Boat owners, future boat owners, dreamer boat owners – the most common question they ask me is: ‘What’s going to make me and my boat safer?’ They want to know what my one piece of crew-overboard gear is that i’d recommend, my thoughts on which sea survival course is the best, or an instruction manual for emergency situations.

In other words they’re looking for a quick fix. i’ve got a bugbear here. you cannot buy safety. you cannot shortcut safety. safety has to be earned, and that takes time. gear and certificates don’t make you safer – not in isolation anyway.

You need another key ingredient. So what is that? What actually makes you a safer sailor?

It’s true that lifejackets, drogues, sea survival courses, an evacuation plan, knowing where the ‘arm’ button is on the EPIRB… all these things are important. but what is more important?

Sailing. the number one thing to up your safety game is simple: sail more, and get better at it. take performance boats. a common justification for buying the same length boat for double the price is speed: ‘by choosing the performance option we’ll be able to outrun bad weather.’

But the lightest, best-designed hull on the market won’t help you escape the storm unless you know how to handle it. i love performance boats. i also think fitting out your boat with good equipment is not only a safer choice, but more enjoyable to use.

And yes, investing time and money to take safety courses is prudent and necessary. but some owners spend hundreds of thousands on upgrading their boats – adding carbon rigs, nav systems, and 3di sails – yet hesitate to invest in a single day of professional coaching.

Just imagine how much faster and safer they’d be if they swapped the equivalent cost of one sail upgrade for top-class training. sometimes people justify an option like a carbon rig on safety grounds, because it reduces weight aloft. but then they reef early because they don’t have the sailing skills to push the boat to the edge.

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Thus, they probably wouldn’t escape the storm anyway, and they certainly wouldn’t see any of the slight gains of carbon vs aluminium rig (as a side note, the simple act of reefing early is a far cheaper way of achieving the same effect!). this all circles back to that old argument: qualifications versus experience.

Who’s safer, the sailor with a licence but no experience or the sailor with 10,000 miles and no certificate? the answer is neither. what matters is whether they can handle a boat efficiently and sensibly. and there’s only one way to know that – go sailing with them.

I still remember a delivery from Gosport to Liverpool for the 2017/18 Clipper Race start. On board was a full amateur crew, a few of whom had done extra training as coxswains so they could take over if anything happened to me.

So i tested them: i threw bob, our human-sized dummy, overboard and pretended it was me. they knew the theory. they’d drilled the procedure dozens of times. but when it came to turning the boat back downwind to the ‘casualty’ they couldn’t get the boat to turn.

Minutes passed and the dummy drifted out of sight, until someone finally realised easing the mainsheet might help. only after an hour of search pattern practice was bob eventually found. it was a reality check for all of us.

All the theory in the world needs to be underpinned by real sailing skills – and those skills need constant honing. for any sailor who wants to be safe, the job of learning, reflecting, and improving is never done.

So for anyone considering how to make themselves or their boat safer, i’d suggest putting as much time (and money if necessary) as you can into your actual sailing education. be picky about the sailing school you choose.

Lots of national sailing programmes do not include any practical sailing as part of their syllabuses. also remember, the quality of the education is ultimately a result of the quality of your instructor and not the sailing brand or programme endorsing them.

If you’re interested in performance sailing and short of cash, go club racing regularly to see how people don’t just sail fast, but also operate within the chaos of close quarters boat manoeuvres, and the constant stream of inevitable mistakes. because in the end, gadgets, miles, and certificates don’t make a safe sailor. time on the water does.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

Note: We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site, at no extra cost to you. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

The post Why time on the water trumps all safety gadgets and certificates – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

For a sailor, free diving is far more than a sport or a pastime. It’s a key skill with clear practical, mental, and economic benefits. I learned them firsthand in my first working season in the Mediterranean.

We were anchored over deep water and a notoriously rocky seabed on the East end of Lampedusa. With the wind quickly rising and nightfall approaching, every boat was making for their home berth. We pulled up the transom ladder and got set to follow.

My skipper was calmly hauling anchor, motoring lightly into the wind, when the windlass ground to a halt.

Anchor fouled, and no amount of give and take could free it. We hadn’t set a tripping line.

The Bay of Tabaccara in Lampedusa. Photo: Roberto Nistri/Alamy.

In no time, she produced a pair of fins. Soon she was in the water, breathing up to dive 20m down, shackle in hand. Within minutes we were free and heading back to our mooring.

That same year, we docked next to another commercial skipper and avid free diver who would set out at dawn nearly every morning, spear gun and net bag in hand.

By the time his guests stirred, he would have a fresh-caught amberjack filleted, marinated, and ready for lunch, any trace of its guts long washed off the sides of the floating pontoon (the spoils usually went to other sailors; guests had plenty else to put between their teeth).

Handy, I remember thinking on both occasions.

I quickly learned that for both these skippers, diving was not just a recreational part of life on board, but a practical help, and that I needed that skill in my arsenal.

Whether you’re a liveaboard or a working sailor, here’s how free diving can make your life at sea safer and more enjoyable, plus a few tips to get you started.

What is free diving?

Photo: Johner Images / Alamy.

First things first: what is free diving, exactly?

Free diving, or ‘apnea,’ is the most basic and essential form of diving, not to mention the oldest. There’s no breathing equipment or external sources of air.

Though it’s now a sport and a competitive discipline, it’s something we do quite naturally. You’re technically free diving anytime you go underwater and resurface on a single breath.

Sport free diving is a more structured, deliberate version of this basic concept. It can be practiced with or without fins (I’m partial to the mono), but across the board training is all about managing air supply.

There are distinct disciplines like constant weight, variable weight, free immersion, static, and dynamic, but you don’t have to worry about all that if you’re just getting started.

Just focus on the basics of breathing up, breath hold, and equalisation.

There are plenty of resources online for understanding what’s happening in your body when you dive and how to dive safely to avoid blackout and hyperventilation, though nothing replaces getting in the water and observing your physical sensations.

A variety of recognised certifications can help you start your free diving journey. Photo: Cavan Images / Alamy.

Additionally, various certifications are available from recognised bodies like AIDA, SSI, CMAS, PADI, and Apnea Academy. Almost any reputable dive shop will offer free diving courses alongside their SCUBA programs.

Regardless of where you are in your training, the most important thing while free diving is to respect your body’s limits, prioritise proper technique, and always, always dive with a buddy– not for nothing, it’s free diving’s number one rule.

Why free diving is an essential skill for sailors

Sailors are famously reluctant swimmers. We tend to be too busy skimming over the surface of the water to think much about what’s down below.

Yet basic free diving skills are a must when you’re spending a good portion of your life on or around the water.

Diving from a boat into the clear turquoise waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea in Cala Goloritzé, Sardinia, Italy. Photo: Pedro Ferrão Patrício / Alamy.

Whether it’s checking an anchor or un-snagging it, having an expanded diving range has saved my skin more than a few times.

It also gives you options.

Like that skilled skipper showed, anchoring over greater depth becomes less of a cause for concern when you have the option of freeing yourself from a rocky shelf by hand, or adding a tripping line shackle after the fact.

A fouled anchor is less of a crisis when you have an expanded diving range. Photo: Theo Stocker.

Even without diving deep, being comfortable in the water can take the stress out of some maintenance jobs and some emergency situations.

Whether it’s a fouled prop, a blocked water inlet, or a barnacle-encrusted hull and propeller, the stakes are instantly lower when you can do the job yourself.

You’ll save time, turmoil, and money in the long run if you don’t have to find dry work-arounds, or hire a diver.

Kirstin Jones won Yachting Monthly’s Brian Black Award for this striking image of discarded fishing gear thoroughly entangling her boat. Photo: Kirstin Jones.

A good skipper sailing in warmer regions should also know their territory inside-out and under.

Having localised knowledge of an area, its hidden pitfalls, and the types of seabed you’re dealing with can make navigating a coastline a whole lot safer. No chart marking or recommendation is more reliable than what you have been able to see firsthand.

For working skippers, fluency with the marine flora and fauna, hidden underpasses, cave entrances, fresh water outlets, and diveable wrecks also makes for a more enriching experience for your crew, whether it’s made of family, friends, or paying guests.

An additional skill can even turn into a selling point when running charters. With the number of sailing experiences on offer on the rise, many are turning to combo sailing-diving, sailing-kayaking, sailing-fishing, and sailing-climbing trips to stand out.

The free diving community

Free divers are the quintessential gente di mare, people of the sea, and have an unmatched connection to the water.

If they’ve been diving locally, they’re likely to have extra familiarity with the area’s coast and regular tides, currents, and conditions. There’s always much to be gained from consulting a diver for well-informed recommendations.

And divers are just like sailors– always keen to talk shop (even if they won’t share their secret fishing spots!).

A spear-fisher’s impressive catch off Linosa. Photo: Viveka Herzum.

While I’m not a spear-fisher myself, for many free divers the skill is a way to put food on the table.

