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By The Ocean Race
WindWhisper Racing Team - with two leading Kiwi sailors on board - won the final leg of The Ocean Race VO65 Sprint into Genova, beating the rest of the fleet by a massive margin.
The Polish boat crossed the finish line in just six knots of breeze at 10:27:52 UTC with a leg time of 10 days 23 hours 17 minutes and 52 seconds. With the rest of the fleet still to cover more than 100 nautical miles in very light winds, WindWhisper could win the leg from The Hague to Genova by more than 18 hours.
With skipper Pablo Arrarte (Spain) unable to take part in the final leg, it was left to previous race winner Kiwi Daryl Wislang to take up the skipper’s role - with former New Zealand Olympian Gemma Jones one of the crew members.
“It’s an amazing feeling to arrive here, happy to be part of the team, and I was lucky enough to take the handlebars for the last leg,” Wislang said.
Even though it always looked like a healthy lead entering the Mediterranean, the fickle nature of the breeze meant Wislang and the crew were never able to rest on their laurels.
“The biggest challenge is trying to cover someone that far behind because the other boats were in completely different weather. Ultimately, we decided we couldn’t cover them and chose to sail the fastest way we could to the finish. There was no option to get back to the coast with the other guys.”
Kiwi Daryl Wislang was the skipper for the final leg. Photos / The Ocean Race
The biggest responsibility for such big decisions always rests with the navigator, so Aksel Magdahl (Norway) rightly earns a lot of credit for his brave choices on the race course.
“We had a tricky choice to make in the Mediterranean because the other boats were more than 100 miles behind,” said Magdahl, who chose to keep on looking forwards rather than play a more traditional, defensive game of covering the opposition.
“We decided to go towards the coast of Algeria to take the fastest route. We thought the other option to cover the other boats would be slow for us. So we went for what we thought was our fastest option and it worked out well for us.”
Magdahl also wins the navigator’s award, the Vasco da Gama Mirpuri Foundation Prize for first boat to pass the line of 37 degrees North latitude. That was largely down to a very good call to break away from the fleet in the English Channel, one which absent skipper Pablo Arrarte had been watching with great interest from ashore.
“The guys made a big strategy call. The fleet was in light pressure and the big breeze was coming, and they stayed further north and the big pressure reached them first. That was the important moment to break away from the fleet,” Arrarte said.
From there the team never looked back, leading into the Strait of Gibraltar by a healthy margin.
WindWhisper Racing Team won the final leg of The Ocean Race VO65 Sprint into Genova. Photos / The Ocean Race
For Phil Harmer (Australia), the victory is extra special as it happens on his 44th birthday.
The two-time winner of the race was pleased to be back on board the VO65 and to have come through the Strait of Gibraltar at night, thereby avoiding the orca whales that paid a little bit too much attention to some of the other VO65s.
“I think the orcas were asleep when we went through the Strait,” he laughed. “We went through in stealth mode, managed to give them the slip, so we were lucky to get through unscathed.”
Crew member Liz Wardley has a special connection with this particular VO65, having led the five-month refit of the boat that she had already managed in its previous guise as Team AkzoNobel.
“It feels amazing to be here now. We had such a big lead into the Med and there was always the option that the others could catch us, so that was stressful. We did leg one well, we did leg six well, and now to win leg seven by more than a hundred miles is pretty cool. And finished in front of the IMOCAs too, so a double win.”
