Phaedo3, the MOD70 that should really be named The Green Flash, took line honors late last night in the RORC Caribbean 600 Race. Lloyd Thompson's Phaedo3 maintained an average of 30 knots, topping out at 40, and finished the race in an elapsed time of 31 hours, 59 minutes, and four seconds, breaking their own record set last year by over an hour and a half.
Photo taken from the Phaedo 3 Facebook page.
The MOD 70 race was tight the entire race, with Ned Collier Wakefield's Concise 10 just behind Phaedo3 by less than 10 minutes.
Jim and Kristy Hinze Clarke's Maxi Comanche crossed the finish line just after 4 a.m. this morning, taking monohull honors with an elapsed time of 40 hours, 53 minutes, and two seconds. That's only 33 minutes outside the record time set by Rambler 100 in 2011.
In IRC CK, James Muldoon's Donnybrook is still in fifth place but has closed the distance between itself and Varuna. There's still a race to be had there, as Donnybrook gains her stride. Follow their drag race here. Elsewhere in IRC, both Bella Mente and Highland Fling have retired for technical issues. Terry Hutchinson was onboard Bella Mente and gave this update:
“We are not really sure what happened. We were beating up to La Desirade, tacking up the shoreline and we heard a loud ping from down below, from inside the boat. It was really rough and we didn't think much of it because you occasionally do hear random noises from these kind of boats. We got around the corner, set the Mast Head Zero and we were off doing 26 knots with Adrian Stead on the helm, coming into Proteus who had got around us in the wind shadow of Guadeloupe. As we accelerated we could feel the fin pitching back and forth. It felt like the boat was going one way and the fin another; that is speculation but it didn't feel right. It felt very unnatural, so we slowed down. Moose (Mike Sanderson) said: ‘Did everybody feel that?’ We tried to arc it back up again and the motion was very noticeable; it felt like the fin was going to drop out of the boat. The correct thing to do at that point was stop and high-tail it for Antigua. It's frustrating because throughout the race we had always kept ourselves in the hunt and we always knew that if we were in the hunt at that quarter, we could finish the race well, so it is frustrating. Up until then it had been an awesome race.” Click for more.