It’s more affordable, not to mention sustainable, than buying your catch in town, and can prove to be a valuable provisioning resource in remote anchorages.

I’ve also found free diving to be an organic way of making friends at the pontoons. You might even find someone willing to take you on as a diving buddy.

Free diving to help out other sailors

Free diving skills can also make you useful to other members of the maritime community.

I’ve recovered lost sunglasses, dropped masks, and other personal items for guests, as well as picking up plenty of polluting debris.

When a 74-year-old solo navigator friend had a piece bounce off deck mid winch-service, getting it back to him was no problem. It was a good thing, too, as having a replacement shipped from the mainland could take weeks.

You’ll also be in a position to help out on those nightmarish, high-season days when the bays are tiled with boats and there’s a good chance of anchor chains crossing, a fluke wedging into a nasty crevice, or a chain slipping under a boulder.

I’ve been in this situation a handful of times, and it’s always rewarding to save another sailor some trouble, and spare your own vessel potential damage.

It doesn’t hurt, either, when being able to offer assistance leads to a good chat and free beer!

Mental benefits

Photo: Ashely Cooper / Getty.

Practical perks aside, a lot of the onboard benefits of free diving have less to do with the boat and more with your coping skills.

As many free divers will tell you, most of the sport is mental. It’s all about self control, and relaxation.

Being able to calm your nervous system and manage fear responses can prove just as useful when facing heavy weather conditions or unexpected situations at sea, particularly if you’re in a position of responsibility and need to do some quick problem solving. You’re no use to anyone if you’re panicking.

If you’re spending extended amounts of time onboard, you’re also likely living with several others in close quarters.

In a crowded environment, free diving can be a way to get some much-needed quiet and mental clarity. Even in the offseason, I’ve often used dry static tables to recenter.

What kit do you need to free dive?

One of the best parts of free diving is that you don’t have to worry about clunky, expensive compressors, warranties, technical malfunctions, or all that finicky kit you need for SCUBA.

However, having the right gear can be a huge help.

Freediver with monofin, exploring Blue Hole, Gozo, Malta. Photo: Blue Planet Archive LLC / Alamy.

In my case, it changed the way I dive by making it safer. With the right kit, meant I could dive for longer and track my progress.

If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably have most of what you need on board already.

First and foremost, you’ll want an appropriate free diving mask (frameless will be more comfortable as you descend and the pressure increases); a pair of fins, and a diving buoy for safety, particularly if you’re anywhere near marine traffic, though it goes without saying that you shouldn’t be.

You may also want a depth gauge, dive watch or computer, or rope if you’re training, as well as a wetsuit if you’re spending longer in the water. It gets chilly as soon as you hit the teens.

If you’re diving with a wetsuit, you’ll also need a dive belt and weights, as the extra layer changes your buoyancy.

Personally, I’m happiest with the least amount of kit possible on me. There’s nothing like feeling the temperature change directly on your skin, and feeling like you’re touching everything in the world just by sharing its water.

My free diving journey

Disclaimer: my early free diving days are a classic do as I say, and not as I have done.

I had a pretty lax, DIY approach when I first started.

I had always been comfortable equalising and holding my breath and figured I was essentially just playing around in the water, seeing how deep I could get. I wasn’t thinking much about proper technique, or even my own safety.

I figured, what could go wrong?

Photo: Viveka Herzum.

It turns out, a lot. I’ve seen plenty of accidents getting helicoptered out since then.

If you’re diving with a buddy, proper technique, and respecting your body’s limits, free diving should be perfectly safe, but I still wouldn’t underestimate the value of proper preparation.

Read up on hyperventilation and the risk of blackout before you even get in the water. It’s good to have an idea of what signals your body can send you that things are not looking good, and how you might miss them.

I fixed my bad habit of diving alone pretty quickly (sorry, everyone), but it would have been much safer and simpler to start with proper training, or at the very least an experienced diving bud.

Alas, I was sailing for work without a first mate and had a lot of time to kill alone at anchor.

I made do with what I had onboard: a bathing suit, a basic mask from Cressi, and a monofin.

My pair was a hand-me-down silicone training pair from Decathlon, three sizes too big. (There were plenty of regular split fins on board, but if you were the kid tying their ankles with elastic hairbands to dolphin kick, you’re probably not reaching for those.)

I was instantly obsessed with the extra agility and propulsion a monofin gave me, and never mind the nasty blisters. I only discovered the joys of neoprene swim socks much later.

My depth gauge was the boat’s depth sounder, or whatever markers I could count on the anchor chain.

Free diving over underwater kelp forest in Southern California. Photo: Cavan Images / Alamy.

Thankfully, by the time I started diving deeper I had a spear-fisher friend to dive with and had done a bit more training.

I had also borrowed a basic diving watch from another skipper to track my depth– I still remember my elation the first time it marked past thirty!

As any diver will tell you, those first deeper plunges were a revelation.

Diving meant temporary access to another universe of light, colour, tiny wonders, and life, even when all over the Mediterranean there seems to be less and less of it. It was cool down there, and beautiful, and ever so quiet.

I was hooked.

Free diver with monofin, surrounded by moon jellyfish. Photo: Connect Images / Alamy.

Five metres down, the colours start to cool. You can see every piece of plankton, every chunk of jellyfish, floating freely through a blanket of blue. Long, dragging tentacles, alien shapes and chunks of bitten membrane. It’s like being inside the plasma of a cell, or a strangely populated atmosphere.

Fifteen, the yellows flicker out. Twenty and on and any memory of green is gone. You’re deep in a bucket of indigo and a buzzing calm. You have to be, or you’ll burn right through your air supply.

I could pick up (and put back!) pen shells, spot sea turtles and schools of barracudas; spend hours playing with octopus, learning to follow their traces.

I followed lungs of damselfish into underwater cathedrals made of black basalt; got inches from the all-too-trusting groupers that hide there; and watched schools of dreamfish wrap around me in a silvery cocoon.

Swimming through a cloud of damselfish in the Mediterranean. Photo: Mikko Suonio / Alamy.

But spending a lot of time in the waters of the Med also meant witnessing its gradual devastation.

Every year, I swam over shoals emptier than the season before.

The view from down below

Overall, free diving has made my life as sea safer and more social. It has given me a leg up on maintenance and some sticky anchoring situations, as well as an extra bank of submarine knowledge to draw on.

Over time, being both a sailor and a free diver has also made me a more mindful citizen of the sea, and helped me appreciate that living, working, and playing on the water comes with a degree of responsibility.

Its not a new refrain. Firsthand knowledge often plays an role in conservation; people tend to protect what they care about, and to care about what they know. I’m no exception.

But it’s thanks to free diving that even while I’m sailing, I never forget what’s happening below.

Suunto Ocean Smart Diving and sailing watch Review

Specifications: Display: 1.43-inch AMOLED color display with sapphire glass and stainless steel bezel. Battery Life: Up to 60 hours in dive…

Diving from a boat – advice from the experts

As cruisers, we can find ourselves in some of the most beautiful places this world has to offer. But more…

If you enjoyed this article about free diving….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

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The post Below the surface: Why every sailor should learn to free dive and how to start appeared first on Yachting World.

You probably saw the collision between the Allagrande Mapei Racing and Team Holcim PRB IMOCAs just moments after the start of the Ocean Race Europe. In the way spectacular disasters are, it was as harrowing as it was addictive to watch. The ease at which Holcim’s foil cut through Allagrande’s headsail cloth was sickeningly impressive, and it’s lucky no one was hurt. But it was also proof of how remarkable these boats are.

The crash was a hearty reminder for us all: mistakes happen, even to the most skilled sailors. If you’re human, you make mistakes, especially in sailing. We need high-profile moments like this to change the culture around mistakes and to remind us that errors don’t make you a bad sailor.

There’s a story many new sailors tell themselves: “When I get good enough at sailing, I won’t mess up anymore.” Perfection feels like the goal, but that’s a myth: perfection is unachievable.

The reality is that mistakes are inevitable. Just consider all the factors that go hand-in-hand with sailing: fatigue, stress, appetite for risk, cognitive overload. Then combine it with the context of changeable weather, unpredictable competitors and high stakes decisions. It’s ludicrous to think otherwise.

I believe we all get allocated the same number of mistakes in life. They just scale relative to your environment and abilities.

Beginner sailors make ‘rookie’ mistakes like tying fenders wrong and dropping them overboard or putting up the wrong headsail.

Intermediate sailors make bolder mistakes, like reefing too late or making sloppy nav calls, usually just when they need a reminder to stay humble.

There was also a crash in Leg 7 of the last Ocean Race

Pros make high speed, high stakes mistakes like aggressive start line tactics or split-second miscalculations. What changes as you progress isn’t the quantity of mistakes you make, it’s the type of mistakes. And while a crash in the Ocean Race might seem bigger than a poorly tied knot, I’ve seen beginners suffer near-panic over small errors. How awful a mistake feels has more to do with you than the slip-up itself.

