With the start of the Melbourne Osaka Cup 2018 now only a month away, there continues to be a lot of activity among our competitors and here’s a bit of a catch up on a few.
For those who have had to travel a long way to the start line, a lot of the hard work in preparing the boat appears to have been completed. The journey to Melbourne has shaken out those last few bugs and there’s time available to relax a bit. The crews of Kraken and Mr Lucky are two of the boats who appear to have done that by lining up for the Sail Peninsula event at Martha Cove that ran for 3 days from Feb 23-25. Both Sunfast 36’s, they joined another of their class Maverick, who’s a local down at Martha Cove for the event which was running in it’s current form for the second time. The weather across the three days was mixed an varied but the turn-out of boats for the races was great, with 53 boats out on Saturday. Our camera caught all 3 Melbourne Osaka boats as they came out of the Marina for the days event.
While the guys played hard at Sail Peninsula, up in the yard at SYC a list of jobs was being worked away at as Andrew and Annette the crew of Red Jacket (feature image) completed some tasks. With Annette away with work a lot of the time, weekends are important. Annette told us that following their qualifying sail down to Hobart in December, a new list of jobs had emerged but things were well on track for them to be ready for the start.
Boats continue to arrive in Melbourne and over the next week quite a few more will arrive before the March 1st deadline for competitors. Matrix Reloaded arrived on Sunday afternoon having come around from Western Port Bay. Crew Bill Gray and Aaron Haigh have both done the race together before back in 2003. They ran aboard a boat called Matrix back then and this time it’s a new boat, a Pogo 40 and the name says it all. The guys are reloaded and will run up against a couple of other pretty much identical boats in Nexba and Lord Jiminy. It’s great to have the guys in Melbourne and we wish them all the best in their final preparations before the start.
