high performance sail boat the work list is endless.

Knowing we faced a long day on the water with potentially two races, everyone headed to bed early to rest up.

The evening highlight was a private concert performance at the villa by Peter Isler and Robbie Kane.  A great wrap up to a great day.