Ullman and Porter Lead the Pack in Santa Cruz
From Event Press Officer Rich Roberts - SANTA CRUZ, Calif.---Italy’s Joe Fly team faces a bittersweet ending Saturday to the 2007 Fullpower Melges 24 World Championship, hosted by the Santa Cruz Yacht Club. That’s how it is when the hottest team has little chance of winning.
Helmsman Gabrio Zandona said after driving to first- and second-place finishes Friday, “We’re still out of the game,” echoing his words from Day 1 when two aborted starts cost him scores in the 20s. “Check the results and the good guys always finish in the top 10.”
Dave Ullman still leads the good guys after he and Zandona swapped wins for the second day in a row. The ageless one continued his consistency of one victory a day---four in all---and followed that with an eighth but lost two points to Brian Porter (5-2), whom he now leads, 28 to 30, followed by France’s Francois Brenac at 41, Italy’s defending champion Nicola Celon at 44 and Zandona at 46.
So playing catch-up has been a futile chase for the Joe Fly guys. “We have less chance now,” Zandona said.
However, it’s worth noting that in last year’s Melges 24 Worlds at Hyeres, France, Celon was 15 points out of it when he came back to win on the last day.
The key to victory may be the deadline forbidding any race to start after 3 p.m. on the last day.
Harry Melges III, Porter’s tactician, said, “If we start as late as we did today, there may just be one race,” reducing the race track for Full Throttle to overtake Ullman’s Team Pegasus 505.
Friday’s first race was delayed an hour waiting for the light wind to settle on a steady southwesterly breeze that built from 10 knots to 17 through the afternoon. When the deadline wasn’t in force for the second races on Wednesday and Thursday, they started six and five minutes shy of 3 o’clock.
Porter said, “If it’s two races to win, we’re in the game.”
Brenac made a strong bid for the lead in Friday’s first race when he timed his start shrewdly by trailing a few boats into the starboard end of the starting line, slipped through a narrow opening next to the pin boat, tacked immediately to starboard, headed right and built an immediate lead . . . for 10 minutes.
Then the wind shifted left and the boats on the right were out of luck.
“Each time this week it has been good to go right,” Brenac said. “Maybe those guys [on the left] saw something. Maybe they were smarter than we were.”
The French were 18th at the windward mark and fought their way back to ninth at the finish, then placed fifth in the second race, leaving themselves 13 points off Ullman’s pace.
Chris Larson of Annapolis sailed Scott Holmgren’s West Marine Rigging entry to its best finishes (6-4) of the week and lies even in eighth place with Mark Christensen of Pegasus 575.
“The good guys seem to be doing the job,” said Larson, an America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race veteran. “They showed that you don’t always have to go right. My bet’s on the lake sailors from Zenda (Wis.). [Porter] is cool and relaxed, and he doesn’t have a throwout yet”---meaning, Full Throttle team remains the only team without a doubled-digit finish and can afford one bad race, which Ullman probably can’t.
Ullman’s view: “Either tomorrow is going to be a good day or a bad day. If we win it's a good day. If we lose then it will be bad day.”
With the turbulent conditions and an aggressive fleet, principal race officer Hank Stuart’s race committee has kept general recalls to a minimum with judicious use of the I-flag (early starters must re-start around the ends). Target time for each race is 90 minutes, and through Thursday the RC had achieved an average of 88.7 minutes while alternating courses of 2, 2 ½ and 3 laps and windward-leeward lengths of 1.6 to 2 nautical miles.
All regatta information is available at www.melges24worlds2007.com . Further information about the International Melges 24 Class is available from www.melges24.com
Information on Melges 24 events in the U.S. is available at www.usmelges24.com
Fullpower Technologies is a new wireless nanotechnology biotech company based in Santa Cruz.