V5's second Airlie tilt, Vixen's first, both flying Kiwi colours

Sixteen boats. One unbeaten champion. And a Kiwi with a score to settle.

When the 38th Jeanneau and 74 Islands Airlie Beach Race Week fires the start gun in the Whitsundays on 6 August, Rating Passage will be running its biggest fleet in over a decade, and Ray Roberts' Botin 40 Team Hollywood, unbeaten across 2025 and nearly untouched in 2024, is the boat everyone else is chasing. Among the chasers, Brian Petersen. His TP52 V5, sailing under both Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and Royal Akarana Yacht Club colours, is back for a second consecutive year after spending all of 2025 racing hard around the Australian circuit.

Sharon Ferris-Choat's Airlie story is a different one. Her Verdier 40 Vixen Racing lines up in Performance Cruising, the biggest class in the regatta, and she's never raced Airlie before. "It's been on the bucket list for a while," she says. Performance Cruising boats race to comfortable cruising standards rather than out-and-out race trim, with handicaps revised race to race, a different discipline to the rating-certificate racing Petersen is signed up for.

What connects the two Kiwis isn't the racecourse, it's the season behind them, and the one still ahead. Both skippers lined up for last year's Rolex Sydney Hobart without finishing, then came back for more. V5 and Vixen Racing have just come off the back of the Noakes Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race and the GCCM Gold Coast Mackay Yacht Race, and both have Hamilton Island Race Week entered for 15 to 22 August, straight after Airlie wraps up.

Go Boating NZ covered V5 and Vixen Racing's Gold Coast Mackay campaign last month. Airlie is the next stop on a season that hasn't slowed down for either boat.

For Ferris-Choat, Vixen Racing does double duty. Beyond the racing, she runs it as a coastal and offshore academy. "I'm creating a pathway where people can learn and gain confidence in a safe environment," she says. "The idea is to encourage them to race and eventually buy their own boats." It's a wry line about a boat built to open doors, turning up at a regatta with a reputation for testing rookies.

The two entries sit inside a bigger story for Whitsunday Sailing Club's regatta, which has passed 110 entries for 2026 and will host the Australian debut of the new Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 455, under naming rights sponsors Jeanneau Yachts and 74 Islands Distillery.

Go Boating (NZ) has been tracking Ferris-Choat's campaign since her Solo Trans-Tasman line honours run into the Gold Coast Mackay Yacht Race. Airlie is one stop on a season that hasn't slowed down, and neither, on this form, has she.