Extreme Sailing Series Asia, Hong Kong Day Four. All change at the top of the leaderboard as Oman Sail Masirah dominated the fleet, winning four out of five races, and snatching the lead from BT. Shirley Robertson’s ‘Rumbo Almeria’ is currently lying in third overall. The final day of racing takes place tomorrow followed by the prize giving in the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club.
With four wins in five races, the European Extreme Sailing Series Champion skipper Pete Cumming was pleased with their performance today, “We are racing with 50% of our original crew so to be back at the top of the leaderboard is real testament to how hard our new crew members Khamis [Alanbouri] and Leigh [McMillan] are gelling with the team. Khamis, in particular, has had a brilliant day. Every day he is improving and it is really satisfying to see him become an integral part of our team. This is only his third full day of top level competitive racing and we aren’t going easy on him, putting him in tough racing conditions but he’s rising to the challenge each and every time.”
It was the last race of the day that was the undoing for the team as Pete Cumming explained. “It was a school boy error and a lesson that you only need to learn once. We had a bad furl at the mark and were too focussed on the mark rounding and not on getting the kite away correctly. It’s tough in these race conditions, but we are all learning from our mistakes and it won’t happen again.”
For BT it was a disappointing day having dominated the previous two days racing in both the longer Around the Island Race and the shorter, sharper racing more familiar to these professional Extreme 40 teams.