5:12 AM Mon 14 Dec 2009 GMT
Last week we wrote about the Publicity Race. The 2009 Race of the Marketers is being won hands down at the moment by Grant Wharington, whose 98 supermaxi Etihad Stadium (formerly Skandia Wild Thing) was dismasted during her Sydney delivery.
You could buy brand exposure like this but it might cost about the same as a replacement 45 metre mast, air-freighted from France.
The saga will continue, but surely two of the PR Top Guns like Ludde Ingvall, Sean Langman are going to step up to the plate soon.
Tonight is the CYCA Board meeting and we will no doubt here in the morning if the Flinders Island Race Inquiry has made any safety recommendations which will impact on the conduct of this years Hobart race.
Sail-World, the largest sailing news network in the world is preparing its
Fleet notes
for the 2009 Rolex Sydney to Hobart race.
Sail-World's coverage of the 65th Sydney to Hobart is going out to its largest audience ever with more than 200,000 sailors seeing our 2009 coverage.
It will be again covering the Hobart race in detail, with a large team of yachting journalists and photographers.
Peter Campbell, Richard Gladwell, Crosbie Lorimer, Trevor Walkley and Rob Kothe will be providing news and interviews. Sail-World will of course run news and interviews from the official Rolex team as well.
We will have images from Andrea Francolini, Crosbie Lorimer and Rolex Sydney Hobart official photographers too.
Sail-World's Fleet Notes for the Hobart race are online already. They make good reading and they will continue to expand, with the help of owners, skippers and navigators over the next two weeks.
Read our 2009 Sydney Hobart Boat Notes here
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The Sail-World team (led by 14 Hobart veteran Trevor Walkley in Melbourne) has been preparing the initial draft, and now all the skippers who have applied to enter the race will have pass worded access to the detailed Sail-World notes, so they can edit, correct and expand their online entries.
While the Sailing magazines news on the boats and crew were frozen a month or so ago the Sail-World Rolex Sydney to Hobart boat notes are being continual updated by owners and skippers, right up until Boxing Day.
We have had updates from over 30 of the 100 boats in the last 24 hours alone. It's an ever refining process.
Last year they were still updating on Christmas Day and making last minute modifications even on Boxing Day morning.
These notes are accessed by thousands of family and friends and sailing and general media around the world.
If you are racing south, check if the skipper has spelled your name right and has detailed correctly the number of Hobart's you've done. That is if he's even put you on the list yet.
Note
- If the owners/skippers of St. Jude and Lahana would like to contact us, we can work with them to update their Boat Notes too.
During the race build up, the race and the wrap up of the 2009 race Sail-World will publish more than 250 stories on the race, which means our coverage will be by far, the most intensive in the world.
This year we will be sending out 20 Sail-World Rolex Sydney Hobart newsletters to 85,000 (yes 85,000) readers around the world. Our coverage will be intensive on Sail-World UK, Sail-World USA, Sail-World Canada, Sail-World Europe-Africa, Sail-World Asia, across the ditch with Sail-World New Zealand and on Sail-World Australia. Interestingly our big cruising audiences and our Powerboat-world audiences will follow the race with us too.
With rapid advances in technology, Sail-World's coverage will be better than ever with boats delivering news and images by satellite and Next G phones, with images and text and with HF email.
Skype is emerging as one of the most reliable marine comms channels. When bandwidth is limited, the last thing boats want to do its look at large emails files. Skype text, is simple fast and reliable.
Onboat images can be sent via Skype, if bandwidth is there too. In the last 12 months we've received Skype text messages from boats in the Sydney to Hobart, Melbourne to Hobart, Gold Coast race, and Flinders Islet races. (If you'd like to pretest that channel our Skype name is sailworldaustralia)
Here is the latest news - note we are resending some of latest Friday's news as we've had reports that some sailors were unable to access the site as the Denial of Service/Hackers were limiting our ability to serve all the news.
Our next Sail-world Sydney to Hobart newsletter will be sent out in two days. Of course the very latest news is online 24/7 at
www.sail-world.com
by Rob Kothe & the Sail-World Team
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