For the second year in a row the Swan 45 Gold Cup will be going back to the USA, with newly crowned world champion Alexander Roepers and his crew on Plenty. Going into the final race, Plenty held the slenderest possible advantage over fellow American William Douglass’ Goombay Smash. Both Swan 45’s were tied on 31 points and had two victories each, so Plenty led by virtue of their three second place finishes. With the world championship resting on the final race, Roeper and his crew etched out a fifth placefinish to take the honours by two points.Roeper was delighted to be crowned World Champion. “I’m absolutely thrilled and the whole crew is. It was a huge cliff-hanger. The first race was very light air, we went up the left side of the beach and rounded the first mark in 18th place. On the run we picked off a few boats but then we went back to the same side hoping that the breeze would fill in and found ourselves in 4th place which was an amazing comeback. As you can imagine, the mood on the boat went from dour to elated and so I think we were tied with Goombay Smash going into the final race.””Halfway through the second race we were in 10th and had Goombay well behind us, far behind us enough to be comfortable. I mentioned to our tactician that Goombay had an eight for a throw out and that we were in 10th – so that wasn’t good enough. He became aware of it as well so it was a good thing that we struggled back into 5th and won! It was unbelievable.”Tactician Chris Larson described how the team had recovered in the first race today, to keep their World Championship hopes alive: “At the start we ended up going to the left with Fever, thinking that maybe the sea breeze hadn’t developed yet and it was going to work. Unfortunately it didn’t and we sat over there basically by ourselves, so we were 19th or 20th around the first mark. But when it gets wacky things turn around and luckily we got a huge shift from the second upwind leg and the sea breeze did come in. We got back to where we only lost two points to Goombay so it was game on for the last race.”Provisional ResultsClass A1. SPIRIT OF JETHOU, Swan 601, Sir Peter Ogden GBR 1/1/4/3/2/1/2/1 -11points2. AKARANA, Swan 46, Graham & Libby Deegan GBR 2/3/13/2/6/2/13 – 19points3. DESPERADO, Swan 65, Richard Loftus GBR 4/2/5/1/3/8/5/13 – 28 pointsClass B1. PHILIPPIDES 2, Richard Balding, GBR 1/2/1/1/1/5/1/2 – 9 points2. SELENE, Mark Jephcott, GBR 3/3/4/2/3/1/5/3 – 19 points3. CHRISTINA, Ben Mobley GBR 5/12/2/5/4/2/6/5 – 29 pointsSwan 45 1. PLENTY, Alex Roepers USA 2/2/3/4/4/2/12/8/1/1/4/5 – 36 points2. GOOMBAY SMASH, William Douglass USA 3/7/5/3/6/4/1/1/4/2/2/9 – 38points3. FEVER, Grant Gordon & Klaus Diedrichs GBR 1/11/1/22/3/1/3/4/2/7/3/17- 53 points
