Variety is the spice of life

Australian Sailing - March 2011

The editor says there is lots to like about Audi Victoria Week. Photography by Andrea Francolini/Audi.

Audi Victoria Week is Australia’s oldest and biggest race week, dating back to 1844. It is also undoubtedly one of the best, stretching from one side of Port Phillip Bay to the other, at three venues that are all ideal for the purpose.

The event starts in Melbourne at Docklands, right in the city centre. Locals and visitors can sit in cafes and restaurants and watch world champions racing back and forth in SB3s as TP52s and other IRC-rated yachts come and go to the invitation race out in the Bay.

Two days later, the start line at St Kilda is a blaze of sails as around 400 yachts, ranging from the RP63 Loki to little 20 footers, jostle to get away in the passage race that will take them 34nm to Geelong on Corio Bay. Here, with food tents, bands and street entertainers packing the foreshore, a series of windward/leewards and the occasional passage race will decide the winners in 16 different divisions sailing on six different courses.

If you can’t find something you like among all this sailing action, you are a very hard marker!

King of Docklands

This year’s King of Docklands was an absorbing event. Among the star-studded competitors was the king of SB3s, Glenn Bourke. “Bourkie” is a dual Olympian, seven times world champion (including three World Laser titles in a row), former CEO of the Volvo Ocean Race and current CEO of Hamilton Island. Eyeing him off was Nathan Outteridge, also an Olympian, twice 49er world champion and recently crowned Moth world champion. His crew included 470 Olympic bronze medallist and former Moth world champion, Ian Brown, and SB3 class president and former European champion, David Cheyne.

However, it wasn’t a two-horse race, with former Dragon world champion and Etchells national champion Nick Rogers and current Australian SB3 champion Jono Shelley from the UK also tipped as potential winners, and anyone among the 14 skippers capable of taking races off the big guns.

The King of Docklands uses a skins format, where a series of races is sailed and the last boat drops out after each heat. When the fleet is down to three, they race for the big points. This means you only need to win the last race each day to win the title. However, Glenn Bourke summed up the prevailing attitude when he said, “You want to take every bullet you can, while you’re still young enough to enjoy it.”

On the first day, Thursday, Outteridge kept his powder dry until the final. Bourke had been the stand-out performer and Outteridge had even fallen out of his boat, with a bit of help from another competitor, during the early rounds. But in the final it was Outteridge, Bourke then Shelly.

When a strong southerly change came in at around 3pm on the second and final day, spectators knew they were in for a treat. With winds gusting over 35 knots out on the Bay, the 20 IRC boats in the day’s Invitation Race had been sent ashore and their crews lined up at every vantage point to watch the SB3 mayhem.

One by one the less-favoured skippers departed, as Outteridge won three of the early rounds and Bourke and Brendan Garner won one each. With winds gusting over 20 knots, rooster tails were kicked up and spinnakers got out of control running downwind towards the marina. From time to time Bourke and Outteridge would sail past commentator Mark Bergin between races and mutter, “tough” or “hard work” to describe the previous heat.

Finally it was down to just four – Outteridge, Bourke, Garner and Damian King, after Shelley had departed owing to a spinnaker disaster that carried his boat way past the bottom mark.

What happened next was yacht racing at its finest.The pre-start manoeuvres were taking place right next to the marina pontoons, with spectators literally able to reach out and touch the boats as they slid past. Inside the last minute, the old bull (Bourke) lined up the young bull (Outteridge) and charged straight at him on starboard. It was an aggressive gesture, aimed at pushing Outteridge away from his preferred starting position at the pin end and unsettling him for the first beat. Ninety-nine sailors out of a hundred would have taken evasive action and done just as Bourke wanted.

Instead Outteridge instantly threw the boat onto starboard and attacked back, slotting perfectly into the leeward hole and screaming at Bourke to go up. Bourke luffed, pushing Garner who pushed King, and Outteridge sped away up the course, aiming to be first into the pressure on the left-hand side.

Bourke, like the champion he is, recovered quickly and went hunting again. With both boats screaming down the course under spinnaker at more than 20 knots, Bourke gambled everything: “I thought we could get an overlap, so we went for a really late drop. We missed it and touched the mark. It was my fault.”

While doing his two penalty turns, Garner and King sailed through and in these super short races there was no time to get back into the contest.

With Bourke out only Outteridge could win the overall title, so Garner and King ignored him, match racing each other for the minor places. Outteridge won the race and the title easily, earning the use of a new Audi for 12 months, while Bourke was second overall and Garner was third.

Passage Race

Saturday morning at Audi Victoria Week sees a total change of pace from the short, sharp sprints in Docklands. Instead, at just before 9.30am, more than 400 boats of all sizes and speeds spread across the skyline off St Kilda.

