The discovery of a fishy stowaway helped Australian maxi Wild Oats XI surge to an unprecedented fourth successive line honors victory in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race on Sunday, captain Mark Richards said. The 30-meter carbon-fibre yacht, which had been trailing rivals Skandia for most of Saturday, was forced to stop to free the two-meter shark that had got tangled in its aft rudder just before 1900 (0800 GMT) on Saturday. Richards said the crew had already thought something had been impeding the yacht since it left Sydney Harbour on Friday before they struck the shark. After the shark freed itself, Wild Oats XI surged ahead of the 2003 winner and crossed the finish line in the island state of Tasmania at 0934 on Sunday, an hour before Skandia. “It was a godsend in the end because the second we got him off, the boat was back to its old self,” Richards told reporters at Hobart's Constitution Dock. “It might have been something off a spectator boat, I mean it was just a washing machine, a nightmare, you never know what could have happened,” he said of the possible reason for its problems. Richards said he had thought about sending a crew member over the side to inspect the keel, but the tight match race they were in with Skandia never gave him the opportunity. “We just never stopped. When you are doing 20-25 knots all the time it's a hard thing to work out what to actually do. “So we were sort of waiting for the opportunity but in the end we didn't have one. We had to do it anyway.” Wild Oats XI, which equalled the record for three successive victories achieved by Claude Plowman's Morna from 1946-48 last year, failed to beat its own race record of one day, 18 hours 40 minutes and 10 seconds. Fickle conditions overnight ended their chances of breaking the record after both yachts appeared on course to eclipse it after favourable northerly winds had propelled them down the east coast of Australia to the island state of Tasmania. Ichi Ban crossed the line third in the 628-nautical mile blue water classic, about 45 minutes after Skandia. Three yachts have retired.
