Sailing Magazine
by Richard Crockett
Again, not a piece strictly dedicated to the Miura, but some Miura news and nostalgia too as the 1976 Rothmans Week and Agulhas Races are covered. ‘Sundance Kid’ the Miura won the Agulhas race, while ‘Impact’ won Rothmans Week.
With a crackerjack crew of Angelo Lavranos, Dave Hudson, Mike Bartholomew, JJ Provoyeur and Neal Gregory, David Abromowitz took the Miura ‘Sundance Kid’ to victory in the Agulhas Race, despite weathering one of the worst north westerly gales in the history of the race. Maybe that is testament to how tough and sea kindly the little Miura is?
Angelo Lavranos wrote this: “Till the afternoon of the 29th the race had been very pleasant sybaritic** sailing. Now, a few miles short of Agulhas, we got an atypical (for this time of the year) northwesterly gale. With no preamble we were able immediately to put on the No. 4 and 3 reefs in the main. The seas became quickly very confused close by Agulhas, when we took our first hitch offshore. (** sybaritic – person who is self-indulgently fond of sensuous luxury).
“The boat fell into it stride and we got along swimmingly. Offshore the waves broke irregularly and heavily and we hit the pavement less often, in spite of driving the boat. The gale settled in to 45 knots on average, but gusting off the clock at about 55 knots. Twenty nine hours of hard windward work saw us to the finish, three hours ahead of ‘Voortrekker’ on corrected time with a few of the usual little irritations thrown in, like having to fix a leestay that was threatening to come adrift; or the failure of all the electronic navigation aids (log, speedo and DF) and a non-usable chart table due to a torrentially leaking main hatch. At the end we had a cracked bulkhead to show for all the hard slogging.”
Reports from both SA Yachting and Yachtsman RSA magazines are included – so there’s lots to read.
READ THE SA YACHTING REPORTS HERE: Pages from 1977 02 – SA Yachting – OCR
READ THE YACHTSMAN RSA REPORTS HERE: Pages from 1977 02 – Yachtsman RSA – issue 04 – OCR