I hate making mistakes. I hate looking silly or messing up, or worse: being blamed. It probably stems from a fear of rejection. It’s something I have to actively work on.

Mistakes are part of learning and avoiding them means avoiding improving. And the more we fear mistakes the more likely we are to make them. Just put someone under pressure and watch them tie a knot while shouting the oh-so-tempting “hurry up” and you’ll see their hands shake, their brain fog over and voila, it will be tied wrong.

When mistakes happen, what matters most is how you manage them. My mother’s voice still rings in my ears: “I don’t care who started it. Just sort it.” She was talking to my brothers and younger self, but it’s just as relevant at sea. If mistakes are inevitable and we all suffer the same amount, then worrying about blame in the moment is useless. Just look at Kiel: both teams immediately set about repairing their boats to make the next leg. The protest will be resolved later, but the priority was getting back in the race.

Article continues below…

‘Why is anchoring still such a misunderstood skill?’ – Nikki Henderson

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On the day the Kiel crash dominated my social news feed, I was helping friends handle a mini crisis of their own. One crew member’s passport had been packed in the wrong bag and was halfway to Hamburg on a Boeing 777. If we’d wasted time focusing on whose fault it was, we’d have missed the window to get the passport on the return flight. But we let it go, jumped into action, and two generous strangers ferried it back across the Atlantic just in time for departure. Faith in humanity, restored.

So, if you want to help make sailing more welcoming for us all, leave the blame behind. If you, or someone else makes a mistake, focus first on sorting out the problem then, second, reduce the chance of it happening again by analysing, learning and implementing better systems.

So, thank you Holcim PRB, Allagrande Mapei, and the Ocean Race team for giving us a real-life example of elite sailors learning from, not hiding from, their errors.

The goal isn’t to eliminate mistakes; it’s to handle them well. Sure, the crash was expensive, dangerous and costly in the moment. But maybe it will save others from similar fates – not by avoiding mistakes entirely, but by avoiding the catastrophic aftermath that comes when errors are buried instead of addressed.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

Note: We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site, at no extra cost to you. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

The post ‘The crash was a reminder for us all’ – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

Yet another wave slammed into our topsides. The carbon drum hull of the yacht we were racing echoed with a thunderous hum as we accelerated, surfing a wave. We were flying! And then we weren’t. SLAM. The boat crash-gybed, rounded up violently and then stalled.

The companionway was a mass of people scrambling into foulies. The boat slopped about in irons. Gong, gong, gong went the broken checkstay as it swung and clanged against the rig.

And me? I stood frozen, can opener in hand, assessing the carnage. Amazingly, the pan was still on the stove. But its contents? The ceiling had turned red. The floor resembled a murder scene of squashed meat. I put my hand to my forehead, dreading the clean up, only to feel coagulated tomato paste binding my already-matted hair into one sticky lump.

As the least experienced crew member, being relegated below decks during an emergency is a rite of passage for offshore sailors. This was one of my first.

I was 18, on a 78ft maxi, somewhere between Sicily and Gibraltar, fresh out of school, and very green. Fortunately in that moment, green in skill, rather than seasickness.

The first days after jumping aboard a new boat can feel like a return to the school playground. You want to fit in. Hopefully, a vacant task reveals itself.

The galley is a good place to start. There’s always something to do. You become popular fast – who doesn’t adore someone who feeds them? Menu planning, provisioning and preparing three meals on shore as well as at sea is full on. So it keeps you ‘out the way’ and gives you purpose.

Early in my career, it served me well. I built practical skills and learnt a vital rule: never serve meatballs in a blow.

Article continues below…

Be careful though, while ‘inside’ jobs may feel like the natural fit for less experienced crew members, this seemingly efficient role-allocation may not serve the crew well in the long term. A pattern I’ve seen again and again, especially working with new boat owners and cruising couples, is that the more experienced person ends up on deck – sailing, fixing and making decisions, while the less experienced often ends up inside cooking, cleaning and organising.

Initially, everyone is happy. The boat doesn’t crash in the marina, you get to where you’re going on time, and the boat interior stays orderly.

But as time goes on, trouble arises. The ‘captain’ gains skill and their crew feel comparatively less knowledgeable so their confidence decreases. They don’t challenge their captain or ask questions so the captain’s progression also hits a ceiling.

The crew starts to avoid deck time. Instead they take full ownership over the galley and their comfort zone deepens. One day, if the captain puts something away in the wrong place, they’re scolded for interfering. Lesson learned, the captain now stays on deck and, just like that, the gap widens.

This doesn’t just happen with couples, but also with friends, families and even professional teams. Often, the more one person or group of people grows, the more others pull back. And, without realising it, they flatline in skill and confidence.

Rotate the galley jobs too. Photo: Lumi Images

So, here’s my advice: level up early.

In the beginning, slow the growth of the more experienced sailor – just for a moment – and focus on the other. Share the throttles and parking responsibilities. Make decisions collaboratively. Practice sail changes together. Take turns fixing the heads. Give each other space to fail and learn.

And don’t stop at the helm. Rotate the galley jobs too. Share the provisioning runs, the cooking, the cleaning. Because the truth is when everyone on board can handle both the deck and the dishes, the confidence builds in both directions.

Given time to reap the rewards you’ll start to build a proper team.

Growing and learning together will strengthen your relationship. Everyone on board will have the freedom to have an ‘off-day’ knowing that someone else has the skill to take up their slack.

And, the best bit, sailing plans tend to match the least confident person on board so if you’re equally matched in skill, you’ll be able to set your sights on more ambitious sailing plans and destinations. Level up and find freedom.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

Note: We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site, at no extra cost to you. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

The post Why you should always aim to share all roles onboard… both above and below decks appeared first on Yachting World.

As the sun slipped below the horizon, so did the noise of the day. The thermal wind softened, the engine fan stopped whirring, and the last of the tourist boats swung into port. In that quiet moment of reflection that one takes at dusk, I was living every sailor’s dream.

We were anchored off the coast of the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve. This remote north-western tip of Iceland is only accessible by boat. Four or five waterfalls cascaded fresh glacial melt down the horseshoe of mountains and into the fjord that was our home for the night. In this isolated northern outcrop of the globe just the hardiest of sea creatures, birds and puffins went about their business on the rocky shores. Otherwise we were entirely alone.

We are living in the age of hydrofoils, carbon fibre and satellites. Our world is getting faster paced and more determined than ever to leap into the future with greater efficiency. And yet, the core components of the universal sailing experience remain the same: simplicity, stunning scenery, self-sufficiency, serenity and solitude.

Are we putting too much emphasis on cutting-edge technologies and forgetting the fundamentals of a good day on the water? Are we at risk of losing touch with our roots?

Anchoring is – literally – one of sailings’ grounding cornerstones, an ancient art that dates back millennia. Devised not long after the boat itself, anchoring began with a large rock and a rope. By Roman times the original ‘anchor rocks’ were shaped to include prongs making them more transportable and better at temporarily digging into the seabed.

Article continues below…

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‘Does anything ever go completely to plan at sea?’ – Nikki Henderson

Back in December I reminded myself what ‘too close for comfort’ feels like. After 18 days at sea, my crew…

Modern anchors now have hinge points and different designs to suit boat sizes and seabeds, but they’re still basically a heavy thing attached to a warp. For sailors, anchoring marks a shift from moving to being.

As one of sailing’s most unchanged fundamentals, are we giving anchoring enough credit? It’s easy to become so focussed on optimisation, that we’re perhaps brushing over those core skills. From an educational standpoint, anchoring, like many other basic sailing principles (hoisting and dropping sails, tying knots or driving by the feel of the wind on our faces), is often undertaught and misunderstood.

Recently I hosted a webinar to explain how to deploy or weigh an anchor without a windlass. Many of the participants – regular cruisers and boat owners – hadn’t ever been formally taught how to do it. And if they had been taught, they didn’t really understand the whys and hows.

I explained: sit still counteracting effects of the wind or tidal stream, drop the hook plus two- to four-times the depth of the water in chain or warp or both, fall back against it, see if it holds, and pay about the same amount of warp again. If the electricity fails, pull or ease it by hand and use a mechanical aid like a winch or a purchase system to help you control it.

The wide eyes looking back at me were indicative of the disbelief. Is it really that simple? It’s as if, with everything in sailing becoming so complicated, it can be hard to grapple with something so basic as a pulley system or the effects of a metal hook, chain, gravity and the seabed.

This begs the question, why hasn’t anchoring evolved? Is there a better solution? Just as furling can be more effective than hoisting and dropping, is an anchor just too inefficient?

No. Anchoring is still used, because anchoring works. There’s no computer program that can beat the feel of the boat yanking back on a good set. There is no phone application that can feel as trustworthy as thousands of years worth of evidence proving that something works.

Maybe it could – like other ‘old-school’ practices – be filtered out for a ‘better way’. It’s not that crazy to imagine a future in which we keep the engines on to hold station in one spot overnight because it’s ‘safer’ and easier to fit more boats into a bay if we don’t have to deal with the unknowns of swinging, holding and wind shifts. The memory of a silent night alone will be a tale from ‘the good old days’.

