Tauranga yachts Open Country and Windarra are both on the start line for the third leg of the round North Island race today after surviving the stormy second leg.

The reduced fleet is expected to depart from Wellington for Napier today.

Headwinds and fierce squalls caused 13 yachts to pull out of the 505 mile second leg.

A viscous southerly storm dismasted the second yacht in the leg and caught Open Country, a Beale 35, offshore, forcing skipper Adrian McHardy to make a hard decision – fight the storm and keep a winning position, or run.

The weather change blew through Friday night with winds building to 30-35 knots and gusting to 40 knots with very high seas, says Adrian.

'Fine Line lost its mast and at that point they were about 10-15 miles ahead of us when that happened,” says Adrian.

'We were running out of options. We had changed down all our sails. We changed down all the gears until we ran out of gears and we just couldn't slow the boat down.

'The boat was jumping out of the water, and we made the call that it was better to run and live to fight another day than to risk breaking the boat or injuring ourselves.

'A hard call when you are in such a commanding position. So we ran 72 miles back to New Plymouth.”

They snuck out of New Plymouth early the following morning and caught the remnants of the southeaster which carried them down to the entrance of Cook Strait, where at 2am Monday they broke the forestay.

'We were running with the no2 spinnaker and 25-30 knots, quite nicely, and it suddenly increased to about 35 knots. We broached in the dark, laid it on its side,” says Adrian.

'When the boat finally stood up we had no fore stay. The mast is just sitting there by itself basically.

'We very quickly ran a couple of genoa halliards forward to stabilise the mast, pulled all the bits on board and continued to Wellington.

They did all this in building seas and with wind at 40 knots gusting to 45.

'You couldn't see anything, it was darker than the inside of a cow with cloud and everything else. We got all the sail off, and we jury rigged a storm jib off a forward baby stay that gave us propulsion.”

Two boats were dismasted on that leg, two sailors on different boats were injured. There were 37 starters at Mangonui, there were 24 in Wellington.