SORC Confirms Winners in Offshore Classics

The first-ever Miami to Havana Race on February 10 had 41 of the 46 starters completing the 210 mile course. It took just 19 hours and 36 minutes for skipper Marc Glimcher and the 21 crewmembers on the chartered chartered RP69 Trebuchet to cross the finish line. Glimcher won the 4-boat IRC division as well as the outright elapsed time record for the passage; a time that one crew member said was ‘ripe to be broken next year.’

At just over half the length of Trebuchet, Stephen Murray’s New Orleans-based Carkeek 40 Decision took quite a bit longer, and while Murray and his international crew may have lost the battle, they won the war; Decision’s 2nd place in IRC class clinched their victory in SORC’s Islands in the Stream Series – the first such series offered by the historic South Florida racing association in more than a decade.

The Islands in the Stream Series included four races over a three month span: Nassau Cup Ocean Race, Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race, Wirth M. Munroe Memorial Palm Beach Race, and Miami to Havana Race.

“We’re not disappointed at all with our result in the race; we were happy to be crossing gybes with Trebuchet more than 5 hours into the race, but they were always going to leg out on us,” said Murray, who said the overall series trophy holds major significance for him. “I grew up admiring the SORC greats, devouring race results and news about the SORC series when I was a kid. To be the first winner of the reborn series feels really amazing.”

While Decision’s course took them far to the Southeast and Trebuchet’s course stuck close the rhumb line for the inaugural Miami-Havana race course, the champion of all the PHRF classes was far more aggressive with their strategy; the Owen-Clarke design Class 40 Dragon committed to a more western strategy, and they committed hard.

“Our weather updates convinced us to send it right down the Keys; not only did it keep us out of the current for the maximum amount of time possible, but it set us up for the lift and subsequent gybe,” said Hennessey. While Hennessey did the lion’s share of the navigating, it was crew Ashley Perrin who called the layline to Havana from an incredible 57 miles out. “With no one in sight at the finish, we knew we were either winning or losing badly, so we were pretty excited to find only one other boat on the dock after we cleared customs,” he said.

Hennessey’s strategy gave Dragon a massive one-hour advantage over the near-identical AMHAS – a huge margin for this highly competitive class. Julian Rubio’s Shuttleworth 45 The Beast won the 5-boat PHRF multihull division.

Race website – Scoreboard