So while I’m all for making sailing more accessible, I think we should tread with caution when it comes to optimisations. We often chase new ideas thinking that improvements and complexity are better, but sometimes simplicity is mastery. Anchoring is a quiet reminder that some things are better left unchanged.

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The post ‘Why is anchoring still such a misunderstood skill?’ – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

If you ride an e-bike you’ll be used to being called a cheat. You’ll also be familiar with the way opinion has polarised in the cycling world on their benefits versus downfalls, particularly where there has been criticism from walkers who blame e-powered mountain bike riders for ripping up the countryside.

But what a game-changer they are, allowing you to explore further afield while making it more fun for those who’d otherwise be at the back of the pack.

Now, think about what might happen if sailing went down a similar route? If we thought that the foiling debate had stirred things up, just wait until the issue of powered race boats gets under the sailing public’s skin.

Because the next hot topic that the racing world looks set to grapple with is arguably even bigger. How much power can you use aboard a boat before it strays beyond the definition of sailing? Should electrical assistance be allowed at all? Some will doubtless argue that we shouldn’t even be talking about how much, as any assistance from power while racing is wrong.

Years ago, I remember being told by a fellow crew member about a rather unethical racing owner who was trying to convince the skipper and crew that running the engine in gear during a drifter of a race ‘just for a little bit’ was completely okay. He argued that it was fine as it would only be for a short distance and he promised he would switch it off as soon as they reached the little bit of wind that was currently out of their reach.

Article continues below…

‘The America’s Cup has always been pushing boundaries’ – Matt Sheahan

For a great pub quiz question, when was the first America’s Cup race? The answer to sailing fans is obvious:…

‘I don’t want to watch sailing with a calculator’ – Matthew Sheahan on Olympic Sailing for Spectators

How was your summer season? If you went to a major event like Olympic sailing, did you wonder where everyone…

For years, ‘just a little bit’ became the running joke aboard our boat when we were faced with the same lack of breeze or adverse tide. Clearly, turning the motor on is a ridiculous thought in sailing races. Or is it?

Last year SailGP revealed it was experimenting with an electric propulsion system that could provide a performance boost for teams to get their F50 cats back up onto their foils in light winds. On the face of it, a clever idea to help to keep the racing close and fair to all when the breeze is fickle and patchy.

When you look at the self-imposed tight two-day racing schedule and a small race course placed close to the shore to entertain the spectators in the stands it’s easy to understand why SailGP finds itself struggling with light shifty breezes so often. Add to this venues that don’t always provide clear breeze and it’s clear that developing bigger wing sails and lower drag foils have been a big plus for the racing.

Yet, while the F50s will fly in ludicrously light winds, when they do fall off the foils the races often become a lottery.

So, a little boost from some small, lightweight electric motors would keep the racing alive through the sticky patches. Controversial? Yes. But if the AC75s hadn’t been allowed to be towed up onto their foils before the start in the last Cup we’d have had a whole load of scores missing off the board. In the cruising world few think they are cheating if they motor-sail.

For all the thrill of the foiling racing, SailGP is much less adrenaline inducing in ‘low rider’ mode. Photo: SailGP

The power output of some of the small electric motors today is staggering and as batteries get more efficient the prospects of being able to do this are increasing.

The boat that got me thinking about how different the future might look when it came to electric power was the new Magic Carpet-e, which some are saying is the most advanced new Maxi to have been launched in many years. I spent a couple of days aboard this 100-footer and the electrical power system that drives the boat, the winches, the hydraulics – in fact everything – is fascinating. It’s a proof of technology on a scale I’ve not seen before in the sailing world.

While this is a boat that doesn’t seek to use her engine when racing she will be used actively as a cruising yacht as well and depend on her electric system for everything. Having experienced what an all-electric boat is like at this scale and seen the technology behind the scenes, I was not only blown away, but left thinking where the lessons learned may lead us.

In the meantime, while chatting to a few of the crew in the evening we got onto cycling. They told me about their road bikes with electric gears instead of cables and how it saved weight and made the gear changes much more efficient. I appreciate I’m behind the curve on this, but it seems small electric motors are weaving their way into life wherever we look.

Sailing could be next.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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Note: We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site, at no extra cost to you. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

The post Can battery powered boats really be called sailing boats? – Matt Sheahan appeared first on Yachting World.

Our defences have run out: social media has well and truly infiltrated our precious, antiquated sailing world. It’s terrifying to think that our secret passage to escapism and isolation at sea has been discovered. But, like most things that scare us, could there be a thrilling aspect to this challenge?

Decades ago, sailors could go ‘dark’ and justifiably claim the atmospheric conditions weren’t great and the SSB radio wasn’t working. Now, if we don’t live stream every part of daily life at sea, our followers feel disappointed.

As this past Vendée Globe has demonstrated, raw, unedited, and ‘real’ daily updates are now considered the norm. It’s expected – by sponsors, race organisers and content-craving supporters. And so, life at sea for any sailing professional has changed. Now we have to adapt to not one, but two higher powers: Mother Nature, and her fierce deputy: The Algorithm.

Depression in the face of a storm is never useful for a sailor. The shift has happened, and there is no going back. So we need to adjust our course and harness its power.

One upside to wide stream internet at sea is that, when used effectively, it provides a platform for lesser-known sailors to gain recognition and ‘win’ in a broader sense. Violette Dorange is a fantastic example of this. She now has 650,000 followers on Instagram and 3.1 million likes on TikTok, having come 23rd in her first Vendée Globe.

To put Violette’s online prowess into perspective, race winner Charlie Dalin has 73,000 followers on Instagram.

Starting the Vendée at all is considered the pinnacle of many a solo-sailing career. But to get noticed among a fleet of 40 incredible competitors is another feat, and one she mastered with aplomb.

Article continues below…

Online sailing communities and apps: Speaking to Sailing La Vagabonde stars

Fleeting acquaintance has always been part of sailing, particularly for bluewater cruisers. A friendship struck up over a rum cocktail…

10 women doing great things in competitive sailing right now

With a Women’s America’s Cup due to start in 2024, a gender balanced sailing event at the Paris Olympic Games,…

That impact will be a huge bonus for Violette as her career develops. There’s no doubt she will go on to achieve great things in sailing, and her social media mastery will be part of that story.

Another positive thing about social media and an increased online presence for sailing is how it casts the net wider. Participation in major sailing events around the world is decreasing and it’s a major problem. We need to attract more people back to – or new people into – the sport.

US ocean racer Cole Brauer has nearly half a million followers on Instagram, including many of those harder-to-reach audiences: women, younger people. Most of her followers were non-sailors – she told Yachting World that many followers didn’t even know she was competing in a solo race.

Maybe you think that’s silly. I think it’s brilliant. Sailing at the top of ‘normal’ people’s newsfeeds normalises the sport and will inevitably tempt more people onto the water.

But while I do have some enthusiasm for social media, I believe we need to heed caution. There is a shadowier side to the cyber influence at sea.

Professional racers are now expected to document ever moment of their race. Photo: Pip Hare Ocean Racing / Medallia

Practically, it’s really hard work. Memories of endless ‘liquid detected in charging port’ alerts, trying to work a smartphone screen with wet fingers, and having to look at myself speaking into a camera after four days at sea with minimal sleep still haunt me.

But now that demand for social media output has spiked, will it negatively impact sailing performances? Is it actually possible to sail with the exceptional superiority and focus of racers like Charlie Dalin or Yoann Richomme, and put out the quantity of social media required?

People have always followed sailing for the drama and the adventure. It’s what made Ellen MacArthur, Pete Goss and Peter Blake such household names – they had an epic story to tell. But, they told their stories with hindsight. Now we are demanding a real-time connection to the action and to the personal journey of the sailors. Will that push them to make seamanlike choices?

I could easily imagine a scenario where a skipper might feel pressured to wake up the off-watch in an ocean race for a sail change, not because they need to, but because it could make for better drama. We’re already pushing humans to the edge with the increasing speed of ocean racing boats – is a social media output quota a step too far? Guidelines are going to be needed, and soon.

Ultimately sailors are optimists and adaptable. But before we resign our fate to algorithms, we need to work out how to integrate this – possibly wonderful – tool into our sport in a healthy way.

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Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post ‘Has ‘social media influencer’ sailing gone too far?’ – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

Back in December I reminded myself what ‘too close for comfort’ feels like. After 18 days at sea, my crew and I finished an Atlantic crossing and parked up in Rodney Bay, St Lucia, with around 5lt of usable diesel left – barely a couple of hours run time for our 60hp Volvo.

You could look at that and consider it an example of exceptional seamanship and precise fuel management – a perfect plan. Barely a drop in the tanks more than needed!

Or you may judge it a reckless ‘near-miss’. Just one unexpected variable such as a messy sea state or dirty fuel, and we’d have been stuck, windless and embarrassingly fuel-less, in sight of land.

