Using ORC WRS VORTICES 2 earns overall win in 50th Ft Lauderdale-Key West Race

12 January 2025 - Key West, FL, USA - In one of the faster races held in its 50-year history, Chris Saxton’s J/125 VORTICES 2 has captured both overall and ORC Class 1 victory in the Storm Trysail Club’s 2025 Ft Lauderdale to Key West Race. Other class winners include Andrew Clark’s J 122 ZIG ZAG in ORC Class 2 and Dan McGraw’s Hobie 33 DARK STAR.

This 160-mile annual race is an overnight offshore racing classic, taking the fleet from the beach off Ft Lauderdale south past Miami then southwest and west along the reefs and islands of the Florida Keys to finish at the harbor in Key West.

This year’s near-perfect northwest winds of 12-20 knots produced near-record breaking conditions for the elapsed time victor, Hap Fauth’s Maxi 72 BELLA MENTE, whose time of 11h 15m 55s was just under an hour short of breaking the existing monohull record of 10h 18m 50s set by Dave and Peter Askew’s R/P 74 WIZARD in 2017.

“We pulled out all the stops for this one,” said VORTICES 2 navigator Dave Bennett. “We knew that we were doing well thanks to the ORC rating time allowance sheets. We’ve done this race many times and know some local areas on the course where there’s some favorable counter-current, but having good strong consistent breeze throughout the race was an advantage not everyone else enjoyed. The A3 spinnaker and reefed Main was incredible fast for us.”

Asked about use of WRS, Bennett commented “Use of Weather Routing Scoring makes complete sense. We have confidence in our ORC rated speeds, so using these polars with weather and current models is a no-brainer for scoring, especially compared to using any other rating solutions. The race committee in this and other SORC races have been great at knowing the weather and how to use it in ORC scoring.”

Indeed, all races of this winter season’s annual Southern Ocean Racing Conference (SORC) races in Florida have used ORC’s WRS for scoring. The results in this race’s third leg of the series were quite close in corrected times: for example, BELLA MENTE’s third place in corrected time was only 2 seconds ahead of Marty Roesch’s Mach 40.3/Class 40 VELOCITY after almost 16 hours of racing.

“It’s remarkable to consider that the class winners were so diverse in size and style of boat - a J/125, J/122 and Hobie 33 that finished 4 hours apart - yet they were within less than 2% of their corrected times,” said Storm Trysail organizer Chris Lewis, a recent past SORC champion. “This does show that the ORC ratings and WRS scoring system is working well to generate close fair results.”

For the remainder of the 2025 season, there will be numerous offshore races that are committed to using WRS as their preferred choice for scoring - including the 300+ entry Chicago to Mackinac Race in July. The ready embrace of this new ORC technology is consistent with a historic commitment that both US and Canadian organizers have had in using VPP tools and weather-based models to fairly score their most prominent races.

The results speak for themselves: winners are those who race their boats well in any conditions, not those who get lucky when their rating matches their preferred rated performance.

For more info on the 50th Ft Lauderdale-Key West Race, visit the event page

More about the ORC Weather Routing Scoring and Q&A - on WRS Q&A page