Carina has won the St. David's Lighthouse Division in the 2010 Newport Bermuda Race.

Owned and sailed by Rives Potts from Westbrook, Connecticut, with a crew blending four families, Carina is the 46th winner of the race's top trophy in the 104-year history of the race

The 48-foot McCurdy and Rhodes-designed sloop won on corrected time under the Offshore Racing Rule by a large margin of three hours, 35 minutes over Gregory B. Manning's Sarah from Warwick, Rhode Island.

Belle Aurore, a Cal 40 owned by R. Douglas Jurrius from Easton, Maryland, finished third, seven minutes behind Sarah.

Carina's chances for winning looked good but hardly certain when she finished the race at dawn on Tuesday. Her main challenge came from Belle Aurore and three other boats in Class 1, the small-boat class.

Any of them could have elbowed Carina off the victory podium had they finished by around 7.00 p.m. on Tuesday night and many sailors at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club and elsewhere spent much of the day following the quartet's progress on the online iBoattrack tracker.

But in the end, nobody was able to save their time on Carina.

The four smaller boats still did well. Belle Aurore won Class 1 and took third place in the St. David's Lighthouse Division. Two other Cal 40s, Peter Rebovich's two-time defending champion Sinn Fein, from Metuchen, New Jersey, and Bill Leroy's Gone with the Wind took second in the class and seventh in the division, and third in class and eighth in the division, respectively. The fourth boat, David G. Dickerson's Peterson 38 Lindy, was fourth in the class and 20th in the division.

Carina also won the North Rock Beacon Trophy as the top boat under the IRC rule with a margin of nearly four hours over Gracie, a custom 69-footer owned by Stephen and Simon Frank from Darien and Rowayton in Connecticut.

Gracie was also designed by McCurdy & Rhodes.

Third under IRC was Arbella, a First 44.7 owned by James Shaughnessy from Greenwich, Connecticut.

As of noon yesterday, only nine boats in the 183-boat fleet were still on the race course.

Meanwhile, Neal Finnegan's Clover III (Dedham, Massachusetts), a Swan 56, is the provisional winner of the 39-boat Cruiser Division.

Jason A. Richter's J-35 Paladin (Mt. Sinai, New York) was leading the 26-boat Double-Handed Division for boats with two sailors, with a sistership, Darren Garnier's Great Scot 34 minutes back on corrected time. In third place was the four-time winner of this division, Richard du Moulin's Express 37 Lora Ann, (Larchmont, New York).

Yesterday, five boats in that division were still on the course

On Tuesday London-based Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy's Swan 56 Noonmark VI became the provisional winner of the 13-boat Gibbs Hill Lighthouse Division for boats with professional crews, with a two and a half hour lead over Snow Lion, raced by Larry Huntington from New York..

The Open Division, for the largest and fastest boats in the fleet, was won by the 90-foot Genuine Risk, sailed by Mark Watson, representing the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, which, together with the Cruising Club of America, organised the race.

n No single boat can win the race.

The ocean classic has five divisions and 16 classes.

The 183 boats entered this year were competing for over 90 trophies including for five major division trophies under the Offshore Racing Rule (ORR) system and a one major prize for IRC that combines most boats in two divisions that choose to be dual scored. Winners in the 16 classes win perpetual trophies and up to four-deep keepers.

The St. David's Lighthouse is often regarded as the main trophy because that division is the largest with 100-plus boats and because it carries on the founder's aim to get amateurs sailing offshore in cruising-racing boats.