Ocean Racing
Boats designed by Farr Yacht Design competed in every Whitbread Round the World Race after 1981, and won the 1986, 1990, 1994 and 1998 races. The first Bruce Farr yacht in the Whitbread Race was the Farr-designed Ceramco New Zealand, which competed in the 1980 Whitbread Race and won the Sydney to Hobart the same year. Farr's design proved exceedingly fast, and Ceramco would have won the Round the World Race, save for an unfortunate dismasting on the first leg, a trans-Atlantic crossing. The deltas for the rest of the legs would have put Ceramco 30 hours ahead of her next competitor. This yacht was helmed and captained by New Zealand's most famous yachtsman Sir Peter Blake.
In 2001 the event was renamed the Volvo Ocean Race. A yacht designed by Farr Yacht Design was victorious in 2002. However, Farr's Volvo Ocean Race boats fared less well in 2006 as all four of his designs experienced problems after various failures in their Farr-designed keel canting mechanisms, including an abandonment of the yacht Movistar which was unable to prevent the flow of water through the keel box and, to this day, lies on the ocean floor, unrecovered.
Farr is the most successful designer of winners of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, having designed 15 overall winners between 1945 and 2003.
Cookson Boatworks developed a new 50' design, using the Farr office to collaborate, called the Cookson 50. Irish-owned yacht Chieftain, conceived, developed and constructed in 2005 at Cookson's in New Zealand, was the overall winner of the 2007 Rolex Fastnet Race. Shortly after it was launched, Chieftain finished 5th at Australia's Hamilton Island Race Week, then won class in the 2005 Rolex Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race.
Chieftain competed in all of the 2006 season Royal Ocean Racing Club races and won class in the Round Ireland, won overall in Round Britain and Ireland Races, was awarded Boat of the Year in Ireland in 2006, and finished as the overall winner of the Rolex Fastnet Race.
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Famous quotes containing the words ocean and/or racing:
“Our fathers water’d with their tears
This sea of time whereon we sail,
Their voices were in all men’s ears
Who pass’d within their puissant hail.
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we stand mute, and watch the waves.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)