Carina starts the Sydney Hobart Race of Dec 26.  There is a good article about Carina at http://rolexsydneyhobart.com/news.asp?key=5526 

A Real American family adventure

Not much more than a year ago, 26 year old Walker Potts and his cousin Rives’ ocean racing experience was focussed on Newport, Rhode Island and especially the annual Newport-Bermuda ocean race. 

By the time they get back to Newport in June next year, they will have seen much of the world and racked up an exponentially expanded racing and ocean passage CV that wasn’t even on the radar a year ago,

The Transatlantic Race. The Rolex Fastnet Race. Now the Rolex Sydney Hobart.  And the thousands of miles of ocean in between.

It all started when Carina, the graceful, 40 year old aluminium sloop designed by McCurdy & Rhodes and owned by Walker’s father, Rives Potts, won her division in the 2010 Newport Bermuda.  Flush with success, someone suggested entering the 48 footer in the Trans Atlantic race. 

“Why not?” was the general consensus.  A snowball that would eventually roll around the world was born.

Having led her class across the Atlantic, inopportune conditions for a heavy IOR boat in the final leg pipped Carina at the post, but undismayed, the Americans’ minds turned to the Rolex Fastnet.  “Why not?’ again.  And the sheer scale of Cowes week blew their mind. 

“Having 90 boats doing the Newport Bermuda was a big race,” Rives remembers, “but to see 350 boats in the Rolex Fastnet race starting sequence and hundreds of spectator boats was an eye opener for us.”  He also loved rubbing shoulders with English, French, German and Spanish sailors in the Solent melting pot.

When Carina won her division someone was bound to start talking about the Rolex Sydney Hobart.

So by way of the Panama Canal, the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti, Carina is in Sydney.  Walker and Rives concede they didn’t see much on the way, but at least the fishing was good. Rives senior and other family members have joined them for the big race.

During the 80’s Rives Potts did an awful lot of serious ocean racing, including racing with the likes of Ted Turner and Dennis Connor.  Rives crewed some of the greatest maxis of their day, including five of Connor’s America’s Cup campaigns.  “But when my boys got to 12 or 13 I wanted to sail with them, so I bought Carina,” says Rives.

He believes that sharing the offshore experience can add hugely to the bond between father and son. 

“Our normal scheme is to have several fathers crewing Carina with their sons,” he says. “Standing watch with your son at night, it brings you closer.” 

 
Sharing victories is also a pretty good tonic for kid/old man relations and over the years Carina has carried Rives Potts and his boys to a remarkable number of class wins for a boat her age. Potts puts it down to the boat’s style.

“She’s a good ocean boat. With her full hull she never pounds and is very comfortable. She isn’t as fast as the new boats, but she gets there in the end. Tortoise versus hare.

“And she sails very well to her rating” or handicap. By this he means that with her narrow, deep hull and longish keel, by modern standards, it is quite easy to get her into the groove, sailing as fast as she can go in the conditions, and to keep her there.

“The new boats have very flat bottoms, big sail areas, narrow keels and deep rudders. The groove is very narrow. It is very easy to fall off the edge so it’s harder to sail them to their rating. Over a long race it is easier for us to keep Carina at her full potential most of the time than it is for the faster TP52s.”

It is one of the reasons why Rives doesn’t think that these days his sons could replicate his glory days of the 80s, a young part-timer crewing on the top boats of the era when he wasn’t busy doing other stuff. 

“It was wonderful sailing those top boats, but it is not as available as it used to be. Now you have to make a real commitment, as it should be because these boats are hard to sail. TP52s are just big dinghies. You’ve got to be sharper focused.”

Walker and Rives are getting the full old fashioned ocean racing experience on their four decade-old boat instead, from sweating through the long months of an American winter deep in Carina’s bilge, stripping her out and repainting and preparing every square inch of her for the big adventure, to trudging across endless miles of ocean as they get her from race to race.

“For Dad, it’s always been character building, never do it the easy way. We could have shipped the boat out but….” Walker muses. 

“The older guys reminisce about the time when all of the crew worked on the boat, not just showed up to go sailing. They wanted to throw us into the grinder. Some said we couldn’t do it.  Well we did. We are here.”

They have been flat leading up to the Boxing Day start. Carina may have been safe enough for the Newport Bermuda, the Transatlantic and the Rolex Fastnet races, but she fell short of tough Australian safety requirements.“Things like increasing the diameter of our lower lifelines and the angle of the stanchions,” Walker says.

“I have been shocked by the strictness here,” Rives senior adds.  “We bought two new life rafts for the TransAtlantic but they are not approved for Australia, so we have had to hire two life rafts for the race.”

But they both praise the help they are getting from race organisers, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, and government safety officials.

After Hobart, Walker and Rives the younger will be back at it again. They have to be back in Newport in the USA by June for the Newport Bermuda race. “We have to defend our title” Rives jokes. 

Pirates have made it too dangerous to go via Suez, so it’s the long haul, around the tip of South Africa, across to Brazil and then up the coast, with no time for sightseeing. 

“Rio. Capetown. We see these places on the charts, but that’s all,” admits Walker.

“When we thought about doing all these races we thought that’s all exciting, but we didn’t think how we’d be sailing across the Atlantic during hurricane season, the Pacific during hurricane season, against the wind to South Africa and against the wind to Bermuda.

“But we’ll just grin and bear it and hopefully the boat stays in one piece, and none of us kill each other.”

By Jim Gale/Rolex Sydney Hobart media team