The Newport Bermuda Race’s international race course has long attracted sailors and boats from many countries. The 185-boat entry list in early June included sailors from 23 countries and 21 boats with non-US sail numbers. Fifty-five of the crews included sailors from outside the USA.
This year the race had its first-ever Chinese entry, Spirit of Noahs (sail number CHN 323). A J-44 chartered from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, the boat was sailed by 10 experienced Chinese sailors from Noahs Sailing Club, described as the first professional team based in Shanghai. Last October, Team Noahs raced in the Audi China Coast Regatta in Hong Kong and then in the Audi Hong Kong to Vietnam Yacht Race. In December, the team competed in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race in their very own TP 52.
Assigned to Class 8 (St. David’s Lighthouse Division), the team sailed west after the start and found a 25-knot breeze that soon died as high pressure moved in. Spirit of Noahs was mostly becalmed for 22 hours with a 2-knot head current before getting going again. Along the route three sails tore. Team Noahs corrected out to ninth in her class.
Interviewed in Bermuda, skipper Dong Qing, speaking through a translator, said that he and his crew were much impressed by the Bermuda Race, which he described as “a very good race, full of challenges.” He looked forward to racing to Bermuda again. When they return to China, Team Noahs will be at a training base where they will practice for the next Sydney-Hobart.
When the Chilean-flagged Swan 57 Equinoccio powered through a Gulf Stream squall last weekend during the Newport to Bermuda Race, the speedometer pegged 15.7 knots, a record for the boat. As the sheets strained, a tiny voice rang up from the companionway, “Usted debe tomar la vela hacia abajo o irá en el agua!”
What little 3½-year-old Larry Westcott was saying to his father was this: “Take the genoa down or it’ll get ripped off and blown into the water.”
Father Martine Westcott obliged. He dropped the genoa, took in a reef, and the boat galloped along under shortened sail until the squall passed. “That was a precise call he made,” said Martine, recalling the moment.
The teeny sailor has sailed more than 5,000 miles with his mother, father, Uncle Philip, and crew. Yesterday he was cheerfully greeted by Royal Bermuda Yacht Club Commodore Leatrice Oatley.
This tot came about ocean sailing honestly. His father was a wide-eyed Chilean 18-year-old when he had the exceptional experience of sailing with legendary Bermudan yachtsman and adventurer Warren Brown, who sailed his famous War Baby was all over the world.
A founder of the Onion Patch Series and a member of the Newport Bermuda Race Roll of Honour, Brown spent time with Martine’s family at their yacht club in Chile, and stayed at their home. Once Martine turned 18, Brown invited him to sail from New Zealand to Tonga, where they weathered the treacherous 1994 Queen’s Birthday Storm in which several boats and sailors were lost. The two men were reunited in Bermuda two years ago, not long before Warren Brown died in 2014. Martine recalls Brown saying, “I have been in four hurricanes in my life and one of the biggest was with you.”
Martine eventually grew his blueberry business, Blueberries Patagonia, and as his son started to walk. He bought Equinoccio in 2014 from a Chicago owner, and sailed her through the Great Lakes to New York—and then to Bermuda, the Caribbean, and Brazil. This year he brought her to Newport to sail the Newport Bermuda Race. The Azores and Spain are the next stop.
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