White Dolphin and her crew, led by owner Pascal Stefani and skipper Yann Delplace, were the first to cross the line off Sotogrande yesterday afternoon. But the Panerai Transat Classique 2012 is a handicap race so the organizers had to wait until Corto crossed line before announcing the winner of the second leg in corrected time. Despite some inspired navigating by her skipper and the enthusiasm of her crew, who counted among their number Maxime and Malik Abbar (son and brother of the owner respectively), Carter design Corto was unable to close the gap. So victory in leg two, a leg disrupted by tricky weather and heavy seas, goes to White Dolphin, the big white ketch built in the Beltrami and Sangermani shipyards in 1967. Her performance was especially remarkable considering she left Barcelona five hours later than her competitors, delayed as she was by the fitting of a new propeller. The yachts are now motoring up to Cascais, the legendary Portuguese marina town at the mouth of the river Tagus, where they will receive a welcome worthy of their respective performances and, of course, moor alongside the rest of the fleet which sailed in from France’s Atlantic seaboard earlier in the summer. In less than one month’s time the committee boat’s gun will signal the start of the main event of the Panerai Transat Classique 2012: the race from Cascais to the Caribbean island of Barbados.