Chris Sayer - Triumphant in France!

On the morning of Thursday July 22nd Chris Sayer and Yves Moreau sailed NZL403 across the finish line at Locmiquelic, France to complete their utter domination of the fleet of 44 yachts competing in the 6th Open Demi Cle' race. A two handed race from Locmiquelic in Southern Brittany, to Saint Quay Port d'Armor, in North Brittany, and then on to Cardiff, Wales for leg two, then back to the finish - a total of 980nm.

Teamed up with Pierre-Yves Moreau who had finished ahead of Chris in the 1999 MiniTransat, they started as favourites - not a good thing for Kiwis generally. However, they lived up to their billing winning every leg with ever increasing margins, in a wide variety of wind and sea conditions. With the race being scored using aggregate time winning the first two legs would not guarantee any comfort and so they began the last leg with a margin of 1 hour and 20 minutes over their nearest competition who had managed to finish legs one and two in second place.

After a nerve wracking 540nm light airs leg from Cardiff, Chris and Yves slid across the finish line just after 6am more than 4 hours ahead of the next boat for a very comfortable win against a class fleet.

After received our congratulations Chris sent the following note: "Thank you, I have to say we had a good boat. Learnt some more tricks and pushed the boat very hard. Full race report to follow but: After lands end we were running with 433. They were going a lot deeper than us as and about the same speed. Neither PYM or I thought it would be a good idea in the lumpy seas but as we wanted to stay between them and the finish we pulled the pole well back and ran at about 160/170 and were a lot faster! In the final leg upwind it was quite windy at times. We made the boat very heavy. Full ballast tank and boat stood up to it well.

Best Regards to Everyone,
Chris

07/26/04