Things are very sweet for the Irish contingent in Antigua at the moment with the leaderboard showing our presence in first and fifth places overall, together with the multihull and overall line honours, in the RORC Caribbean 600 2017 writes W M Nixon.
As Afloat.ie reported earlier, the Ian Moore-navigated JV 72 Bella Mente (Hap Fauth, US) just got better and better the nearer she got to the finish line off Antigua, and in the end had a convincing margin of an hour and twenty minutes on corrected time over the 2016 winner, the Maxi 72 Proteus, and is now virtually unbeatable by any other boats.
Meanwhile, currently indicated as finished and lying fifth overall is the hundred foot Leopard, aboard which is Tom McWilliam of the Crosshaven sailmaking dynasty.
After another day of looking at this craziest of RORC courses, we’ve moved on from seeing it as a bowl of spaghetti or a cat’s cradle to a bulimic Dalek. But whatever it is, Ian Moore has done a textbook job on it.
Outline sketch for a bulimic Dalek? The RORC Caribbean 600 course gets odder and odder the more you look at it.
Meanwhile others working their way round this geography lesson on the middle section of the Lesser Antilles include Tim Goodbody, Aine Hanvey and Paul O’Donoghue, they’s fifth in Class Zero in the enormous Danneskjold with 32 miles to sail, while Barry Hurley and James Murphy are on Pata Negra in Class 1, they lie 6th in Class with 149 miles to go.
Things are looking a bit less rosy at the moment for Storme Delaney and Ciara Scott in Sunset, they’re 7th in Class 2 with 214 miles to go, while the First 40 Arthur Logic – which has shown in the top ten at various stages – now lies 9th in IRC 2 with her crew including Wicklow’s David Ryan and Jim Cummins, and they’ve 202 miles still to sail.
It must seem a very long way when they remember that Damian Foxall and his shipmates on Phaedo 3 finished after just 33 hours of sailing to knock off 600-plus miles and take line honours big time
