Yachting World August 2020

By now we should have seen the America’s Cup teams race at two series events in Europe in April and June. Events overtook us all, however, and the teams have migrated to New Zealand to train. Until the America’s Cup World Series in Auckland in December, not only will teams have had no opportunity to race against each other, but they are virtually sight unseen by the public and cloaked with mystique. This makes it difficult commercially for sponsors, yet the rarity of America’s Cup battle is part of its fabled, gladiatorial reputation. It flares brilliantly, then vanishes. Like the Olympics, the Cup exacts years of toil for a few scarce shots at winning. No matter how good a sailor you are, or how rich you may be, its fleeting,…

Out of the blue, only a few weeks after Googling ‘how do you go bankrupt?’, Pip Hare got a call from a tech company she had never heard of, saying they wanted to sponsor her for the Vendée Globe. The British solo sailor and Yachting World columnist has an entry in the solo round the world race but had been so short of funds that she didn’t know how she’d get her boat to the start line in November. The sponsor is Medallia, a global company that collects and analyses customer and employee experiences, and within weeks of the initial conversation they had signed a contract with Hare and miraculously turned a teetering dream of competing in the race into certainty. “It has turned everything round for me,” says Hare.…

A new foiling monohull design for the Youth America’s Cup next year has been launched in New Zealand. The first of the new one-design was launched in June from Auckland-based Yachting Developments. It has been designed by a team led by Yachting Developments’s Bob Graham. The AC9F is a different beast to immensely powerful AC75s that will compete for the Cup itself. The 29ft 6in design is a full carbon foiler with L-shaped foils, daggerboard, T-foil rudder and classic stayed rig, and looks rather like a mini hybrid version of the latest generation IMOCA 60s. It is designed to be comparatively easy to handle and will foil at speeds of 20+ knots rather than the 50 knots reached by the AC75s. The design and build of the AC9Fs was fast-tracked…

Eight-time Volvo Ocean Race skipper Bouwe Bekking and the Volvo 65 Childhood 1 were on standby in late June to set a benchmark time for a new 775-mile offshore Round Denmark Race to be held in 2021. The mainland of Denmark is not, of course, an island, so this is more a race around its coastline and easternmost islands. It can be sailed either clockwise or counter-clockwise, but typical low pressure passages will likely favour the clockwise route. “Records have always been surrounded by a certain mystique and the Round Denmark Race course has the potential to become one of the mythical distances,” says Bekking. Top Danish sailors Jens Dolmer and Olympic Bronze medallist Katja Salskov-Iversen will form part of Bekking’s crew. The record attempt will be a time trial,…

In 1931, a Yachting World correspondent who went by the name of Solent opined: ‘615 miles seemed to me too long for any yacht race by some 500-odd miles.’ But he confessed to a complete change of heart after taking part in the Fastnet Race aboard the American schooner Mistress, writing that: ‘There was not a single hour of that race that I would have missed.’ Up until then the race had been an annual event since the first in 1925, but from 1931 it would be – apart from the war years – every other year to allow it to alternate with the Bermuda Race. The inaugural event, called simply the Ocean Race, was open to ‘fully decked yachts of any rig measuring not more than 50ft and not…

email yachting.world@futurenet.com Letters may be edited as appropriate www.twitter.com/yachtingworld www.facebook.com/yachtingworldmagazine High point I agree with your conclusion in the July issue that the new First 53 is a stunning looking boat. You mention the very wide transom and, curious as I am, I checked the beam to length ratio and found to my surprise that it is roughly the same as my rather slender (by modern standards) and maybe even old-fashioned-looking Malö 43. Obviously, it is the max beam being so far aft that makes the 53 look so wide but at least being moderately beamy overall should make for a nicely balanced hull. I, too, have noticed a trend for putting winches further aft, which I like in principle for short-handed sailing, but together with twin wheels can create…