Two-metre swells, 30-knot winds, send Napier race boats packing

Last two standing - near-vintage offshore racing boats Fury and Midnight Express parked-up on Sunday after the cancellation of the second day's racing in Napier. Fury raced in 1974, and on Saturday won the overall honours for the 60-mile classes. Photo / Doug Laing

Most of the national offshore powerboat championship fleet are now back in the shed for repairs after taking a battering in the Napier Offshore 100 off Westshore and Ahuriri at the weekend.

Last two standing - near-vintage offshore racing boats Fury and Midnight Express parked-up on Sunday after the cancellation of the second day's racing in Napier. Fury raced in 1974, and on Saturday won the overall honours for the 60-mile classes. Photo / Doug Laing

Scheduled to run four races over two days, it was effectively over by Saturday night with more than half of the 10 boats invalided out, ahead of what were to have been two more races on Sunday.

The Napier racing was the first of just three legs in the 2025 New Zealand Offshore Powerboat Association drivers’ championship,

With conditions deteriorating to winds exceeding 30 knots and swells up to two metres, the decision was made by 10am to cancel races three and four in the afternoon.

The decision allowed crews to head home, mainly to the Auckland region, to start getting the boats back into shape for Leg 2 on Lake Taupo on February 15-16.

The conditions dashed hopes of more entries for a new under 140hp class aimed at attracting new competitors to the sport.

Among the damage was the loss of Man’s Ruin’s gearbox into the ocean in Saturday’s first race.

The Sports 300 class boat’s crucial piece of hardware was given up for lost after an unsuccessful salvage dive on Sunday morning.

One that wasn’t broken was 10-metre twin-Mercury catamaran Espresso Engineers, which claimed maximum points from the two finishes, successfully defending the honours in the Bay after winning the 2024 race.

For driver Mike Gerbic, who bought the hull from offshore powerboat industry leader Doug Wright in Florida about five years ago, there had been reasons to want to forget Napier.

In the Napier race in March 2012, Gerbic lost a Super 60-class boat with the name of the same loyal sponsors after it delaminated and started to sink.

It was salvaged and taken home, but ended up at the tip, said Gerbic, who raced on Saturday with Joshua Edlin on the throttles.

There was some satisfaction in that the subsequent NZ 1, Rainbow Haulage, had to settle for second-best on Saturday.

Midnight Express, in the Sports 80 class and one of the oldest boats in the fleet, snapped a blower belt, rendering it unable to compete further.

However, monohull Fury, in the same class, celebrated 50 years since first hitting the water by claiming overall honours in the 60-mile classes, raced by Owen McKay, son of original racer Jim McKay.

Meanwhile, the Supersonic crew of driver Ryan Archer worked late into Saturday night to carry out running repairs on a broken cowling mount and trim system, and would have been toughing-up again on Sunday had the racing taken place.

Gerbic said drivers know what to expect in the open sea of the Napier racing, which dates back more than 50 years and is the longest-surviving event since offshore racing started in New Zealand in 1964.

Of Saturday’s conditions he said: “It was a lot more choppy and sloppy than normal – like the Waitemata Harbour on steroids”.

His boat ended with “superficial” cracks in the full-carbon hull, but he said it would have been worse if it had raced the next day.

Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 41 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.