At 08:00:51 on Thursday, January 26, the Rhode Island based team Rikki crossed the Appleton Estate finish line. The team's elapsed time was 4 hours 20 minutes 55 seconds and 51 seconds.
Rikki, owned by Bruce Chafee, is a crew predominantly made up of young recent collegiate dinghy sailors, all of whom the Pineapple Cup was their longest offshore race.
Following the race Aidan Naughton, bowman and Louis Frumer, grinder had this to say about the race.
On how the race went, Louis said, "it was as expected, there were quite a few times during the first day of the race we were seeing triple zeros, but as advertised it was a nice long sleigh ride to close it out so it was all good all the way around.
The boat has a pretty strong dinghy sailing background and our M.O. is to try and sail the boat, even though it's 42-feet, sail it like a dinghy. We try to be real aggressive, move our weight around the boat as much as possible and really try to take advantage of shifts."
When asked about his favorite part of the race, Aiden said, "I think it was the triple-headsail set up. We've, well at least I have never done it before on this boat and we were cruising along. Louis added, "we were ripping right along the eastern edge of Cuba with a true wind speed in the high-teens, low twenties and we broke out the triple headsail for the first time and it all worked ... and it was awesome."
Rikki was the third and final boat to finish this year's Pineapple Cup. Full results can be found here.