ORCV Coastal Sprint 2026
West Offshore Products Coastal Sprint
There’s something about an early Saturday start at Queenscliff. The fleet gets underway while most of Melbourne is still in bed, and by the time the city wakes up, you’re already working your way out through the heads with 10–15 knots of south-westerly on the nose and a short chop building outside.
That was the scene for the third West Offshore Products Coastal Sprint — 13 boats out of the ORCV’s Category 3 series, out through the Rip and around the Centre 2 course: a 27-nautical-mile run taking in marks east and south of the heads before swinging west and home. The Race Director announces the course just an hour before the gun, which keeps everyone honest right until the last minute.
On Shimmer — Steve Twentyman’s Hanse 505 out of Safety Beach Sailing Club — we had a crew of six: Andrew Rentoul, Scott Pimlott, Terry Kourtis, and Sam Backwell doing his first ever ocean race and took to it exactly as you’d hope.
The wind kept everyone thinking all day. A south to south-south-westerly that couldn’t quite make up its mind, shifting back and forth more than 30 degrees between 170 and 200 true — the kind of oscillation that rewards the boats watching the pressure and punishes anyone who goes to sleep on a tack. In conditions like that, the result often comes down to who reads the next shift first.
Then there was the Morning Menad. Under ORCV rules, the fleet is prohibited from sailing in the shipping channel while racing, which keeps everyone on the Queenscliff side of the heads on the way out. As a side note, we’d actually passed the Spirit of Tasmania on our way to the start — she’d come through earlier that morning. This course then required boats to cross the channel heading east once clear — right at the moment the Morning Menad, a large cargo vessel inbound from Shanghai, was making her approach through the heads. The Coast Guard was on watch and keeping a careful eye on the fleet as boats assessed their moment. Six yachts, Shimmer among them, crossed ahead of her bow. The rest had to wait and cross in her wake, adding time they’d spend the rest of the race trying to claw back. No radio calls were needed — everyone did the right thing — but it split the fleet cleanly and shaped the race from that point on.
On the water, Shimmer was making her presence felt — first around the second mark and putting down a strong performance throughout. At the finish, Ginan (Nigel Jones and Cam McKenzie) had led off the gun, dropped back to second, then clawed it back on the next leg — ultimately taking out all three handicap divisions: AMS, ORC and PHS. Cadibarra (Paul Roberts) was a solid second across the board. Shimmer rounded out the podium in both AMS and PHS — a good result on a day that asked a few questions of every crew.
Congratulations to the whole fleet, and a particular shout-out to two boats doing their first Coastal Sprint — Freeloader (Jeremy Capon) and Amici (Graeme Hart). That’s exactly what this series is for.
And to Sam — race one of many.
The Coastal Sprint series forms part of the ORCV Coastal Championship.
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