Rob Bassett and Brett Russell’s TP52 Wired has taken line honours in the 2026 PIC Coastal Classic. She crossed the line at Russell at 10.58am on Saturday after 24 hours, 58 minutes and 25 seconds of racing.
The win came the hard way. At noon on Friday, Wired was around six minutes behind Evan Davies’ Davidson 59 Another Duchess through the Tiritiri Matangi channel. Another Duchess is the boat that beat her into Russell by 59 seconds last year. By Flat Rock at 2.07pm the TP52 had edged six minutes clear, and by evening the rematch was over. With the breeze dying north of Kawau, Another Duchess pulled the pin and went home.
At 7.40pm Wired still had 73.4 miles to run and needed to average four knots through a forecast hole overnight. Our own numbers rated her an even-money chance at best. Her crew had other ideas. She was the first racing boat to call in at Sail Rock, at 8.56pm. By 4.55am she had covered 51 miles in eight and a half hours, sailing clean through the calm the models had promised.
She rounded Cape Brett at 6.41am, but the run into the Bay of Islands proved the slowest leg of the race. The final 11 miles took more than four hours in fading air.
Wired finished as the last boat standing in Monohull Division 1A. Antaeus, Equilibrium, Explore Racing and Another Duchess all retired, among 56 withdrawals from the fleet. The Multihull Division 6 pair of Apache and Romanza are next in, while the rest of the fleet races the 2pm cut-off.
