The Newport Bermuda Race has long been well known for the variety of the challenges it throws at sailors. Sometimes there are calms, at other times storms, often there’s overcast, and occasionally there is the distraction of a stunningly beautiful night. This year, a full moon rose over the fleet with such brilliance that one sailor (Bermuda Race Organizing Committee Chairman A.J. Evans, sailing in Vamp) took a break from his steering and sail-trimming duties to send out an email at 2 o’clock one morning saying, “Spectacular evening of sailing here on a gentle sea with a decent breeze under a full moon and stars.”
The sea is not always so pleasant. When weather forecasters predicted before the start on June 17 that the entries would be battered by brutal storms, 50 crews dropped out, leaving 133 boats start the race off Newport, RI, on June 17. The grim forecast turned out to be correct, but only in the far eastern part of the race course. The few boats sailing there survived the 45-knot winds with discomfort but no reported damage, and sailed on to Bermuda.
The crews were also resilient as well as creative in the strategies they chose to deal with the race’s other challenges. The 100-foot sloop Comanche, in the race’s Open Division, set out to break the 635-Newport-Bermuda sailing speed record. The intricate course chosen by navigator Stan Honey to find favorable wind and avoid unfavorable current led to a speed record of 34hrs 42min 53sec, for an average speed of 18 knots.
Well astern of Comanche, boats in the race’s four other divisions managed the typical rough Gulf Stream waters, and then dealt with a cold eddy, a large pool of swirling cool water, that forecasters had predicted would provide a favorable boost of current toward Bermuda. Some navigators intentionally sailed their boats into the eddy. Others who believed this was too good to be true kept their distance—correctly, it turned out. The eddy had shifted position and the boats in it were set back, not forward. There were more surprises all the way to the island. “I’ve sailed many Bermuda Races,” said Brad Willauer, in the Cruiser Division entry Breezing Up with a family crew, “but I don’t recall ever sailing one when we didn’t get a push from a favorable current.”
The boat in the St. David’s Lighthouse Division that came out best in these perplexing conditions was Warrior Won, a 44-foot sloop. Her hard-working navigator H.L. Devore, set a course miles east of the eddy, going so far as to sail at right angles to the rhumb line to Bermuda in order to get farther away.
Obsessively checking the weather forecasts—Devore claimed he did 200 downloads to Warrior Won’s computer in two days—Devore and his shipmates neared Bermuda with a light following wind in a pack of six similarly sized boats, all of them jibing aggressively down the course to St. David’s Head as though they were small boats racing for an Olympic gold medal.
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