Newport, RI — After an impressive spinnaker start out of Newport Harbor, the first several hours have shown great progress into first race at the 2024 ORC World Championship held at New York Yacht Club. The three competing classes have been sailing in a relatively steady northeast breeze of 11-16 knots, with close racing thus far among the current leaders in each class, especially in Class 0 where there is just 3 minutes separation in the corrected time standings among the top four teams after 7 hours of racing.
According to the championship rules set forth by co-organizers at the Offshore Racing Congress (ORC) the format of this Long Offshore 24-hour race is to demonstrate offshore racing proficiency by testing skills in navigation, strategy, sail selection as well as boat speed on the course.
The fastest boats in the fleet are the 6 entries in Class 0 who are racing on a 203-mile course, and at 1700 local time they had rounded the southernmost mark 20 miles southwest of Montauk Point with about 12 miles completed into their next leg. This is the start of a long 63-mile beat upwind towards Buzzard Tower, a journey that will take them well into the night before rounding and heading west on their next towards Cerberus Shoal in Block Island Sound.
Victor Wild’s TP 52 FOX had the early lead at this stage, but only 1:18 ahead of Andrew Berdon’s TP 52 SUMMER STORM, who in turn was only 2:06 ahead of David Team’s TP 52 VESPER.
Class A has the most entries in this fleet, with 19 boats traversing a 177-mile course that also took them first to the same mark south of Montauk and then on the same leg upwind to Buzzard Tower. At this point Tom Rich’s GP 42 SETTLER held the lead by 3:09 over Austin and Gwen Fragomen’s Botin 44 INTERLODGE IV and 8:08 over another GP 42, ARMA, owned by the McCloskey, Roseberry, Dubois and Crow syndicate.
However, unlike Class 0 where the leaders have remained close to each other throughout the race, some teams in Class A have split away from the leaders heading north on starboard tack by opting to start this leg by heading due east on port tack. This includes the young team on Bruce Chafee’s R/P 42 RIKKI.
Class B is racing on a shorter 157-mile course that is zig-zagging upwind and downwind across Block Island Sound between Buzzard Tower and Cerberus Shoal. At 1700 the pack was just north of Block Island and led by the North East Keelboat Alliance’s (NEKA) Ker 11.5 PEACEMAKER in actual time while close behind Marcin Sutkowski’s GS 44 Performance Wind WHISPER 44 from Poland held the lead in corrected time. Only 5:45 behind was John Brim’s Italia 11.98 RIMA with John Baxter’s J/111 FIREBALL only another 2:33 behind RIMA.
Current projections have fleet finishers arriving at the finish at Fort Adams tomorrow late morning through midday, weather permitting.
“We’re very pleased with this start to the ORC World Championship,” said Regatta Chairman Matt Gallagher. “Very early this morning we made some adjustments to the courses based on new weather information and the Race Committee overcame a logistics hurdle with the position of one of the marks, so both race managers and racers are performing well.”
Positions of the teams and corrected time leaderboards for each class may be found on the TracTrac system at this link: https://tractrac.com/event-page/event_20240927_ORCWorldCh/3039.
More information on the entries, race documents, scoring, media resources and more may be found on the event website at https://nyyc.org/2024-orc-world-championship.
Text Credits: NYYC / Dobbs Davis
Photo Credits: NYYC
Video Credits: ICARUS Sports
