On this cool Saturday evening in Hobart, Cian McCarthy and Sam Hunt of Kinsale brought their chartered Sunfast 3300 Cinnamon Girl-Eden Capital in at 9:11 pm local time to the Tasmanian port city's waterfront to finish fourth on water and fourth overall in the Two-Handed division in the Sydey-Hobart Race 2023.
They had been sailing at 6.6 knots in the outer approaches to the line, but the firm sou'sou'west wind which has set the tone and the pace for the past day and more as the smaller craft make their way toward a finish port faded at dusk to make for a slow finish for the Kinsale duo,
making them at least an hour later than had seemed likely earlier in the evening.
MAIN TROPHIES GET FIRST APPEARANCE
In Hobart, the historic main trophies - the John Illingworth Cup for first to finish and the Tattersall Cup for best time in IRC, had appeared for informal dockside award ceremonies which will become more formal at the official prize distribution early next week, but by then many of the big noises in international professional sailing will already have long since departed Tasmania.
The overall-winning RP 66 Alive crew with skippper Duncan Hine get an informal presentation of the Tattersall Cup. As a Hobart-registered boat, Alive's overall win - her second - has brought great local pride
Alive's navigator Adrienne Cahalan with the Tattersall Cup - this was her 31st Hobart Race, and it's not the first time the Offaly-born internationally-rated navigator ha won this very special prize
But for Cinnamon Girl's crew and others in the Corinthian Division (in which she placed xy), the attractively-located port of Hobart on the Derwent Estuary is an exciting place, particularly on your first visit at the end of a Sydney-Hobart Race, and a challenging one at that.
From an early stage, it was clear that the pace-setter in the Two-Handed Division would be the boxy-but-fast Lombard 34 Mistral (Rupert Henry & Jack Boutell), yet that didn't prevent Cinnamon Girl and her sister ship Kraken III (sailed by former RSHR Two-Handed winners Rob Gough and John Saul) from filling the leader slot on IRC from time to time.
Rupert Henry and Jack Boutell on the Two-Handed victor Mistral. Handsome is as handsome does - the uncompromisingly boxy Lombard 34 is a Marc Lombard creation, and he also designed the successful 45-footer Pata Negra, now owned by the Hall family, who sail from Pwllheli
But as the race progressed, Mistral's slightly but significantly larger size put her steadily further ahead, and in the end, it brought her sooner to a much steadier wind stream, which had her across the line in early afternoon today, a couple of minutes before 3.0pm local time to give an elapsed time for the 628-mile race of 3 days 19 hours and 53 minutes which corrected to 4 days 1 hour and 57 minutes.
This gave her a clear win by almost four hours on CT over second-placed Kraken III, while third was the new JPK 10.30 Min River owned by Sydney's Jiang Lin, who has now logged three TSHR TH races, and raced with her co-skippper Americ Belloir. But while the leading three carried the breeze to the finish, when Cinnamon Girl was nearing the line, a calm night was descending on the scene, providing her with a finish time which didn't reflect her competitive performance during the race.
CINNAMON GIRL'S OUTSTANDING SUCCESS IN CORINTHIAN DIVISION
Nevertheless, it meant she was the leader of the Corinthian Division in her class and is second overall in the Corinthian Division for the fleet as a whole, with the amateurs won by Richard Hudson's Farr 45 Pretty Woman, while in third slot in the Corinthians behind Cinnamon Girl is Richard Williams' Cookson 40 Calibre 12, which was fourth in the open Division 3 with the crew notably including bowman Stephanie Lyons. She's also of Kinsale YC connections, so a spot of celebrating in Kinsale YC won't go amiss.
Results here
