Cowes Week - Clear win in Black Group

Until Tuesday Neville Upton and his Listening Company team aboard one of the 45 entries in the Sunsail charter fleet led Black Group overall. They had a clear string of first places and were seemingly in line to make history by becoming the first Sunsail yacht ever to win the Black Group title.



However, from then on the situation changed and Key Yachting's Paul and Marie-Claude Heys sailing their brand-new J/97 Jenga V in IRC Class 5 started to emerge with some equally impressive results, and a final race win yesterday, was enough to secure the title.

Chatting about his win this morning Heys was keen to praise The Listening Company team for providing some great competition. "The Sunsail boat did exceptionally well by winning all its early races, and had a pretty good grip on the Black Group. It was only on the light wind day, which is the day I was worried about because it's a day you can easily slide down a snake, that their fleet failed to finish within the time limit and suddenly the game opened for us."

Interestingly Heys said although he has only won the Black Group title once before, back in 2002 in a J/109 Waverider, the same sort of scenario happened then. "All of a sudden it all came together," Heys continued: "This black group is game of ‘last man standing'. As the week goes on there are less and less people in with a chance of winning it and by the Thursday it's usually pretty obvious as to which two or three boats can do it."

Heys' J/97 is fresh out the box having only just been launched onto the market in June. Heys and team sailed it from Le Sables d'Olonne, France where it was built, straight to the Round the Island Race startline where they gained second in class and 27th overall in the IRC fleet. Heys continued: "It was a good first outing but apart from that and couple of sails from Hamble, I haven't actually sailed the boat much, and we only put the crew together last week."
Team Jenga V was made up of a crew of 15 that was rotated through the week with six to eight sailing each day including the likes of Paul's wife Marie-Claude who helmed for the first three days, and Neil Martin who, according to Paul, managed to gain their biggest winning margin of 28 minutes on corrected time. Paul continued: "We also had Rob Greenhalgh sailing for three days, as well as three, young Plymouth University students who regularly race J/80s and dinghies, plus we had Matt Sheahan doing the navigating for a couple of days, and his daughter Ellie helping out on the bow."

Source:Cowes Week