Whether you judge it good or bad; two things hold fast. 1) Cut it fine and get away with it and you have a great story in the bar. 2) Dig deeper, and there’ll be lessons to learn.

So, was it luck? Or a masterful plan that came together?

A month earlier, I joined friends of mine on their new home: a 45ft catamaran. The boat was brand new. They’d sailed her straight out of the factory to the Canaries. By the time I joined them they had a few thousand miles under their belt, and the very short list of warranty issues meant a crossing before Christmas was viable. Good news!

We prepared together for almost a week, at which point a brilliant weather window awaited us. As is my routine on joining a boat, I gathered data.

Sailing across the Atlantic into the setting sun

On the fuel specifically: the crew had been monitoring rpm and engine hours from new. From always running the engines in gear at 2,000rpm, and then cross referencing their logged engine hours with the diesel they added to the tanks on their first fill up in Tenerife, they knew the engine was burning 3.8lt/1gal per hour, which matched the fuel consumption curve as per Volvo’s manual.

So, we made an educated assumption that the graph could be used to accurately predict fuel consumption for lower rpms and assumed a 2.2lt/hr burn at 1,800rpm.

At 2,000rpm the boat made 6.2 knots in a flat sea; at 1,800rpm it was 5.4 knots. The power generation was similarly significantly more efficient at lower rpm. On a cloudy day at sea, the power draw on the batteries required five hours of running the engines at 1,800rpm to bring the batteries back up to 100%.

According to the manufacturer’s manual the boat had two diesel tanks of 250lt each and 90% of the fuel in each tank was usable in practice. So, we had 450lt of usable fuel. We then added four 20lt jerry cans as an emergency reserve – which would offer us 125 miles range at 2,000rpm or 160 miles at 1,800rpm.

Assuming a 28-day crossing in which every day was cloudy, we’d need 308lt [28x5x2.2] for charging, and would have 142lt remaining [450-308] for motoring. That would mean 40 hours, or just over 200 miles of range.

Article continues below…

Most of our life on land we spend hiding from ourselves. But at sea there is no escape – Nikki Henderson

Ahoy there, from halfway to the Caribbean! This is my third attempt at writing this column. The first go was…

‘Boat ownership is a wildly impractical love affair, and gets complicated when you’re smitten’ – Nikki Henderson

Being a professional sailor, I realise how stupid this is, and I really should know better. From working for owners…

As each day of the crossing progressed, we recalculated these figures to take into account our real-time progress, the reduction of charging time needed due to solar generation, and the future weather forecast.
But despite our meticulous planning and monitoring we encountered a few surprises. Does anything ever go completely to plan at sea?

During a bilge inspection on day 14, we discovered a stamp on each of the fuel tanks showing their capacity was 230lt and not the 250lt stated in the boat manual. Lesson: check the tanks match the manual.

On the penultimate day, our starboard engine stopped as we’d run its tank ‘dry’. So despite the manual stating that 90% of the fuel is usable, in reality it was 84%. Lesson: find out what the real-time ‘bottom’ of the tank is before you face a wind hole on day 17 of an Atlantic crossing.

We’d been running our two engines in sync, to avoid one having too many more hours than the other. So, when one tank reached bottom, the other wasn’t far off and there was no scope to change strategy. Lesson: avoid stressing all the systems at the same rate.

The jerry cans saved the day. We hadn’t expected to use them at all. Lesson: the extra weight of the odd jerry can of fuel can save a whole load of stress.

So to sum up, assumptions and ambiguity are a sailor’s worst nightmare. Test everything, never guess. And have a back-up plan.

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Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post ‘Does anything ever go completely to plan at sea?’ – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

Close to the Spinlock stand at Boot Düsseldorf earlier this year were three white plastic dogs, canine mannequins sporting three sizes of the Spinlock ‘Fido’, the company’s dog flotation vest.

Despite being featureless statues, when real dogs passed by they seemed to know exactly what they were looking at as they stopped to take a sniff. Even when there was more than one dog present, they still explored the mannequins rather than each other. It was comical to watch.

Once Fido had been inspected by each real dog, it was time for a quick drink from the strategically placed water bowl before moving on – at least they would have done had their owners not inevitably been distracted in the meantime by the Spinlock stand’s wares.

“It’s been like this all week,” said one of the Spinlock staff. “We didn’t intend this to happen, we just brought the models to exhibit our new lifejackets. But the response has been impressive and has brought all kinds of people onto our stand.”

As I strolled through the show’s 18 huge halls that provide a spectacular reminder as to just how big the watersports scene is, it was also apparent that tough times often bring out the most creative solutions. Boot Düsseldorf 2025 had plenty of examples of this.

Be it power or sail, it seems new boat sales are facing challenging times right now. Fairline Yachts’ precarious financial position was just one of several talking points on the powerboat side of the exhibition, while in the yacht halls it was the number vacant spaces that were being discussed among the regular show goers.

Article continues below…

Best Yachts of 2025: European Yacht of the Year 2025 Winners

The European Yacht of the Year 2025 winners were announced this evening, Saturday 18 January 2025 on the first night…

The Hottest Yachts and Trends for 2025

Yachting Monthly’s Theo Stocker and Yachting World’s Toby Hodges have been scouring the halls of Boot Düsseldorf 2025, and after…

In Hall 16, which has been yacht central for as long as I can remember, giant potted plants and casual seating tried to mask the areas where some of the biggest European builders would normally have been. But it takes more than a few pot plants to disguise the absence of Hanse, Bavaria, Dehler, Oyster and Elan who were among those that had chosen not to come this year.

The theories for the lack of attendance were varied, the two most popular being the costs of exhibiting at Boot and the big increases in production costs that have wiped out any profit on boats that were sold on long lead times.

Among those that were in attendance were some exciting new launches from builders who’d shown us fancy renderings last year as they explained what was in store for 2025. Now they were here for real.

X-Yachts was proudly displaying one of its most ambitious design projects to date with the launch of its ORC-focussed race boat, the XR41. For a luxury production builder that has spent so much time developing its extensive range of performance cruisers, to invest in a fully optimised production racer was an impressive display of self-confidence.

Nautor Swan has done much the same with the ClubSwan 43 and 28, two exciting new models that were also revealed 12 months ago and promised for this year.

Grand Soleil was showcasing its super-sleek, super-Italian, Grand Soleil Blue, not just good looking but claimed to be 100% recyclable.

Last year French builders Wauquiez revealed renderings that looked more like radical blue sky thinking than a boat that would become reality – and yet here it was, the all-new Wauquiez 55 (see Yachting World’s YouTube channel for Toby Hodges’s boat tours and highlights from Boot).

Saffier, best known for its range of day cruisers, had taken a similarly big leap into new territory with its SL46 Med, an elegant performance cruiser.

Contest was revelling in the success of its immaculately presented 63-footer that won the luxury cruiser category of European Yacht of the Year while J-Boats was wearing its winner’s badge with pride too after the J/40 took the award for best performance cruiser.

All were drawing attention and all were displaying new, innovative and stylish features.

But if the daily queues to get on board were a reflection of popularity, Beneteau’s new First 30 was a winner from the off. Designed as a planing 30-footer that’s as much fun to race as it is to cruise, Beneteau has gone back to basics and created a modern day version of its hugely popular First 30 from the 1970s.

So, while the world’s biggest indoor marine show provided mixed messages about the state of the industry, exhibitors prepared to follow their noses were pulling in the crowds.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post ‘Why it was all-change at Düsseldorf Boat Show 2025’ – Matt Sheahan appeared first on Yachting World.

Ahoy there, from halfway to the Caribbean! This is my third attempt at writing this column. The first go was interrupted by a squall. We underestimated its strength, surfed down a wave at 19 knots and then spent the rest of the watch slightly overly vigilant, as if that would make up for our previous 35-knot misjudgement.

Attempt No2 was on my 0300-0600 watch. After a coffee, several snacks, meandering down the B&G settings menu with no purpose, and two log entries made exactly to the minute on the hour, I conceded that writing was not a sufficiently ‘staying-awake’ activity – and stepped outside to stargaze.

With Starlink I quickly realised I could log in every day – and yes, write an article about sailing, for sailors, while sailing – but I could also follow the Vendée Globe tracker, and see the solo racers thrashing about in the Southern Ocean, hitting speed records, and sleeping in 20-minute intervals. Their concerns are in a different league to mine, moaning about 35 knots or struggling to write a column on a 3am watch. So, having put my ‘struggle’ into perspective (in other words, comparative luxury) I’m knuckling down.

Offshore sailing has a way of putting your life, and your ‘problems’, into perspective. A sailing friend of mine, Sophie, once told me that offshore sailing is a magnifier for your romantic relationship. It exposes the cracks and blows them up, like it does for the boat itself. You don’t go to sea to save your relationship, you go to sea to find out what needs work!

