Go the Cone!

Few boats, and certainly fewer at 30' are as wicked as the R/P 30' Cone of Silence. They recently turned in a stunning performance in the 2005 Pittwater to Coffs Harbour race - 5th elapsed time and first on corrected time. Here is the story from onboard the Cone from Scott Nichols.Enjoy.

Light winds greeted the fleet for the start of the Pittwater to Coffs Harbour race 2005 making the task of two additional rounding marks all the more annoying. The forecasts indicated we were in for some downwind running - the kind of conditions in which The Cone excels. A good start saw us well placed as we rounded the mark off Palm Beach and started heading north for Coffs, waiting for the southerly to kick in.

The breeze swung to the south-east earlier than predicted and started to fill in a little. The crew breathed a sigh of relief when we were able to hoist the first chute. The breeze was building steadily until the evening and we were making some good miles, the only down-side was the sloppy conditions seeing up to a foot of water sluicing over the deck. The boys who were first to put on their wet-weather trousers were banished to the front of the rail to take the brunt of the water.

By nightfall, the sou'easter was blowing consistently around the 20-25 knot mark. The Cone was in her element, on the plane, surfing down waves and just generally smoking up the coast doing 16's and 17's. The boys were getting comfortable and doing their best to get through 3 days of provisions in the first night.

A loud crack sounded the end of relaxation time as the tack line blew and the carbon bow sprit shuddered violently after being suddenly unloaded. The monster white chute was a twisted mess and sustained some damage, but the real problem was the tack line.

In the pitch black of an overcast night we dispatched our two slimmest crew to attend to the tack-line while the remaining heavyweights lined up against the stern to keep us from nose-diving. Still cruising along at 10 knots with only the main, one of the boys hung upside down to retrieve the tack line while the other clung to his feet. Through persistence and luck, they were able to re-thread the tack line like a giant needle and thread through the block at the end of the sprit. With a new chute up, we were on our way again.

A few hours later another kite was on its way to the loft as it too sustained some spectacular damage - a symptom of how hard The Cone was being pushed. With our "bullet-proof" spinnaker on we saw out the night without further incident allowing the crew to get some rest.

The southerly stayed in longer than expected in the morning, eventually easing off as we neared Coffs. In the lighter winds it became like a delivery trip with bodies flaked all over the deck using spinnakers as bean bags. The boredom was soon forgotten as we approached the breakwall at Coffs with a small crowd on stand-by to greet the finishers. The boys were stoked when the race officer emerged from his hut to shout our catch cry of "GO THE CONE!" (A cry that was to grow real old, real fast for the other competitors in the bar that night).

As we motored into the marina, we had felt we had done well but as we looked around, we could only see four other finishers. Upon confirmation of our fifth place across the line, we cracked some well-earned beers as the result sunk in. Although we had seen very little of the rest of the fleet during the race we thought we were able to see just behind us the Farr 36 Inner Circle Rum. We realised that it was Future Shock (Elliot 56) we had been looking at chasing us the whole way.

Our aim was to be the first boat under 50 feet, but we were ecstatic when we realised we were the first boat under 60 feet to finish - a result that meant far more to us than our first placing in the PHS division.

Most gratifying of all was that conversation heard in the bar centred not around the maxis but around The Cone. Our skipper, Jamie Neill almost burst with pride when he heard The Cone referred to as a "micro-maxi" by several of our fellow competitors. Another jug of rum went down and another cry of "GO THE CONE" echoed through the bar.

1/7/04