Skipper Eliot Merrill and his crew aboard the Lyman-Morse 46 Acadia sailed hard and came up with class honors in the 40th running of the Annapolis-Newport Race.
Merrill reports leaving the Chesapeake Bay dead last in the ORC Open 2 Class but made all the right moves to move to first place after 3 days and 11 hours of sailing aboard the Thomaston-Maine built boat.
“We exited the Chesapeake 13th out of 13 in our class, and had a lot of work to do,” Merrill was quoted as saying a report from Lyman-Morse. “Strategically we ended up sort of tacking down the center of the Chesapeake more than on the edges and I think the wind was a little better on the edges. There were a lot of holes that people fell into, including us, and it took a lot of concentration and focus to make sure that we kept the boat moving at all times.”
Merrill is a veteran of Newport to Bermuda and Marion to Bermuda races. He said the focus aboard the boat was finding the right line to Newport and frequent sail changes to keep abreast of conditions.
“As we exited the Chesapeake, one of the models had us going all the way out to the Gulf Stream, which was, you know, 100 miles east of the rhumb line,” Merrill said. “We knew we didn't want to do that, but we favored the east and our focus was to stay in the wind and keep the boat moving. We were also able to download the Yellow Brick [tracker] information as to how everyone else was doing and we saw the boats West of us going slower.”
The LM46 is a semi-custom, cold-molded, high-performance sailboat that was launched in 2022. Arcadia is hull Number Two. Capable of sailing at 10 knots or better, boat is a collaboration between Lyman-Morse founder Cabot Lyman, his son and company president Drew Lyman, and top Kiwi designer Kevin Dibley. IT is fitted with a powerful rig for a cruising boat, and carries 1,183 square feet of sail, including a square top main.
“The LM46 is great and so well balanced. It's now my third season with the boat so I'm learning more and more about it as we go along and really getting the feeling,” Merrill said. “I’ve got a couple rules when offshore racing; in order of importance. Be safe, have fun, eat well, and do well. I feel like we achieved all four and it was in the right order. We had just a ton of laughs and such a good time so everyone was smiling even before we knew that we had won our class. And we smiled even more after that!”
