VIRGINIA BEACH — This year’s spark for the Worrell 1000 catamaran sailboat race came from half a world away on the back of meticulous preparation.
Brett Burvill and Max Puttman of Team Australia pulled into Virginia Beach on Friday with a time of 90 hours, 9 minutes and 11 seconds to win the race, dubbed “The Spark that Lit the Flame.” The duo captured 11 of 12 legs during the two-week race, which started in Hollywood, Florida.
“We’ve been sailing together for about five or six years now, so we have a very good synergy with each other,” Burvill said. “We don’t have to communicate a lot on the boat, we do it a lot by feel and we understand each other on how to make the boat go fast.”
Burville added that knowledge of how to pull every second of speed from the boat comes from months of designing and building the hulls, while his teammate Puttman builds the sails. Burville said every component of their boat comes out of a small factory in Fremantle in western Australia. And then there’s the countless hours of testing their design in the water.
“We know every component intimately on the boat,” Burville said. “We had zero failures and just everything was perfect. And for us to come all this way and achieve this on our first try — we’ve done an almost perfect event.”
Added Puttman: “Everything happens for a reason. We thrash these boats when we’re at home. We absolutely abused them to try and figure out what’s going to break, so we were very well prepared.”
Compatriots Team Australia 2 finished second at 93:11:15, followed by the French-American Team Cirrus/MM Sailing at 93:35:13. Both teams battled back and forth over the 12 legs for the runner-up spot.
It was that attention to detail combined with their racing skills that gave Team Australia 1 the edge over their competition.
“Max and Brett are world class (Formula 18) sailors,” principal race officer John Williams said. “They had maximum confidence in their equipment.”
Williams added that perfect boat preparation allows the racers to keep their heads in the race the entire time out on the water because you’re not thinking about the boat and any problems that can arise from equipment failure.
“You saw less experienced teams with events like this who spent days working on their boat after the start of the event,” Williams said. “It was a learning curve throughout the race.”
Williams explained that during traditional races, such as many buoy-rounding regattas, there are down times between heats when you can make adjustments to fix anything that comes loose or gets broken on a boat. But in the Worrell 1000, when sail days can take as long as 16 hours on the water, the equipment has to hold up and Team Australia’s boat was better prepared than all the others.
Virginia Beach’s Team Rudees finished fourth at 94:40:16.
“It’s all 1,000 miles and you’re fighting every inch, there’s no relaxing out there,” Smyth said. “And because of the weather, every day is so different.”
Smyth’s boat was the one that spoiled Team Australia’s Worrell 1000 sweep, winning the leg from Atlantic Beach to Ocracoke. Team Rudees edged Team Australia 2 by a little less than five minutes.
“You have a big option there because you can go the ocean way, which is a little longer, but you’ve got to go around Cape Lookout,” Smyth said. “That particular day, there was an offshore wind and there were better conditions on the inside, so we took the shorter course — which is the more treacherous course.”
Smyth explained there were a lot of unmarked and uncharted obstacles in the form of sandbars and shoals, and that bridges and fishing nets would also come into play in Bogue Sound. Getting back to the oceanside to where the landing spot on Ocracoke could have been a challenge as well because the inlet is small and narrow and if the tide is coming in, it makes for a strong current flowing back into the sound.
“That day had light wind, so if we had to fight the current, we may have never got out,” Smyth said. “We timed it just right and the current was going out, so we got flushed out. But it could’ve gone the other way.”
That strategy put the two boats ahead of the rest of the fleet by at least 50 mins.
Added Williams: “For the very first time, in the 50-year history of the event, somebody went into Bogue Sound, took Cape Lookout out of the equation and shaved 13 miles off of the course. It had never been tried before because it is incredibly risky. Shallow water, moving sandbars, shoals, lots of fishing nets — it’s nearly an impossible navigable waterway. Yet two boats snuck through there and it really paid off for them.”
Team Outer Banks, comprised of Hardy Peters and James Eaton. finished eighth at 103:24:33.
“It’s definitely a long two weeks,” said Peters, who competed in the race for the second time. “We had some really good days and we had some really long days. Coming into the race the last time, we were the deer in the headlights. This year, we knew what to expect, we knew what was out there and we had a much more comfortable feeling about what to do with the race.
Eleven of the 12 boats that started finished the race. Team Babysitting Robots was forced to retire after their boat capsized during the third leg.
“We had a hard day with thunderstorms off of Cape Canaveral,” Williams said. “That’s when we lost (Team) Babysitting Robots — their sailors were rescued by the Coast Guard and their boat was abandoned at sea.”
In 23 tries, every team reaching the finish line has happened just four times. But overall, racing was a mixed bag, Williams said.
“We had the thunderstorm and then leaving Florida is a long day,” Williams explained. “The 120-mile leg was a long day. The last boat got in at 3 a.m. in the morning. Then there are days like (Friday). The winds are mostly out of the south, during which boats can fly their spinnakers. It’s not as physically demanding and there’s enough breeze where it’s not a mental grind to perform. The boat is moving well and all the equipment is working.”
