Hobart Race updates from Sailing Anarchy

It’s better late than never for the new Carkeek 40 Ichi Ban, which arrived in Oz a couple of weeks ago from Dubai just in time for fitout and launch before the 2013 Hobart Race. With a fleet including a couple of late model Volvo 70s, five 100-footers including the Loyal (ex-Speedboat), and a couple of badass mini-maxi downwind monsters — Ichi and the sparkly Beau Geste – and even the full fleet of Clipper/Winnebago 70s, 2013 is looking like the best Hobart big-boat fleet in a decade.

new Botin 80.

When the Speedboat and a pile of Volvo 70s grinding and scraping their way to readiness for the 2013 Sydney-Hobart Race, Bob Oatley’s Wild Oats XI is looking both long in the tooth and a bit iffy for that all-important first-to-finish trophy. What’s a billionaire to do when his 100′ Super Maxi starts to look old and tired? There ain’t enough time to build a wider, more powerful boat, and you’ve already added yet another steering appendage up front to go with the canting keel, rudder, and two daggerboards. Maybe you just need a little more cowbell.

That’s apparently what WOXI skipper Mark Richards thought, and the result is a nearly 3-meter DSS horizontal stability fin. We’ve seen them before, and they’re performing with varied results, and the consensus is that, for the right boat, the DSS system is pretty damned sweet.

 

We think this is the biggest DSS deployment yet, and you can bet your sweet ass that, if the Aussie “Swiss Army Knife” works, you’ll see a lot of retrofitting very soon; with the worldwide economy less stable than even Rolex’s sailing future, it’s a lot cheaper to cut a new hole in your boat than it is to build a new one.

There’s one massive problem we can see here: One big fish or one waterlogged timber is going to tear a hell of a hole in a boat that averages 20 knots and touches 40 regularly. Do they really need another point of failure?