Runaway win to Japanese yacht

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 64

Runaway win to Japanese yacht

NZPA-AFP Osaka Japan’s 16-metre sloop Nakiri Daio sailed into Osaka at dawn yesterday to claim a runaway victory in the first Mel-boume-to-Osaka doublehanded yachting race.

The boat’s American skipper, Warwick Tompkins, a 55-year-old sailing consultant from San Francisco, and his Japanese crew member, Kaoru Ogimi, aged 57, finished the 10,200 km (5500 nautical mile) race at 7:06 a.m., amid a riot of fireworks and whistles from ships in Osaka’s north

port It took them 31 days and 19 hours through rapidly changing conditions in the Pacific, the equatorial doldrums and the Northern Hemisphere spring, to reach this western Japan port since they set out from Melbourne at midday on March 22 in a 64-boat fleet.

Nakiri Daio’s closest rival, the 16m Japanese sloop Dr Rai, skippered by a 39-year-old physician, Rai Okamoto, was located some 200 km (110 nautical miles) behind heading the 45 boats still

in competition. They were registered under six countries: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, the United States and the Netherlands. , Ogimi, a Tokyo department store executive, is vice-president of the Nippon Ocean Racing Club, and has known Tompkins since he studied at an American University. He is one of the principal race organisers. The race, touted as the world’s first to cross the Equator in the Pacific, was staged at a cost of SUS2 million to mark the

120th anniversary of Osaka’s opening to internaional trade. The organisers plan to hold the event every four years to make it an institution in international yacht racing. Nakiri Daio, having led from Melbourne after a spectacular start, was overtaken once, on March 27, by a hot-trailing New Zealand sloop Castaway Fiji skippered by the round-the-world veteran sailer Digby Taylor. By that time, 11 boats had been forced to retire from the race.

They included Japan’s

top contender Bengal HI, skippered by a 48-year-old Japanese adventurer, Kenichi Horie, which had drawn protests from Tompkins who charged her engine was not powerful enough to meet safety requirements. The charge was dismissed by the race committee. . The 16-metre Castaway Fiji failed to keep the lead long and on April 2 sank in the Coral Sea, 40 miles (64km) astern of Nakiri Daio, leaving the other crew member, Akhurst, aged 35, unaccounted for to this

date. : ' \ From that point, Nakiri Daio, built last January in New Zealand, built up a solid lead and struggled through a calm, on the final day to victory. Tompkins has a doublehanded sailing record including a 1700-nautical-mile passage from Florida to Spain in 1972 and 1973 and a 9000-nautical-miie race from New Zealand to California in 1982 and 1983. Nakira Daio means in English, most properly, "wave cutting king.”