Bags the Big One

In the summer of 2015 Jim Clark and Kristy Hinze-Clark’s 100ft super-maxi Comanche set a new one-day speed record, clicking off 618 miles in 24 hours at an average speed of 25.75 knots midway through the Transatlantic Race. This past summer, the boat—which Clark built for the express purpose of knocking off as many offshore monohull records as possible—was at it again, this time smashing the record for the entire trip across the pond, mere weeks after also setting a new record in the Newport-Bermuda Race.

Comanche’s historic passage, from Ambrose Light off New York Harbor to the UK’s Lizard Point, began on July 22 when navigator Stan Honey identified what he hoped would be a good weather window in front of a low-pressure system that would then follow the boat across, providing southwesterly winds and flat seas.

As fate would have it, the crew found itself having to deal with thunderstorms and fog early on, not to mention some unexpected light patches— the true bane of every would-be record breaker. Nonetheless, Comanche pushed on, with the crew leveraging the boat’s immense size and ability to generate equally immense apparent winds, to stay in the hunt.

In the end it wasn’t even close, as Comanche covered the 2,880-nauticalmile course in just 5 days, 14 hours and 25 minutes, shaving more than a day off the time set by Mari Cha IV in 2003. In doing so, the boat now holds one of the most coveted sailing records in existence, rivalled only by the handful of round-the-world records out there and the famed clipper route from New York to San Francisco.

“There are only about two weather windows a year where a monohull can make it all the way across the Atlantic in one system, and we found one of them,” Honey said afterward. “Beating this record by more than a day is above my expectations, and I am delighted.”

“What a boat!” said boat captain Casey Smith. “We have got the 24-hours record, the Sydney Hobart and now the transatlantic. What a boat! Awesome!”— Adam Cort