Article continues below…

‘Boat ownership is a wildly impractical love affair, and gets complicated when you’re smitten’ – Nikki Henderson

Being a professional sailor, I realise how stupid this is, and I really should know better. From working for owners…

‘Seamanship isn’t about sailing slowly’ – Nikki Henderson

The sailing world is small. But of the 350 or so passengers on board the Boeing 777 I took recently…

Going to sea magnifies your reality. My crewmate, George, and I were comparing sailing to his previous life in the US marine core. Just as on the front line, at sea problems aren’t self-manufactured, they’re real. The watermaker breaking and the risk of running out of water is real. Big winds, ferocious seas, broken sails and a broken boat are risks that require real management every day. And, as we were reminded by the tragic news from this year’s ARC, going overboard and being lost at sea is a real possibility too.

That realness pulls us into the present. The lack of convenience, security and comfort and the focus this ‘real’ life requires, the less time we have to spend worrying about all the things we normally worry about. Being caught up in being ‘busy’, social expectations, how we look, what car we drive… Once we’re separated from all of that we cannot help but ask ourselves: what is actually important to me?

What I’ve seen during my career is that we all basically have the same answer. Strip away all the luxuries and – beyond food, water, and a dry bed – the most important thing in all our lives is love. People, pets, special places, and perhaps a few meaningful trinkets; when you are out here, you realise who and what you miss. It’s who we cannot stop thinking about. Survival and connection: it’s all we really need.

But as Sophie so aptly observed, magnifying your life isn’t always comfortable. It highlights weak points and chasms. We realise how much time we’ve wasted on meaningless endeavours. Offshore we find clarity on what, or even who, we need to let go of.

But without a doubt, the most challenging part of reality to face out here is ourselves.

Most of our life on land we spend hiding from ourselves. But at sea there is no escape. Eventually your baggage, stress, uncomfortable thoughts, character traits – good and bad – will be reflected back at you. At sea the confined space, the intensity of the experience, and the sheer presence it requires, blow YOU up onto the big screen.

Even with Starlink now providing us with the greatest distraction known to humankind (the internet), there is still no avoiding the mirror that’s held out here. Because a power even greater than the internet – Mother Nature – still dominates. So eventually we have to take a long, hard look at ourselves.

As George and I discussed, not only do we have to look but we also have to work through what we see. Because some of those scars we bear, habits and personality traits, can get in the way of dealing with the ‘real’ problems at hand.

And here lies the gold mine to be found at sea: an opportunity to fundamentally change who you are and how you see the world. There’s treasure out here, come and take a look…

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post Most of our life on land we spend hiding from ourselves. But at sea there is no escape – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

Being a professional sailor, I realise how stupid this is, and I really should know better. From working for owners and using their credit cards to pay the bills, I know full well that the saying ‘owning a boat is like standing in a shower and ripping up bank notes’ rings true.

I’ve now learned that process begins right at the purchase stage, because apparently it’s a rite of passage to buy a boat that’s triple your original budget…

Like any sensible sailor, I called upon the advice of trusted friends, colleagues and clients. Should I buy the boat? Am I crazy?

Naturally, I picked my advisers carefully: all people who would say ‘YES!’ Romantics, who don’t care for details. Remortgage my house? Sure! Spend a significant proportion of my income on berthing fees? Dreams are priceless!

Boat infatuation is intoxicating. I’m coming to realise that buying a boat is like embarking on a new relationship. The first stage is the dreamy honeymoon phase. Your love can do no wrong! Even their flaws are endearing. Looking up at the deckhead, I saw some water damage. “Hmm, it looks like the deck is leaking. I’d probably enjoy replacing the teak.” Right…

What happens next? The sugar coating will wear thin. Flaws become irritating, infuriating. Lesson 1: just like people we can’t expect boats to change. Especially older ones – they really get stuck in their ways.

Article continues below…

Second hand boats: Buying a yacht to upgrade

Among brokerage listings it’s rare to see a yacht openly advertised as ‘work needed’. After an initial conversation, the potential…

Second hand boats: How to finance a yacht

If you are one of the many boat owners who buys with cash, then great – you can saunter on…

So, the second stage is one of realisation. Realising that her slow acceleration upwind wasn’t just a bad day; it’s who she fundamentally is. Understanding that she will never be as tidy as you want her to be. And, disappointingly, she will always – always – groan and creak in her sleep at anchor.

From realisation to withdrawal. After a time, all those flaws are going to feel too overwhelming to cope with. Maybe you made a bad call? You want out? You might be getting frustrated, angry even. But you’ve committed now. There’s no easy ‘out’. No-one wants to buy an unloved boat. So, defeated, you’ll resort to apathy.

“How’s the boat going?” your enthusiastic advisers will enquire, excited at the prospect of onboard sailing holidays (the real reason they all encouraged you to buy the boat).

“Don’t even ask,” you reply, as you dream of dry earth, a house far from the sea, possibly becoming a farmer…

So why go through this pain and misery? There are thousands of repeat offenders, who are into their second, third, even fourth boat marriage. There must be a good reason? Ah, the final stage: true love. To pull in another cliché: ‘stormy seas make better sailors’.

The first phase of owning a boat is the ‘honeymoon phase’

The conflict, the aggravation, possibly depression, are all a necessary and unavoidable part of the process. If you do it right, out of fury emerges an honest acceptance of one another and a sense of deep almost connection and love. Now you have the boat of your dreams.

But dreams are never quite as imagined. The final stage: heartbreak. You lie awake at night worrying about her in a storm. You feel guilty for not maintaining her better. You reluctantly have to say no to other opportunities to spend time with her. She’ll be a tether, constantly pulling on your heart strings. And for many, many people this all gets too much to handle. And the boat goes up for sale.

So, if the economics of a boat never add up. If owning a boat is painful, slow and full of bad surprises. If there is an exceptionally high neglect and divorce rate, then why buy a boat? Why risk the heartache?

If you’re reading this you probably share my dream of sailing off into the sunset – perhaps on your own yacht. But is it worth it?

In the end, to buy a boat or not comes down to the ‘why’. The ‘why’ must be greater than all the costs. And those costs are great. So identify what that reason is. What are your deep psychological needs that a boat can fulfil? For me, it’s freedom, adventure, and beauty.

I hope the boat I end up buying will align with my values, help me be my best self, and be an extension of my soul. So, ask yourself: why? And if you have an answer, if it comes from a passion that runs deep in your veins, then welcome to the club. We share the same problem!

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post ‘Boat ownership is a wildly impractical love affair, and gets complicated when you’re smitten’ – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

Why we haven’t been matching the factory polars for our new boat? I just can’t work it out! That’s something almost every new boat owner has asked themselves at some point.

Ever felt like your boat is sluggish? Or woken up for a watch offshore, thinking you were absolutely sending it, only to find your competition or nearby boats have left you in the dust?

The speed issue is real. For racers, going faster means a trophy. For cruisers, being able to sail quickly means shorter passages, less strain on your boat, and a happier crew. And for all sailors, going fast is fun!

So how to go faster? It’s easy to get sucked into the detail. You might pick up the North U Trim book and start thinking about car positions and draught shape. Maybe you’ve made a weight saving plan, involving luggage limits or even freeze-dried food and a watermaker. Or perhaps you’ve employed a shrewd weather router for your upcoming Atlantic crossing to help pick the optimum route across.

Article continues below…

Tradewinds explained: Everything you need to know before sailing across the Atlantic

A transatlantic tradewind crossing from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean is on many a sailor’s bucket list. Endless sunny…

Sailing across the Atlantic: Bluewater veterans share top tips for your first crossing

On the afternoon before we left the Canary Islands for the Caribbean for a transatlantic with the ARC, I struck…

These are all good ideas. But when thinking about speed, there is an order of priorities to consider. And it starts with sails. Not sail trim, sail shape, traveller position, twist or foot tension… but the sail itself.

This fundamental fact is so often missed: the greatest impact the everyday sailor can make for going faster is to fly the right sails for the conditions. And once you have that nailed then the question of how to go faster is answered more elaborately. Finesse and precision such as tiny adjustments to ballast position or steering cable tension can then make a significant difference to the speed. But only once the right sail is flying.

So the typical new boat owner is likely to be making some basic errors – the same ones I’ve made so many times myself! Mistakes like flying headsails for too long without changing down; not reefing readily enough; and dropping loose-luffed sails (spinnakers and Code 0s) too early.

But why? What stops sailors flying the right sails? One factor is the crew. Are they up for it? Do you have crew keen to heave a headsail up to the bow at 0300 in 15 knots of wind, brace themselves as the boat slops over the short, broken swell, hoist up the J2, haul down the J4, and – now soaking wet – flake it, bag it and put it away all for the sake of a few knots?

That takes a certain breed of crazy. And if the wind is blowing a consistent 20 knots can the crew handle it? Can the helm keep the boat from rounding up with a building quarterly swell? Can the trimmer stay focused and keep the kite full as the boat accelerates down each wave?

Dropping a loose-luffed sail too early is just one of the many reasons we might not be hitting polars.

