Master Lock Comanche takes line honours in Sydney to Hobart filled with mass retirements

Master Lock Comanche took line honours in the 80th Sydney to Hobart on Sunday in conditions that forced more yachts to retire than the catastrophic weather of last year.

LawConnect owner and skipper Christian Beck was more confident in his rival’s abilities to win the race before it began, saying only a mistake from Comanche could give him his third consecutive win.

The luck went Beck’s way last year when Comanche’s main sail tore in a night of wild weather that claimed two lives and forced a man overboard. Comanche retired alongside 32 other yachts and like many returning, this year was supposed to be her redemption.

Comanche sailed out of Sydney Harbour on Boxing Day behind LawConnect but raced in front about five hours after the race began. It was only briefly for a few hours on the final day, when SHK Scallywag 100 found her way in front of Comanche down the Tasmanian coast, that her lead looked in doubt.

“We had a great lead during the race. It evaporated this morning,” Master Lock Comanche co-skipper Matt Allen said from Constitution Dock in Hobart. “We had to effectively have a restart. We’ve never seen anything like that in a Sydney to Hobart race where all the boats were so close together.

“There was just no wind where we were. The breeze just totally dissipated. The boats behind us basically caught up.”

It would have been a fairytale win for Scallywag skipper David Witt who has twice promised he would not return to the Sydney to Hobart, having entered 27 times and never won. But just past midday, near Coles Bay on Tasmania’s coast, Comanche took the lead again and soon LawConnect pushed Scallywag back to third.

“We just had to look,” Comanche co-skipper James Mayo said of the decisive move. “We’re all looking around, and we just saw some puffs of wind developing on the shore, and we were pretty close, we were about a mile out from the shore and we just thought that we have to see how that’s going to develop.

“And it started to develop and we started to move and we took off.”

On LawConnect, bad luck determined their fate. A ripped sail lead to conversations about whether the yacht should retire. Had they decided to, it would have added to a list of 33 – including high-profile retirements Wild Thing 100, URM Group and Moneypenny.

Three yachts reported injuries to crew members’ ribs, two of them suspected to be broken. Three yachts retired with sailors suffering seasickness, which even affected the most comfortable in the water, including Olympian Ian Thorpe and his skipper on LawConnect.

Two yachts retired after losing their life rafts and thus failing to comply with safety regulations. The oldest in the fleet, Maritimo Katwinchar, joined them, retiring to Eden despite having been a contender for overall honours, awarded to the fastest yacht after a handicap is applied.

Instead, by 6.30pm on Sunday, reigning overall winner Celestial V70 looked to be defending the Tattersall Cup.

Its skipper, Sam Haynes, called the conditions on the second night nasty.

“Hard, hard work,” he said. “Hard on the boat, hard on the crew. Felt like a very, very long time since we left Green Cape and then got ourselves across to finally be here on the Tasmanian coastline.”

And Beck, who had begun the race hopeful, even with a torn sail, had all but resigned to the second place finish by 3pm.

“It’s starting to spread out a bit now,” he said. “We’re starting to get the winds that Comanche wanted.”

The winds provided around the heads and gave Comanche what Allan called the best run up the Derwent in all of his 33 races.

“Last year was brutal, but it was unfinished business” Mayo said, covered in champagne. “We wanted redemption.”