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Home / Sport

Dalton set to sail away

15 Sep, 2002 10:48 AM4 mins to read

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By JOHN COUSINS

It's taken hundreds of hours of hard work and planning, a boatload of money and a single-minded determination to be the world's best.

Now, finally, for Graham Dalton the day of reckoning is near.

Tomorrow Dalton sets out to conquer the world in yachting's ultimate challenge, the
Around Alone yacht race, the longest sporting race on earth and the only major international blue water trophy to have eluded New Zealand's grasp.

Unfortunately Tauranga's great hope in this epic boat race could not have had a worse start.

In a double blow, his yacht Hexagon has not only incurred hefty penalties for arriving nearly five days late for scrutineering but Dalton also missed the September 2 deadline for completing the qualifying voyage.

Hexagon, sailing under the pennant of the Tauranga Yacht and Power Boat Club, has been hit with penalties totalling 61 hours.

It means Dalton will have to cross the first leg finishing line two days ahead of his closest rival in order to win. The fastest yacht was expected to take about 12 days to sail from New York to the English port of Torbay.

In a race where each of the five legs carries equal points, Dalton remained upbeat.

He has flagged away any chance of winning the sprint across the Atlantic: "We would have to win by 500 to 600 miles and with it being a 3000 mile leg, realistically that is not going to happen. We could win by 200 miles and still come last," he said.

He regards the struggle to even reach the Rhode Island scrutineering port of Newport as a triumph over adversity and is definitely not in the mood to treat tomorrow's race start as an anti-climax.

"We beat the odds to get to the start," Dalton said.

His woes started when the race committee would not recognise Hexagon's shake-down voyage from Auckland to Sydney via the Kermadec Islands as the qualifying voyage.

Hexagon then lost its mast on Dalton's first bid to cross the Atlantic to reach Newport and had to be towed back to England.

Misfortune struck again when he finally got away again on August 21 under a borrowed mast and rig. He sailed into a high pressure system which becalmed Hexagon for a two days and made for slow progress until the weather changed.

By necessity, Dalton's 16-day Atlantic crossing was also the qualifying voyage and, when he failed to meet the September 2 deadline, it meant that technically he was disqualified.

Yachting's international jury had already ruled against his appeal on the shake-down voyage and faced with the real prospect that Hexagon might not even start, he gathered support from among the other Around Alone skippers and wrote to the race committee to argue extenuating circumstances.

They accepted his case and decided the entry stood but dished out more penalties. Each leg of the race starts with a clean sheet so the penalties will not carry over into the second leg to Cape Town.

Dalton saw little point beating up Hexagon in a make-or-break effort to carve into the 61 hours when he could still end up finishing last anyway.

"We have to see how the first leg goes but it may be because of the penalties that we button off a little . . . who knows?"

Dalton said he had been too busy to get into a stew about the impact of the penalties: "I'm anything but downhearted."

Hexagon's shore crew had worked night and day to fit the new mast and carry out repairs to the keel's hydraulics, his computer's hard-drive and issues associated with the dismasting.

The boat was at the point where it was "pretty damn close" to being as good as it could be and Dalton insists he is too.

"I can't think of anything more I would like to do," he said.

- BAY OF PLENTY TIMES

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