Another factor is you. Are you brave enough? And, bluntly, are you wealthy enough? It’s easy for a sail crossover chart to tell you the S4 will be okay up to 30 knots of wind. But have you ever flown an S4 in 29 knots when you’re 1,000 miles from the shore? Because it’s not super relaxing. Aren’t you here to have a nice time? And the urge to drop it early increases if you’re worried about the cost of the repair. Going quickly increases the risk of something breaking.

There are so many reasons why you might drop the kite at night, why you might be hesitant to shake out the reef, or why you might not want to send your crew up to the bow for the sake of speed. So how do we all go faster? The answer: nail the manoeuvres.

The greatest impact the everyday sailor can have on speed is to set the boat up well for changing sails. Some ideas: extend the sock line of your cruising chute so that it can divert from the bow back to a winch so you can drop it with mechanical assistance. Set up martin breakers to ensure a reliable de-powering of your spinnaker at any time.

Consider a top-down furling asymmetric spinnaker to avoid the need for a sock or traditional drop altogether. Upgrade or lubricate the mast track slider or car system so the mainsail drops and hoists easily. Service the sheaves in the boom for the reefing lines. Consider a furling staysail as an easy ‘power-down’ solution to your upwind sail set up so you don’t have to go splashing around on the bow at night.

In other words, set your boat up as efficiently as possible so you can get sails up and down quickly and easily. Practise the manoeuvres and build confidence. Once you have this nailed, you’ll be more likely to fly the right canvas at the right time.

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The post ‘What stops sailors flying the right sails?’ – Nikki Henderson on the power driving your boat appeared first on Yachting World.

Close reaching at a fast 60° TWA I was working out how far forward the outboard jib lead needed to move before setting up something more permanent.

“Where is a handy billy when you need one?” I said to my crew mate, who looked at me with an incredulous expression that so reminded me of my friend’s four-year-old son, Axel. Axel was learning how to speak on the radio with his grandfather, Dennis.

“Roger!” Dennis responded on the handheld VHF.

“Why are you talking about Roger?” Axel replied, confused. “My name is Axel.”

My crew mate’s face: “Er… Nik… Who the hell is Billy?”

So, who is Billy? I thought the same thing. After diving deep on Google, it turns out billy has many forms. The US Navy’s billy is an engine-powered portable water pump to empty out sinking compartments on a ship.

Down Under, a ‘billycan’, commonly known as a ‘billy’ is a name for another piece of emergency equipment: a metal can used to boil water for tea and coffee.

In Canada’s Pacific Northwest, a handy billy is a wooden motorboat with an outboard motor under a housing (for a quieter ride).

Sea shanties such as ‘Rio Grande’ and ‘Heave Away, Me Johnnies’ (British slang – Johnny interchanges for Billy) identify sailors as ‘bullies’, which said out loud with a pirate twang could well be ‘billies’.

And when the Geordies up in north-east England call someone a ‘billy’, they are referring to any good friend or close companion. (Note to self: derivatives of weird sailor-speak lead you down very long rabbit holes.)

The handy billy I was referring to was the naval term for a quick-grab general purpose block and tackle system. It’s a purchase system made up of lines and blocks to give you a mechanical advantage when lifting or pulling heavy loads.

Combine it with a quick release shackle at each end and a cam-cleat to lock off the line, and you can use it almost anywhere on a boat to pull something heavy. The more turning points the line makes, the greater the load you can pull with the same effort.

For example, in a 3:1 purchase system, a load of 90kg (the average man) will require a pulling power of just 30kg (much more attainable) to lift.

Article continues below…

‘Why it’s tough being the only woman on board’ – Nikki Henderson

For Leg 3 of the Ocean Globe Race, L’Esprit d’équipe (FR) and Neptune (FR) were granted dispensation to sail with…

The Race to Alaska: answering the call of the wild

“Nikki, give up the tiller for a second. You gotta see this.” Ev Goussev, co-owner of the yacht Gray Wolf,…

Moitessier fans might know the story of when his steel bowsprit on Joshua buckled sideways during his solo circumnavigation. He used a handy billy to bend it back into shape, and his fix stayed in place for the remainder of the voyage.

I like to think of the handy billy as a fancy tourniquet, the solution to a problem on board when there is no winch close by – a high-traffic piece of equipment that everyone should have ‘to-hand’, just like a multitool, a bucket, or a headtorch.

You won’t regret making or buying a handy billy. Use high spec line so that you can keep the rope slim, the blocks small, and the system lightweight. Remember the handy billy is all about convenience. Taper the splices well so they slide super smoothly on the blocks, and make sure the snap shackles on either end are big enough to clip onto most things. The handy billy has got to be versatile.

Need more convincing? There are plenty more uses, but here are half a dozen to give you the idea:

• Clip to headsail clew to temporarily remove the load off the sheets, perhaps to move a car or sort out a riding turn.
• Add a snatch block on one end and use it to divert the sheet leads or act as a barber-hauler.
• Hook one end onto lifejacket lifting strops and the other to a halyard to create a short-handed solution to recovering a crewmember out of the water.
• Attach it to the end of the boom or spinnaker pole and use it to lift large weights, such as a liferaft or outboard motor on and off the boat.
• Bulk up the number of pulleys and use it for precision placement of ultra-heavy things.
• A quick grab solution for deck level rigging failure such as a failed backstay hydraulic ram.

Come to think of it, all the derivatives could make sense when you consider the handy billy’s true identity: a sailor’s handiest companion on board! Some days it could rival a tea kettle in its frequency of use.

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What do you do if a halyard lock gets stuck? What if your spinnaker is wrapped? What if your mast track gets damaged and the mainsail won’t come down?

I’ve been running a webinar series based on various ‘what if’ scenarios with a community of performance catamaran sailors. Some participants were lifelong sailors, some first time boat owners, and some were preparing to start a new life as liveaboards.

Even the most experienced sailors might encounter new scenarios at sea. The best way to prepare for unexpected ‘emergencies’ is to break them down ahead of time, so it doesn’t feel entirely new in the moment. Hence the roundtable discussions.

We had been first addressing the immediate risk to the crew and boat of various ‘what ifs?’. Themes emerged. Most scenarios don’t pose imminent life-threatening danger or catastrophic boat damage, but if handled incorrectly, can quickly deteriorate.

One risk during any unforeseen situation on board is panicking crew. Most terrified people can be stabilised, if not calmed down completely, by a reassuring hand on their shoulder, looking them in the eye, calmly saying “It’s going to be OK”. Other tools include giving someone a menial task to follow so that they can regain a sense of control.

Article continues below…

How to climb a mast safely at sea – masterclass with ocean racer Pip Hare

Of all the things I have encountered over my sailing career, climbing a mast at sea is one of the…

Solo mast climb in a mid-Atlantic squall: Emma Richards’ Around Alone

In 2002, Emma Richards (now Sanderson) was the youngest person and the first British woman to finish the ‘Around Alone’…

Why waste time on a panicking crew member if your spinnaker is ripping itself to shreds? Well, you are unlikely to be able to solve that problem alone. Panicking crew don’t listen. They might pose a danger to themselves. Their mindset might be infectious.

And for the boat? Think about how to press pause and stop things worsening, eg don’t gybe or add excess side load to the track.

Figuring out how to stay safe and stabilise the situation was stage one of a three-stage framework we were using to tackle every scenario.

Stage two is to assess the situation. Collect data that you might need to take further action. We came up with questions for each scenario: did you hear a bang? Wind strength and direction? What jammers are open? Any knots in lines? Is it a forestay wrap, or is there a spare halyard in there too? Any collision risks?

Stage three is finding a solution. Ideally accompanied with a cup of tea and a biscuit to make up for the drop in blood sugar that follows a big adrenaline spike. To solve any of the three scenarios I set out at the beginning, this means figuring out how to get the sail down. And unfortunately, it might involve a mast climb.

Even for the most monkey-like riggers, going up the mast at sea is no fun. Keeping yourself stable enough to work up there is extremely physically demanding and requires engaging muscles that most of us didn’t even know existed. For short-handed crews, even just getting aloft might equate to an hour of CrossFit, either as the monkey or the ‘wincher’. It’s going to be high, exposed, and near impossible to communicate (headsets are so useful). Then add a wrapped kite, or an overpowered mainsail to the mix, and it becomes (if it wasn’t already) scary!

Initially, the horrified looks of the webinar participants didn’t phase me. Everyone has an expression like that when faced with climbing 40ft up in a 3m swell. But then I realised, this wasn’t just fear; it was a realisation that if they encountered a situation like this, they wouldn’t be able to solve it. Because none of their regular crew would have the physical or mental capacity to get up there.

When faced with an obstacle between you and your dream lifestyle, it’s tempting to brush it under the carpet. “We’ll wait until we get ashore,” or “We’re cruisers so we don’t fly spinnakers.” But things are going to get messy if you have a full main stuck up the rig with a gale on the way. Even for the most conservative cruisers there are scenarios that might require a trip aloft while offshore – rig damage, wiring issues or skyed halyards perhaps.

