Mana MOD70 - Middle Sea Race 2021
What a amazing race. Start day was on my 40th birthday and to finish it off Loick Peyron was onboard for the race!
Loick nailed the start bang on in his cool and collected manner. We lead out the harbour and up the first leg. They seem to have legs on us during the lighter stretches with the tweaked sail sets and we had kept our ground in the gusts.
Bad luck that we had no comms for the race over the iridium so lost touch slightly with the other 3 boats which gave us a slight disadvantage. We slung the boat around the track with no issues onboard. Hats off to Loick and Jean Baptiste for sharing their years of knowledge and to the team for doing a great job.
From SailWorld:
The big multihulls are also champing at the bit. Giovanni Soldini, skipper of Maserati Multi70, has taken line honours on three occasions and holds the current multihull race record which, at a touch over 56.5 hours, is surprisingly slower than the monohull time. This year, though, it could all be about to change.
"We have known for a few days that this edition will be very windy," he advised. "The first part of the race to Messina for us will not have strong wind, but from Stromboli to the finish looks very, very good... 20 knots or more. It should be a good year for the record, and with the other multihulls it will be a very interesting race. It will be important to be in the front."
On Riccardo Pavoncelli's Mana, which was beaten across line by Maserati last year, but won on corrected time, Jeff Mearing the boat captain confirmed the expectation of strong winds.
"The boat is sound, all prepped up and ready to go," said Mearing. "It's going to be a fruity race; the forecast has been changing every six hours as the low pressure moves around. Right now, we are trying to get everyone goggled up, ready for the waves coming over the deck. She's going to be a blasting machine for this one."
Mearing is celebrating his 40th birthday on start day and is thrilled to be doing so on Mana in the company of French ocean-racing legend Loick Peyron.
