Paul and Ceris Arns, along with the crew of Obsession, were crowned ORWA Siska Champions for the second year running at the 2025/26 season presentation, capping off another dominant offshore campaign in Western Australia.
Obsession, a MAT 1245 designed by Mark Mills and campaigned out of Fremantle, finished atop the Siska Trophy standings on IRC, Western Australia’s most prestigious offshore racing prize, awarded annually to the best-performed yacht across the full Blue Water and Short Haul series combined. To win it once is an achievement. To win it back-to-back, across a nine-race season that runs from September to April, is something else entirely.
A Season Built on Consistency
The 2025/26 ORWA season is a long, demanding campaign spread across nine races hosted by five clubs along the Western Australian coast. It is not a series that can be won with a couple of big results. You have to show up and perform from the opening Foundation Race in September through to the Albany Race in April.
The season kicked off with the George Law Foundation Race out of Fremantle Sailing Club in late September 2025. From there, the fleet tackled the 48nm Coventry Reef Race, followed by the West Coaster Race, a 129nm blue water passage that takes competitors offshore and down the coast, rounding out the FSC offshore block.
Aerial shots of Obsession on the delivery home from the 2026 Albany race. Photos © Elizabeth Court & Paul Dunbar.
November brought two more races: the 40nm RPYC Island Race on the 15th, plus the Blue Water race, SOPYC‘s Pieces of Eight on the 29th. The Pieces of Eight is an 80-nautical mile figure-eight course hosted by South of Perth Yacht Club that tests boats and crews across a wide range of conditions.
At the start of 2026, the Pot of Gold Race, another 40nm hosted by and finishing at Hillarys Yacht Club, got things going in January.
Then February brought Western Australia’s oldest offshore Blue Water event: the Royal Freshwater Bay Yacht Club’s Bunbury Return Race. At 170 nautical miles from Fremantle to Bunbury and back along an unlit coastline, this race has been a fixture on the WA offshore calendar since 1948. March delivered the 40nm Halls Head Race. The season wrapped in April with the RPYC 300nm Albany Race, a southern Blue Water Race that takes the yachts past Cape Naturaliste, as well as the famous Cape Leeuwin, into the Southern Ocean and onto Albany, closing out the championship.
Four of these races also make up the ORWA Blue Water Series: the West Coaster, Pieces of Eight, Bunbury and Return, and the Albany Race. Throughout these events, Obsession displayed remarkable consistency on IRC in Division 1, putting up four first-place finishes that had the team well on their way to claiming the Siska. In the same division, fellow UK Sailmakers Fremantle customer Bill Henson and the crew of Sirene placed second on IRC and finished second in the Siska overall.
Powered by UK Sailmakers Fremantle
For the second year running, Obsession raced under UK Sailmakers Titanium upwind sails and Matrix spinnakers built by UK Sailmakers Fremantle. Their ever-expanding inventory also put ISL technology to the test across several headsails, delivering speed in a wide range of conditions, from 30-plus knot starts to moderate breezes over long passages. Shape retention under load, race after race, month after month. In a nine-race series, year after year, durability matters as much as the speed numbers.
Sirene Takes Second — Another Win for UK Sailmakers Fremantle
Hot on Obsession’s heels was Bill Henson’s JPK 45, Sirene, finishing second in the Siska Trophy. Sirene is also a UK Sailmakers Fremantle customer, racing on X-Drive sails designed in collaboration with Pat Considine of UK Sailmakers Chicago and Geoff Bishop of UK Sailmakers Fremantle.
It has been a big couple of years for Sirene and her crew. In December 2024, they took on the Rolex Sydney to Hobart in the boat’s Hobart debut — 628 nautical miles of some of the toughest offshore racing in the world — and came home as IRC Corinthian Division Champions, finishing 2nd in IRC Division 2 and 15th overall from a fleet of 104 starters. That result put Sirene on the map nationally. The 2025/26 ORWA campaign has confirmed she’s a major force at home too.
To have the top two boats in Western Australia’s premier offshore series outfitted by the same loft is a result the team at UK Sailmakers Fremantle can be proud of.
Hear It From the Crew
Later this year, Paul and Ceris Arns will join us on the Lessons Learned podcast to talk through what it takes to go back-to-back in one of offshore sailing’s more demanding season formats; the tactical calls, the sail plan, and what separates consistency from luck over a nine-race series.
Congratulations to Paul, Ceris, and the entire Obsession crew on the back-to-back win, and also to Bill Henson and the Sirene team, for a stellar season in their own right.
Next up for Obsession: the 2026 Noakes Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race. Owners Paul and Ceris Arns are trucking their MAT 1245 more than 4,000 kilometres across the Nullarbor from Fremantle to Sydney for their first taste of east coast racing. The 384-nautical-mile race starts July 25, with Hamilton Island Race Week to follow. Follow along with the Obsession Racing team on Facebook for updates.
