Carina wins St. Davids trophy in Newport Bermuda Race

Carina

The 48-foot McCurdy and Rhodes designed sloop Carina has won the top trophy in the 46th running of the Newport/Bermuda Race, beating her closest sompetittor by more than three hours.

From the press release: Carina has won the St. David’s Lighthouse Division in the 2010 Newport Bermuda Race. Owned and sailed by Rives Potts (Westbrook, CT) with a crew blending four families, Carina is the 46th winner of the race’s top trophy in the 104-year history of the race, which runs 635 miles from Newport, RI to St. David’s Light, Bermuda.

The 48-foot McCurdy & Rhodes designed sloop won on corrected time under the Offshore Racing Rule by the very large margin of 3 hours, 35 minutes over Gregory B. Manning’s Sarah  (Warwick, RI). Belle Aurore, a Cal 40 owned by R. Douglas Jurrius (Easton, MD) was third, seven minutes behind Sarah.

Carina’s chances for winning looked good but hardly certain when she finished the race at dawn Tuesday. Her chief challenge came from Belle Aurore and three other boats in Class 1, the small-boat class. Any of them could save their time and elbow Carina off the victory podium should she finish by about 7 PM. Many sailors at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club and elsewhere spent much of Tuesday following the quartet’s progress on the online iBoattrack tracker. In the end, nobody was able to save their time on Carina.

Those four smaller boats still did well. Belle Aurore won Class 1 and took third place in the St. David’s Lighthouse Division. Two other Cal 40s, Peter Rebovich’s two-time defending champion Sinn Fein (Metuchen, NJ) and Bill Leroy’s Gone with the Wind (Tiburon, CA), took second in the class and seventh in the division, and third in class and eighth in the division, respectively.  The fourth boat, David G. Dickerson’s Peterson 38 Lindy, was fourth in class and 20th in the division.

Carina also won the North Rock Beacon Trophy as the top boat under the IRC Rule, with a margin of nearly four hours over Gracie, a custom 69-footer owned by Stephen and Simon Frank (Darien and Rowayton, CT). Gracie was also designed by McCurdy & Rhodes. Third under IRC was Arbella, a First 44.7 owned by James Shaughnessy (Greenwich, CT).

As of Noon ADT Wednesday, 9 boats in the 183-boat fleet were still on the race course. This is the third largest Newport Bermuda Race since it was founded in 1906. The St. David’s Lighthouse Division, for amateur crews, is the largest of the race’s five divisions, with 103 boats this year.

By Ocean Navigator