In a fitting re-birth of the venerable Fort Lauderdale to Charleston Race, Roger Sturgeon’s STP65 Rosebud/Team DYT (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.) crossed the finish line just before 10 p.m. on April 10, to break the 35-year-old race record set in 1974 by Ralph Ryder’s C&C 66 Phantom and set a new standard for the modern running of this event. Eleven boats started the 408-nautical mile offshore race at 2:00pm on April 8, just outside of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale and finished outside of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Although Rosebud/Team DYT clocked in at 1 day:7 hours:52 minutes: 49 seconds, on corrected time under IRC rules it finished second overall by less than nine seconds to Teamwork, the J/122 owned by Robin Team (Lexington, N.C.). Full results are posted on the event website www.fortlauderdalecharlestonrace.org.
‘We left a lot of room for other boats to break the (new) record,’ said Sturgeon of his boat’s 90-minute improvement on the 1974 record. ‘This should be great encouragement for others to do this race and go for the record… Details