Two days into the Noakes Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race, the fleet's overnight tactics have started separating the leaderboard, with Smuggler fighting back to the front after a costly early call and a chasing pack of 40-footers locked in their own private battle.
By Sunday morning, Smuggler had rejoined the offshore TP52 pack and retaken both Line Honours and her division lead after working further out to sea overnight, a move that paid off handsomely. By afternoon she led the fleet with 120 nautical miles to the finish, ten miles off Wooli Beach and stringing together a series of gybes off Coffs Harbour under navigator David Van der Winde. More than twenty miles south sat the chasing pack: Gusto, V5, Koa, Antipodes, Back 2 Black and Ambition, with the Overall trophy and bragging rights still very much in play behind the Line Honours contest.
Further back, Minerva sat first in IRC Division One and third overall, while Newcastle sailor Joe de Kock's Farr 40 KD1 was playing the rock-hopping game, passing within half a nautical mile of the coast at Southwest Rocks to lead IRC Division Two. Among the double handers, Disko Trooper, skippered by Jules Hall and Alex Knight, was quietly assembling one of the standout results of the race: leading IRC Division Three, Corinthian IRC, Corinthian PHS and both Double Handed divisions simultaneously. Asked about the afternoon's tricky, patchy conditions, Hall kept it simple: "We have a plan. You'll soon see if it's the right one."
Smuggler crossed the line at 08:03:48 on Monday morning for Line Honours, an elapsed time of 1 day, 19 hours, 3 minutes and 48 seconds. But the overall race was far from decided. By early Monday afternoon, Sean Langman's Back 2 Black had become the first boat under 50 feet home and sat provisional race leader on handicap, with Disko Trooper second and Chris and Lockie Dare's Ambition provisionally third. Dare, whose father-son crew includes Sydney Hobart-winning navigator Alex Nolan, described the battle with Langman's boat as "super tight racing... they managed to get away off the coast, and at one point it was just too hard to close the gap."
As the double handers worked their way up the final stretch of coastline on Monday evening, nineteen of the 48-strong fleet had finished, with the rest expected home overnight and into Tuesday morning.
