Skipper Charlie Enright of Barrington, guided the IMOCA 60 Mālama,  from 11th Hour Racing across the finish line, almost eight and a half hours after first place finisher, Argo, which completed the course in 41 hours, 28 minutes and 48seconds, at an average speed of 15.3 knots and elapsed  the fastest time in the history of the race. Mālama finished the race with a time of 041:28:43,  is the fourth fastest. Mālama and Argo a are foil-assisted crafts and they  bookended the 100-foot Comanche’s 34h:49m mark in 2016 and the 90-foot Rambler 90’s 39h:39m time in 2012.

As Enright disembarked at Royal Bermuda Yacht Club later in the morning, he said that Mālama  experienced winds up to 35 knots and never sailed lower than 70 degrees to the wind. “It was pretty impressive,” he said, “sailing with cracked sheets upwind doing 18 knots.”

“We had some adversity, but we were able to fight through it,” said Enright, referring to issues that cropped up with electronics and rigging. “In those conditions,” he added, “we try not to come out of the water [on the foils]; we’re trying to displace as much of the boat as possible. We can control how much we come out by adjusting the rake of the foil and the extension of the foil.”