Yachting: Illbruck unbeatable says Dalton

By JULIE ASH

Amer Sports One skipper Grant Dalton cannot see illbruck being beaten in the gruelling round-the-world yacht race, which finishes in Germany in June.

Dalton finished second in the sixth leg from Miami to Baltimore behind the Australian entry, News Corp, which includes New Zealanders Craig Smith and Nick White in the crew.

Assa Abloy clinched third over illbruck in the leg. SEB were fifth, Tyco sixth, followed by djuice and Amer Sports Too.

But in the overall standings, illbruck lead with 41 points from Assa Abloy on 34. Amer Sports One have 32 points and News Corp are one behind.

Tyco follow with 27, djuice and SEB have 21 and Amer Sports Too nine.

"Since Miami, no one has been able to win this [overall race] other than illbruck," Dalton said.

"I think most of the boats have said that or accepted that already. This is a race for second, third and fourth."

But Dalton's view is that when you are out on the water, you do not think about coming second.

"You race every leg as a race and beating Assa Abloy and illbruck in this leg was really important to us.

"Of course we would have liked to have taken out News Corp but we are still ahead of News Corp overall. We have pushed Tyco back so at least we have a breather on them now and we have closed in on Assa Abloy.

"We've had three seconds in six legs and that still feels pretty good."

The 875-nautical mile leg did not get off to the best start in Miami when six of the eight yachts jumped the gun and had to return to the start.

"We certainly don't believe we were over the start line because we were obscured," said Dalton.

"I could quite easily sight the line from where I was on the boat. We discussed whether we would go for redress because we think that we can prove, from witnesses, that we were not over the line. But we don't believe we would gain enough time to take out News Corp, so we won't pursue it."

While Dalton was satisfied with his second, Tyco's skipper, Kevin Shoebridge of Auckland, was far from pleased with his crew's sixth place.

"It was a bad four days right from the start," he said. "Every turn we took turned out to be a bad one."

Tyco made up for their bad start to be in a good position early in the race but were caught under a black cloud and in torrential rain which cost them 15 nautical miles.

"If you get five miles behind you're history and here we were 15 miles behind on the first morning and it sort of went from bad to worse.

"We got in these situations a few times where the boats in the front would have breeze and we'd be flopping around."

The seventh leg in the nine-leg race, from Annapolis to La Rochelle, France, starts on April 28.

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