Yachts & Yachting magazine October 2019

It has been a busy month for the Y&Y team, with the Fastnet, Cowes Week, SailGP, J/70 worlds and many other first class events taking place in what have just about passed for British summer conditions. My foulies got wetter at Cowes Week than they did most of last winter, but we had some great racing and Lawrence Mead and his team deserve praise for keeping the starts going in highly changeable conditions. Cowes Week is rightly known for its racing, but not everyone is gunning for victory at all costs. For many people it is the only regatta they do. It is a fun event and also a family event, sometimes with three generations on the same boat, like the Hill family, pictured above, who have been racing at Cowes…

British sailors were celebrating strong performances at the 2020 Hempel World Cup Series first round in Enoshima, Tokyo, which followed hard on the heels of the “Ready Steady Tokyo” Olympic Test Event in August. The 49er pairing, James Peters and Fynn Sterritt, gave the Olympic selectors something to think about by finishing second in the World Cup medal race, leaping from fifth to top the podium overall, as the German crew capsized on the final run to lose what had looked like a sure-fire gold. Meanwhile to ensure selection goes down to the wire, Dylan Fletcher and Stuart Bithell had secured silver in the 49er at the Olympic Test Event a couple of weeks earlier. The Olympic sailing team should be announced on 30 September. Ben Saxton and Nikki Boniface opened the…

The appearance of the new Hugo Boss caused a flurry of interest around the sailing world in August, as the IMOCA 60 was wheeled out of its shed for the first time and launched at Jason Carrington’s Hythe yard in Hampshire. The boat, in which Alex Thomson aims to win the 2020-21 Vendée Globe, is the result of more than two years of work by naval architects VPLP and Carrington, with a team of more than 100 engineers and boat-builders. Thomson’s team revealed few details, but a glance at the 7.6 tonne foiler shows an almost totally enclosed cockpit, those on board apparently spending most of their time under cover. We’ll get an idea how successful the design is when Thomson departs from Le Havre on 27 October in the…

£14,000 nautical miles. The nominal length of the Brest Atlantiques race which will see the four ‘major player’ Ultim maxi trimarans go head to head as they circumnavigate the Atlantic in October 2.5 metre waves and a 25 knot breeze made conditions challenging for sailors at the World Cup in Enoshima. Rolling waves and a stiff south westerly meant capsizes were plentiful 79 per cent were in favour, 21 per cent against as the International Laser Class Association voted on allowing “non-trademarked” boats to participate in class events. The rule change must now be ratified by World Sailing 5 metres is the maximum allowable draught of the canting T-Foils on the new America’s Cup boats, along with a 4m maximum wing-span. Four teams are expected to launch their boats in the next few…

“We had a good chance of a medal but gold was completely out of reach in my opinion. We got an awesome start and kept it upright. We were going quick upwind in the wind and waves and all the people that needed to do badly did badly, so we went from fifth to first in the Medal Race which is a sick feeling. Just the amount of different people that are needed to finish in different positions was crazy but it happened. You’ve just got to believe and keep pushing to the end. We’re super happy.” James Peters, who with fellow-49er Fynn Sterritt started the last day of the Enoshima Hempel World Cup Series in fifth overall but staged a remarkable comeback to finish second in the medal race for…

Flyboy As Y&Y closed for press, Yo Wiebel, world 24-hour distance record-holder on a sport catamaran, was waiting for a weather window to attempt a new record for the official WSSRC distance Cowes to Dinard-Saint Malo aboard a 15ft singlehanded iFly foiling beach catamaran. Farewell Renowned yacht designer Don Pye, co-founder of Holman & Pye in 1964, died in August aged 93. Holman & Pie was responsible for the UFO 34, which won its class in the 1979 Fastnet, as well as yachts for Bowman, Wauquiez, Seamaster, Hustler, Oyster and many one-off custom designs. Don, a popular figure on the English east coast and around the sailing world, lived to see Holman & Pie’s Rustler 36 design finish first, second and third in the 2018 Golden Globe Race. Hot topic Sailors in…