The 2018 Sailonline (SOL) virtual Melbourne-to-Osaka race was won by ‘Billy’ and was joined on the podium by ‘rumskib’ from Germany and ‘Chaos’ from the U.S.A. Billy was in fact one of four Australians including ‘Dingo’, ‘Kipper1258’ and ‘Tyger’ who all featured in the top 20 in the final results of a virtual fleet of around 160 active competitors.
Bill ‘Billy’ Newman, originally a Melbournian, was apparently ‘moved’ to our southern prison colony (Tasmania) some 40 years ago. He sails from time to time on his son’s J24 out of Mersey Yacht Club (Devonport) and describes himself as an “Inexperienced, now retired, round the cans sailor” … Yeah, right, don’t believe it for a minute! The truth is that SOL includes some very well credentialed sailors so making it in to the top 10 is no mean feat.
As I have mentioned in a previous post the first half of the race was a bit of a drag race up the east coast of Australia. And then came The Solomons. Often there are options through this region but this year the only real option was to pass through the gap to the west of The Solomons.
As Billy said: “As we approached, routings through the Solomon Sea consistently preferred a track west of Bougainville Island so I had no hesitation in following that route and the leading group had a dream run in at least 5kn TWS all the way, (as I remember). Not typical Doldrums weather at all.”
And with a couple of others I personally proved this beyond any reasonably doubt by trying to go east!
So mid-race, Billy was up there. He was doing well. But he wasn’t going to win if he played follow-the-leader. So, what did he do that made the difference? We could claim to be the “leading” group at that stage and as we headed north I started thinking “where next”.
Osaka was still over 2000nm NNW. My simplistic theory was that to get to Osaka we had to go west but mainly north, it seemed that prevailing winds were favouring the northing so I concluded that I should do my westing at the first and fastest opportunity. I had worked my way west as it was and around the 14th April the Wx [weather report] and QtVlm [free route-planning software] gave us some encouragement for a more westerly track, Dingo and I discussed this encouragement in chat and as I was eager for a way west I only hesitated for a few hours, thankfully Dingo hesitated for a Wx or two. As it turned out this was the decisive move for Billy. Wind direction and polar were helpful, I ignored QtVlm and sailed generally NW until I was about 30nm west of everyone in that leading chorus line and about 80nm east of the rhumb line. As I recall Chaos and rumskib were already at a similar longitude and approaching south of me. I am not sure where they had come from but I think also west of Bougainville but never so far east into the Pacific as our leading group.
In the next few days the more westerly boats advanced and I got to a reasonably realistic #1 about 8nm ahead of rumskib and Chaos. I was able to maintain a similar advantage all the way to the line. It was simply a matter of keeping alert, nervously watching my back and not blundering, until achieving a welcome and very satisfying win, in a long, challenging and interesting race.
Well done Billy and everyone else who competed in the SOL virtual race.
When our real-life Sunfast3600s finally arrive in we’ll calculate an overall winner taking in to account of course that their start was delayed by a day and they were delayed by almost 3 days due to the cyclone.