I was fortunate enough to be on Rob Hanna’s TP52 Shogun and could watch all the action from very close quarters. The St Kilda start line was a new one for the race, and it worked for the spectators onshore and in power boats - but got very “friendly” for some of the competitors. One poor little trailer-sailer found himself in a TP52 sandwich and ended up sailing in the totally wrong direction to escape.

The first leg was a long beat up the coastline to Sandringham before the fleet turned right and followed Loki westward across the Bay, flying spinnakers on a broad reach in the fluky 5-6 knot winds.

On Shogun it was interesting to watch a professional crew in action. There was no unnecessary chatter, just the calls from tactician Steve McConaghy and skipper Rob Hanna, followed to the letter. Rolling the boat through tacks was conducted like a military operation, with the “rail meat” moving as one and throwing their weight aggressively outboard. When weight was needed on the leeward rail, a call of “two down to leeward” would see the two men who were furthest aft peel off from the back of the stack together and glide smoothly across the boat. No unnecessary movement, no unnecessary noise.

Unfortunately, as the old cliché goes, it was a race in two halves. In the first half, Loki, Living Doll, Hooligan and Shogun cleared away from the rest, heading further north towards what  looked like a steady breeze filling in from the west. Meanwhile, Scarlett Runner, Calm, Pretty Fly II and Terra Firma, who had been literally miles behind beating up to Sandringham, had gone south looking for the afternoon sea breeze.

The leaders sailed into a hole, the sea breeze eventually overpowered the light westerly and the boats down south cleared away.

Loki, being bigger and faster than the rest, managed to catch Scarlett Runner halfway up the channel in Corio Bay to take line honours, but for the rest of us in the northern hole it was an agonising second half to the race.

Melges 52

As we struggled up the channel at around 5.30 in the evening, we overtook Kim Williams’ Melges 32 Rock N’ Roll, which had skimmed along the south coast and beaten us to the channel entrance.

“Look, isn’t that one of those new Melges 52s?” asked some humorist on Shogun as we eventually used our 20ft waterline advantage to run her down.

Among IRC Division 1, Terra Firma took the race on handicap, from Veloce and Shamrock. Loki was 11th and Shogun was 12th in the 13 boat fleet. It seems that passage racing on Port Phillip Bay is a bit like winning the toss in cricket and deciding whether to bat first. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you go south. The hundredth time, you think about going north but go south anyway.

Arriving in Geelong, the crew of Shogun got the boat tidied away and settled in the cockpit for a quick re-cap of the race. Rob Hanna offered a thought that club racers could learn from.

“It was an eight race series with one drop,” he said. “Now it’s a seven race series with no drops. Don’t dwell on what happened today. Let’s just go out tomorrow and do better.”

Boats everywhere

Sunday is the beginning of the rest of Victoria Week. Once again the pace changes as most divisions, which include IRC, AMS, sports boats, multihulls, classic yachts, cruising with and without spinnaker and a number of one-designs, go out each day to race windward/leewards.

Four courses are accommodated in the inner bay, with two more in the outer harbour towards the channel entrance. The water can be shallow and more than once crews were seen hanging off the end of the boom and even taking to the water to swing the keel off rocks.

Full race descriptions and results were posted on the mysailing website on a daily basis, so we won’t regurgitate them all here. Hooligan, the former Emirates Team New Zealand TP52, cleaned up IRC 1 and owner Marcus Blackmore is the front-runner to win a new Audi in the IRC Australian Championship which continues at Audi Sydney Harbour Regatta. Other IRC division winners were Bruce McCraken’s Beneteau 45 Ikon and Grant Botica’s Adams 10 Executive Decision.

Shoreside

Meanwhile, back on land Geelong is the perfect place for a regatta because all facilities are so central. Three stages were set up on the foreshore and more than 60 performers entertained the crowds. Food of every description was available and a few beers were easy to come by outside the Royal Geelong Yacht Club which overlooks the marina. Crews arranged dinner at one of the dozens of eateries before walking to their nearby accommodation for a good night’s rest.

One was heard to say, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” But it might.

Both the City of Greater Geelong and the Royal Geelong Yacht Club are pushing the State Government to help fund a new Yarra Street Pier, to replace the old jetty that was destroyed by fire in 1988. The city council has committed $5 million towards the project and RGYC $2.5 million. They are seeking $15 million from the state government.

If construction goes ahead as planned, a further 78 small craft could be berthed and the big boats, which currently tie up stern-to on the opposite side of the harbour, could be accommodated in safer, more convenient moorings.

That would make Audi Victoria Week even bigger and, if it’s possible, even better.