His friend and rival, Ambrogio Beccaria might have taken the Class 40win, but yesterday 'Bogi' had a grey, drizzly arrival into New York. One of the pre-race favourites Alberto Bona might now be slightly disappointed with his fifth - or more significantly the fact he could not make up ground after initial problems -but for completing what he describes as 'most diffcult race I've done' Albi was blessed with a peach of a morning for his beautiful arrival into the Big Apple. 0600hrs dawn, sunshine, light breeze, blue skies...Manhattan skyline shimmering.....blessed!
Alberto Bona ITA IBSA 5th Class40 on the dock in Brooklyn: "There were a lot of problems, I’ve never had a lot of problems on this boat but this time I had a lot. Starting with the J1, the J1 was starting to deteriorate ( on the luff, I’m not sure why. With the first teaching on the second day when we started to go fast in the first low pressure.
Then there was a problem of losing time because I had a the rudder that came up and broke, the line that keeps the rudder down in the fixed position broke and so at thirty five knots at one point I had no rudder in the water and so I was trying to fix that. I lost a lot of time.
I had the J2 tear with the sails, I think because they were flapping quite a lot when we were at forty five knots, I had to ease the sails a bit to go fast and then they were flapping a bit and so the sails didn’t like it, so I tore the J2. Then after a certain point, on the port side, I heard a strange sound in reaching the second low pressure. It was a new sound for me, the boat was slamming on the water and making a new sound. I realised that something went wrong with a bit of delamination on the hull. We don’t know yet if we hit something from the external side and so this is our major issue, working out what happened there.
There was no danger but you know that you have a structural problem and so you don’t go one hundred percent. At the start I was saying, ‘no this is nothing, I think it’s just because I put the garbage on the bow, At first I thought it was nothing and then I said maybe it’s the garbage jumping, making a new sound. Then I realised you can’t just say that, you have to go and check. That very difficult in 30 knots. You can’t go into the bow to check. If was not easy…..But here we are, finished, and that’s one of the important things. Now we need to repair all of that before the next race.I think I made a mistake in the first day, my idea was to pass the first low pressure on the southwest point because I didn’t want to go north. I was afraid of the bubble of no wind and so with the meteorologist (before the start) we had said that we would go to cross the first low pressure in the south west corner, which was not so bad. We did not so badly, we were with Ambrogio at that point, he was even more south. After a certain point I saw him going quite up the way and I think that was my mistake. I don’t like to follow but I had to follow and said I can do my course and at the end of the day it won’t change a lot because the north will have more speed to come down, But at the end it was incredible how much the gain in the north was and I think that’s where I made a mistake, I didn’t realise that.
This has been the toughest race I’ve done for sure….not in terms of racing because I wasn’t at that level. It was frustrating at the end because I think that all the races have a different history and this one was not for me. When you realise that I think you are able to think maybe there is a still an opportunity in the end. It can be very difficult with nature, there is bubbles of no wind, systems that are changing rapidly and so I never said that the race was finished, I thought maybe there will be an opportunity to come back.
Alberto's race
Finish time: 16h05 37''UTC 12:05,37hrs local NYC
Elapsed time : 12 days, 4 hours, 35 minutes and 37 seconds
Distance sailed : 3358,68 NMs
Delta to first 12 hrs 17 mins and 42 seconds
Average speed on the great circle route: 10,08 kts
