After sailing nearly side by side over 635 miles and two and a half days,George Sakellaris’ Shockwave nipped Hap Fauth’s Bella Mente at the finish line at St. David’s Lighthouse, Bermuda, by 7 minutes to win line honors in the 2014 Newport Bermuda Race.
Shockwave finished Monday at 6:33am, followed by Bella Mente at 6:40am. The third boat on elapsed time, Alex Schaerer’s Caol Ila R, finished more than three hours later. The next boat, the US Naval Academy ‘s Constellation, is more than 100 miles back of her, followed by the rest of the fleet in a big pack.
In a repeat of their dramatic duel in the 2012 Newport Bermuda Race, two 72-foot Mini-Maxis, Shockwave and Bella Mente, are within 2 miles of each other on the final sprint to the finish of the 635-mile race.
So close that they sometimes appeared as one boat on the Pantaenius Tracker, Shockwave was 88.7 miles from the finish at 9:00 and Bella Mente had 90.2 miles to go. A third Mini-Maxi, Caol Ila R, was more than 20 miles behind the two leaders for the race’s first to finish honors.
If they keep up the pace of the 9- to 13-knot speeds reported on the tracker, the two Gibbs Hill Lighthouse Division boats may cross the finish line off St. David’s Lighthouse by dawn Monday. In 2012 Bella Mente beat Shockwave on elapsed time by 2 minutes, 3 seconds, and both boats broke the previous elapsed time record for the race. Shockwave won the Gibbs Hill Lighthouse Trophy on corrected time in 2012.
The tracker calculated at 9:30 that, this year, Shockwave would be the top boat in the fleet under the IRC Rule, with Christopher Dragon, in the St. David’s Lighthouse Division, second ahead of Bella Mente.
