The weekend of March 7 saw the largest fleet of yachts ever participating in the prestigious Audi Sydney Harbour regatta. A record number of 308 yachts participated in the 4 race series over Saturday and Sunday.

The start lines were "organised chaos" with many yachts trying to barge on the starter's end and on more than one occassion the start boat took a blow to it's transom!

We were fortunate enough to be in prime position for each of the 4 starts which gave us the opportunity to have reasonably clear air to the windward mark.

Participating yachts included Sydney 32's and 36's, a variety of Beneteaus up to 42 feet, Bavaria 35 Match's, Northshore 369's, 370's, 38's, 37 Sports, Swarbricks, Cavalier 395's, a Masrm 920, Hanse 371 (that was us) and a variety of other racing and cruising yachts - about 40 in our division.

The racing was very intense and the courses were short (times were typically between 55 minutes and 1 hour 10 minutes duration) so there was no room for a make up after a mistake. By way of example, we had a port starboard issue with a yacht resulting in him doing a 720 penalty. He went from 1st to 22nd in that race!

Cutting to the chase, our final result was 5th overall. Having done some further analysis, had we been a TOTAL of 2minutes 38 seconds faster over the 4 races (thats under 40 seconds per race) we would have won!

My thanks to my crew, to Windcraft for their ongoing support and to Hanse for designing and building our very competitive and comfortable Hanse 371.

We love our Hanse!

John

"Carte Balnche"