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Occasionally the weather gods get it right, and they were certainly smiling on the 92 competing boats inside and outside the unique and awesome 2014 Gill Surf to City Yacht Race.
On the cruise down over a few days there have been plenty of interesting stories coming in and you will hear little about them here, except to say that in the F22 Midnight Rain I was lucky enough to head down in, we only had to tack three times between Sandgate and Southport for a lovely seven hour sail. The usual rumble of nongs on jetskis, clowns getting nosebleed somewhere in the towers of Riviera stinkboats, and even the ubiquitous seaplane tried to land on our parade, but it was still all fun in the fresh easterly with a soupcon of south.
As expected, the awesome Volvo 70 Black Jack completed the ocean course and blasted across the finish line in an elapsed time under seven hours to take a few hours off the race record and even beat the (smaller) multihulls home. Thankfully their canting keel was up enough to not pick up any of the old crab pots and sunken sharpie keels around the fisheries beacon. They also claimed corrected time on IRC from Jessandra II.
Local hero Scott Murphy bought extra bags of lollies to get his young crew on the wings and win PHRF Div I - also from Jessandra II in his home built gold rocket. The Qld Cruising Yacht Club coup continued with the Commodore Phil Lazzarini easily winning div II ahead of Bad Habits.
In the ocean multihulls course, Andrew Stransky just edged out Boss Racing with his continually dominating Fantasia in the lumpy conditions which suited his waterline length nicely.
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| Fantasia in full flight, photo courtesy Fantasia Sailing |
