Sweeping line honors through the three-day regatta will be Stark Raving Mad’s moral victory, while the ORR handicappers can pat themselves on the back for setting up some close competition by the numbers among a mixed bag of eight big boats.
It might have turned out otherwise if the weather gods hadn’t waited until the last two races to deliver the fresh breeze that brought Stark Raving Mad and the other TP52, Andy Rasdal’s Valkyrie, to life.
“I told you that with more breeze it’s easier for us,” said Gary Weisman, the North Sails president who drove SRM in the absence of Madden, whose doctor barred him from leaving shore so soon after recent surgery.
“I wish I’d had something to do with it,” said Madden, one of the founders of the event. “But its downwind performance was what I hoped it would be.”
That’s where SRM outclassed the fleet, especially capitalizing on the best wind of the weekend Sunday — 8 to 10 knots from the south — and the upgrades Madden made after acquiring the 2006 MedCup champion formerly known as Mean Machine.
Valkyrie was the only boat that could stay close in Sunday’s three-lap race around a 1.5-nautical mile windward-leeward course set off Newport Pier. Valkyrie finished only 52 seconds behind in elapsed time, while boat for boat Pyewacket II finished about 5 1/2 minutes back after fighting through a face-to-face, lead-swapping match race with Grand Illusion.
Upwind, the Pye II guys seemed to keep finding themselves on the wrong side of the course when the wind shifted the other way, and a litany of other stumbles included a guest sailor getting one leg tangled in a jib sheet.
