Artforms Takes the Double |
| Saturday, 15 November 2003 |
| Kip Stone and Artforms took the line and handicap double in this Friday afternoon’s RNZYS Rum Race in Auckland harbour.
The last week also saw the new Owen Clarke Open 50 complete its maiden solo voyage, leaving on Saturday afternoon, following what is the traditional route for yachts leaving New Zealand heading for Cape Horn.
From Auckland Kip headed on his lonesome east, first rounding Cape Colville, heading for East Cape and once past East Cape headed south towards the Chatham Islands, an isolated group of ten small islands approx 800 kilometres east of the South Island.
At the latitude of Wellington, Artforms had covered 500 miles, time to head back to Auckland and the race was on to be back in time for this Fridays event. After a good showing in her first outing last week, Kip and his crew (from the Auckland Owen Clarke office, Doyle Sails and some local sailors) were keen to improve.
This week’s regatta was run in a little more breeze and with a course that was a little more reaching orientated for the first leg. Starting down wind Artforms was quickly up with the front-runners and by North head was in third place. As the course altered to a flat run a place was lost to a local ULDB 50.
From the bottom mark the course was upwind to the finish. The correct sail combination was made for the leg and the boat had excellent pace, steadily reeling in and passing the boats ahead including the local carbon Farr 52 and ultimately taking the lead coming into the last fairway mark before the finish.
The gun went to Kip and Artforms which was sweetened further by two waiting bottles of rum and a phone call soon after getting back to dock saying we had had also won on handicap.
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