Carina wins St. David's Lighthouse Trophy
By John Rousmaniere
A
48-foot sloop designed by McCurdy & Rhodes, she won on corrected
time under the Offshore Racing Rule by the very large margin of 3 hours,
35 minutes over Gregory B. Manning’s Sarah
(Warwick, RI). In third place, seven minutes behind Sarah,
was Belle Aurore, a Cal 40 owned by R. Douglas Jurrius (Easton,
MD).
Carina,
winner of two Bermuda Races 40 years
apart
As of 5 AM EDT Wednesday,
28 boats in the 183-boat fleet were still on the race course. This is
the third largest Newport Bermuda Race since it was founded in 1906.
The St. David’s Lighthouse Division, for amateur crews, is the largest
of the race’s five divisions, with 103 boats this year.
Carina’s
chances for winning looked good but hardly certain when she finished
the race at dawn Tuesday. Her chief challenge came from Belle Aurore
and three other boats in Class 1, the small-boat class. Any of them
could save their time and elbow Carina off the victory podium
should she finish by about 7 PM. Many sailors at the Royal Bermuda
Yacht Club and elsewhere spent much of Tuesday following the quartet’s
progress on the online iBoattrack tracker. In the end, nobody was able to save
their time on Carina.
Third place Belle Aurore in drying-out mode. Somewhere in
there three sailors are sleeping off the long haul.
Those
four smaller boats still did well. Belle Aurore won Class 1 and
took third place in the St. David’s Lighthouse Division. Two other
Cal 40s, Peter Rebovich’s two-time defending champion Sinn Fein
(Metuchen, NJ) and Bill Leroy’s Gone with the Wind (Tiburon,
CA), took second in the class and seventh in the division, and third
in class and eighth in the division, respectively. The fourth boat,
David G. Dickerson’s Peterson 38 Lindy, was fourth in class
and 20th in the division.
Almost
empty on Tuesday morning, the RBYC marina is now packed
with 125 boats with some room to spare for the late finishers.
Carina
also won the North Rock Beacon Trophy as the top boat under the IRC
Rule, with a margin of nearly four hours over Gracie, a custom
69-footer owned by Stephen and Simon Frank (Darien and Rowayton CT).
Gracie was also designed by McCurdy & Rhodes. Third under IRC
was Arbella, a First 44.7 owned by James Shaughnessy (Greenwich,
CT).