In American sporting culture, it’s fair to say that an activity like sailing takes a back seat.
But in Midcoast Maine last month, boat builders at Hodgdon Yachts were tracking a race in Australia, where a yacht constructed a decade ago at their East Boothbay yard skimmed across the finish line first at a speedy 22 knots.
“We watch the Sydney-to-Hobart race every year,” said Tim Hodgdon, president and CEO of Hodgdon Yachts. “It’s very exciting because we were a big part of that project.”
The Sydney Hobart Race is a notoriously dangerous and grueling competition spanning 630 nautical miles from Sydney, New South Wales, to Hobart, Tasmania, kicking off on Boxing Day every year.
The Maine-built yacht, now called Master Lock Comanche, won “line honours” at the Australian race, meaning it crossed the finish line first, in just over two days and five hours. It’s a different, but no less prestigious, title from the overall winner, whose time is corrected through a system of handicaps.
Comanche has won line honours at Sydney Hobart five times. It also holds the standing record for the fastest Sydney Hobart finisher at one day, nine hours and 15 minutes in 2017.
“It’s been a huge mark of pride, being able to say I was part of something like that is huge,” said Phillip Wells, a composites lead at Hodgdon Yachts who worked on the Comanche project and would go on to help build yachts for America’s Cup campaigns.
The team behind the year-long undertaking to build the Comanche included French designers, Australian project managers and sailors from around the world, Hodgdon said.
The 100-foot maxi yacht was originally commissioned in 2013 by tech billionaire and founder of Netscape Jim Clark, with the intention of “breaking records,” Hodgdon said. The build cost at least $15 million, Forbes reported at the time.
It’s changed hands several times since, and is now co-chartered by Australian skippers Matt Allen and James Mayo. But the Maine-built vessel continues to break records and win races.
In 2016, Canadian sailor Richard Clarke was on board Comanche when it broke the sailing record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly a decade later, he returned to the vessel to help sail it into its fifth line honours victory at the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race in Australia.
“The Sydney Hobart is a very special event for a sailor,” Clarke said in a phone call from his home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, just days after the race. “You have 100-and-something boats all starting at once in this cramped harbor (with) hundreds of thousands of spectators. It’s the closest thing to sailing in a stadium.”
As exciting as the Sydney Hobart is, it’s not without risk. This year, two crew members on the Comanche suffered injuries, but are expected to recover, Clarke said.
“Humans can fail before this boat does,” Clarke said.
And last year, two sailors died in incidents on board their separate yachts during the first day of the race as gale winds complicated the competition.
The December competition represented a comeback for Comanche, which retired early after sustaining damage to its mainsail in 2023.
Because of the risks to humans and boats, attention to detail was key in the build.
“There’s literal lives at stake when you’ve got a 100-something-foot mast and something like that breaks; there’s people under it,” said Wells, of Hodgdon Yachts. “And so, it’s always in the back of your mind — what a high-performing boat this is, but also the margins of failure.”
“I never had so much overtime in my life,” he said.
The monumental effort by an international team of yacht builders created moments of a lifetime for sailors like Clarke — and something Mainers can be proud of thousands of miles away from Australia.
“It is my favorite boat in the world, and I’ll say that without debate,” Clarke said.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Katie Langley can be reached at [email protected].
