KEY WEST ROUND UP

This year’s Key West Race Week was an absolute stunner for the Melges 24s with great breeze, great racing and great partying! On the water fifty-nine teams from six nations battled it out with Bill Hardesty eventually grabbing the honours on the final day from James Spithill with Morgan Reeser, helming for Neil Sullivan in third. As always the crews had at least as much fun ashore as afloat with the social highlight of the week being Karen Gottwald’s legendary annual M24KW party!

Hardesty was at the helm of Philippe Kahn’s Pegasus 575 with a crew of legends including 2004 Olympic Gold Medallist Kevin Burnham; Olympic Bronze Medallist Freddy Loof; Star and multiple Finn World Champion Mark Ivy and four-time All American College Sailor of the Year Midge Tandy. Hardesty was delighted with their win commenting, “I am luck to be here. Philippe was sailing the Farr 40, so he gave me the keys to drive the boat. With this all-star team it was easier than I expected. I just tried not to mess things up!”

Although Hardesty took the overall lead on day one and won four of the nine races he by no means had it all his own way. Other race winners were Italian Olympic 470 sailor Gabrio Zandona, helming “Joe Fly” for Giovanni Maspero; the legendary Brian Porter whose “Full Throttle” crew revelled in the windy conditions; America’s Cup helmsman James Spithill from Seattle; multiple World Champion Flavio Favini, helming for Switzerland’s Franco Rossini aboard “Blu Moon” and Irish Olympian Mark Mansfield, making his first appearance in the Melges 24 class at the helm of Simon Strauss’s “Team Gill”.

Through the week Zandona was Hardesty’s toughest competition taking the lead from him on day three and going into the final race looking fairly confident. Unfortunately his luck wasn’t to hold and after a disastrous start he only managed a 20th place which he was forced to count having already discarded a 21st. Overall Zandona had to be content with fourth overall.

James Spithil’s week got off to a lousy start when his apparent second in race one turned into an OCS, but he recovered admirably with a string of top five places. On the final day his fourth place was just enough to give him second overall

The most consistent performance of the week definitely came from Olympic Silver Medallist Morgan Reeser aboard Neil Sullivan’s “M-Fatic” whose all top ten score line gave him a comfortable third place overall eleven points clear of Zandona in fourth with Brian Porter fifth and Flavio Favini sixth.

New Melges 24 owner Alex Ascencious from Houston, Texas, also had a great event, just beating the legendary Dave Ullman for seventh place. – “This regatta was awesome! We just got the boat a couple of months ago. We sailed a clean race and had fun. We plan on doing a lot of regattas this year, including the US Nationals in Annapolis, in preparation for the World in Ocean Reef.” – commented Ascencious.