Pinch perfect as Read takes title
TASMANIA’S champion sailors in the one-design SB20 and International Dragon classes were decided yesterday on the River Derwent as part of the Crown Series Bellerive Regatta.
Tasmania’s largest regatta saw close to 150 boats, involving more than 600 sailors contesting three days of racing to decide the top boats in nine keelboat divisions and 10 skiff and dinghy classes.
Tasmanian champion in the high performance SB20 sports boat class is Frazer Read, sailing Pinch, while the perennial Dragons, once an Olympic class, went to Wicked, skippered by Andrew Blakeney.
Read is a former gun Sharpie sailor and Blakeney is a regular SB20 helmsman.
Pinch had two wins and a fourth yesterday to overtake day-one leader Porco Rosso (Elliott Noye).
Wicked was unbeaten in the small fleet of Dragons.
Racing on most courses was delayed for an hour but a southeasterly breeze filled in to 18 knots by midday before fading away midafternoon.
The entire fleet in Division 2, Sailing with Spinnakers, failed to finish the last race and the last SB20s race was abandoned. Regatta manager, vice commodore Ian Stewart, was delighted with this year’s event, with double the number of boats in the Racing Division and an increase in off-the-beach entries.
Wayne Banks-Smith steered his Farr 40 War Games to line honours in all seven races for the Racing Division, winning the PHS and IRC handicap categories on corrected time.
In PHS, War Games’s winning margin was just .5 points from Prion (John Dryden) with another point to Cromarty Magellan (Richard Grant).
The AMS category went to Whistler (David Aplin) with War Games second.
Ultimate Challenge, now owned by Peter Jenkins won Division 1 (Cruising with Spinnakers) while Division 2 went to Footloose (Stewart Geeves) and Division 3 to Commbank (Craig Escott).
Temeraire IV (Richard Ware) won the Cruising (Non Spinnaker) division while Shrinkedge (Andrew Jones) from Port Dalrymple Yacht Club won the Trailable Yachts.
The final results in the offthe-beach classes were not available last night but a report will be published in tomorrow’s paper.