My closing remark to the webinar participants was straightforward. Any yacht out sailing must have someone on board who can, and is willing, to go up the rig at sea. They need to be in good physical condition for the task. There should be adequate equipment on board to go aloft and, ideally, the procedure has been practised.

If you own – or sail on – a yacht on which going aloft is not something you could currently cope with, then source the extra crew member, buy the necessary equipment, and do a ‘dry-run’ on the dock before you next slip lines.

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Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post ‘Even for the most monkey-like riggers, going up the mast at sea is no fun’ appeared first on Yachting World.

As a team that is much younger than the rest of the competition, what superpower does that give you? That’s the question I asked of a group of teenagers this month during a sailing podcast interview.

Francesa Dougherty (aged 17), Isa Ford (15), Anna Cezik (16), Simone Ford (17) and Henry Thomas (15) make up a Race to Alaska team named ‘Rock the Boat’. They’re borrowing a Santa Cruz 27 and competing in this year’s 750-mile human-powered race from Port Townsend, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska. Oh, and if you were wondering, their theme song is the one you’re thinking of. And, yes, it was released before any of them (or me) were born.

Their nervous giggling made me think they didn’t quite see themselves as superheroes. ‘Energy and enthusiasm,’ just about summarises their bashful answer. As the ‘grown up’ in the room, it is now my prerogative to reflect on what else they could have said.

Something that struck me was how able and confident they were, in such a wonderfully humble way. Most adults see this race as adventurous, if not extreme. For these teens to even believe they can do it is a mark of impressive self-assuredness. To find a boat, spend their free time training offshore with mentors, and design and build pedal drive systems to fulfil the ‘human-powered’ (rather than sail-powered) element of the race by themselves is exceptionally resourceful.

Article continues below…

The Race to Alaska: answering the call of the wild

“Nikki, give up the tiller for a second. You gotta see this.” Ev Goussev, co-owner of the yacht Gray Wolf,…

‘Why it’s tough being the only woman on board’ – Nikki Henderson

For Leg 3 of the Ocean Globe Race, L’Esprit d’équipe (FR) and Neptune (FR) were granted dispensation to sail with…

But as they detailed their ambitious plan, there was no arrogance, no cockiness, no overconfidence. Instead there was a lot of “No, you speak first!” giving each other space to talk, coupled with a lot of the aforementioned giggling. I’d be fascinated to watch their future sailing journeys unfold.

As we dug deeper into what ‘being young’ meant, they opened up. They feel an innate sense of responsibility as a young team. They have a sense of duty to be safe, make good decisions and compete at a high level, in order to set an example for other young teams, other young women, and other people of colour.

They hope to become role models in sailing for anyone else ‘who looks like them’ and lay a path that others can follow. Half an hour of talking later, I was feeling inspired – how brave, ambitious and optimistic adolescent energy is!

A true passion for something greater than the race itself – that’s their superpower. It’s that extra surge of energy they needed to go overnight training in the pouring rain last weekend. It’s the thing that will fire them up at 3am when they haven’t slept, and someone wakes them early to help with a sail change.

Team ‘Rock the Boat’. Photo: c/o Race 2 Alaska

It’s what will keep their frustration in check when someone inevitably doesn’t rehydrate dinner properly or forgets to flake the spinnaker sheet during a gybe. It will turn whatever result they have, even if they don’t make it to the finish line, into something that feels good for them.

I left the call with more questions than answers: always a sign of a thought-provoking conversation. Should we all be identifying more closely with our youthful selves, and embracing those ambitions that as adults we cast aside as naïve or inconsequential? I wonder if we are forgetting how powerful it is to go into a race, not to win, but ‘because it’s just so cool.’ Or even, ‘because we could affect the future’.

It’s easy to think that a relentless drive for first place is what elevates you to success. But the problem with the podium being the main motivator, is that if you fall back in the fleet so far that is no longer a realistic aim, your motivation disintegrates. Is success for you actually even winning? To me, they felt like winners because they wanted to inspire others, and I was inspired just talking to them. The race is still two months out.

The time has probably passed for any of us to believe we can change the world by racing to St Malo one weekend. But perhaps we could still find a golden thread – a deeper driver than just results – to weave into our upcoming season. (Cole Brauer making history in a hat emblazoned with the words WILD FEMINIST comes to mind, and remember, she didn’t win).

What would my greater motivation be for the summer? What would be yours? What difference could that make to us all if we flipped what ‘winning’ looks like on its head?

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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Rushing to wean ourselves off fossil fuels it seems we’re building another problem for the future. What do we do with the new batteries we’re now installing once they’ve reached the end of their life?

The growth in popularity of electric cars is evident on our roads – but how many old ones do you see? Sure, there are those that have been around for a while and may have had their battery replaced, but old electric cars are still in the minority, suggesting that we haven’t yet got to the point of mass battery replacements.

The RAC Foundation reckons there’ll eventually be around 33 million electric vehicles on UK roads. At present there are around 1.6 million plug-in electric cars in the UK, so there’s a long way to go and ultimately a lot of batteries to be replaced at some point. As well as being an environmental headache it’s set to be an expensive one too. Although Tesla batteries are believed to last 10-20 years, the cost of replacement is said to be $5,000-$20,000 per car.

So while emissions are coming down, it does look like we’re pushing a ruck in the carpet in the hope that new technology will come along to help solve the problem.

I use cars as an example as it’s much harder to establish figures for the marine world, but if we continue to progress towards electric power then clearly we’ll end up with a similar issue when it comes to battery replacement.

However, recently there have been some interesting technology stories that could provide solutions. Toyota believes it may have found a way of extending the life of a lithium-ion battery with a simple injection, while it is in situ.

Article continues below…

‘Electric yacht propulsion opens doors to a completely different way of thinking about sailing’

Electric propulsion is rapidly becoming established in the mainstream yacht market. This is increasingly driven by customer demand, often by…

Grand Soleil Blue first look: new recyclable yacht concept

It wasn’t until the end of a lengthy press conference in Düsseldorf that Grand Soleil’s management team dropped what was,…

Batteries become less efficient with age as they lose some of the charged particles that store the energy. Toyota’s proposed solution is to stimulate the production of new lithium ions and electrons as a result of the injection. During tests the research team claimed they were able to restore batteries to around 80% of their original capacity, a performance they could maintain for more than 100 charging cycles.

The ability to perform this restorative process in situ is also significant in helping to keep costs down, something that could be particularly important aboard boats.

There’s more testing to be done but the news has attracted a great deal of interest in the EV world.

Meanwhile, another exciting development is that of solid state batteries. Broadly speaking, existing lithium batteries consist of three key parts: an anode (negative) and cathode (positive) physically separated by a polymer layer, and these are immersed in a liquid electrolyte that allows the ions to transfer.

Photo: Andreas Lindlahr/EYOTY

In a solid state battery the separating material is a solid layer that is also the electrolyte allowing the transfer of ions between the anode and cathode. The benefits of this are said to be greater energy density (more than double that of lithium-ion batteries), and much faster charge times (by around six times).

As a result of their increased capacity solid state batteries can be smaller and lighter and are considered to be safer too.

Aside from the advantages of a more efficient cell, the issue of safety is an important one given the number of serious fires on board boats that have been attributed to battery problems. The liquid electrolyte is volatile and flammable.

A solid state battery has a thicker separating layer that is more resistant to high temperatures which helps to prevent short circuits within the battery. The thicker separator also helps to protect against the growth of spike shaped lithium formations on the anode, dendrites that can pierce the separator in a Li-ion battery and cause a short circuit. And perhaps most important of all, a solid state battery won’t catch fire even when punctured or damaged in impact.

It’s early days for the technology, though. Dealing with how the materials expand and contract when they are charged and discharged is one key issue. Another is that the separator only works at high temperatures, plus life cycles are short by comparison.

Still, the future for electric power – be it ashore or afloat – looks very encouraging.

And while ultimately the solutions are still pushing the problem further down the line, solid state batteries could provide one of the biggest steps forward to more sustainable green power.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post The switch to electric will reduce emissions, but what will we do with all the old batteries? appeared first on Yachting World.

For Leg 3 of the Ocean Globe Race, L’Esprit d’équipe (FR) and Neptune (FR) were granted dispensation to sail with an all-male crew. The Notice of Race stipulates that every yacht must sail with a mixed crew, which is defined as a crew where there is at least one woman. In the Ocean Globe Race (OGR) newsletter, race organisers explained that the teams had found it ‘too difficult to find crew members at such short notice during the festive season’.

The Race Committee found this a valid enough reason to permit both yachts to compete without suffering a penalty.

For context, there are time and financial penalties outlined throughout the Notice of Race for not complying with the rules of safety equipment inspections, not attending media photo shoots, or not conforming to Ocean Globe Race branding. It’s interesting the OGR does not regard having a mixed team as critical to its brand.

This news was highlighted to me via the Women who Sail Facebook group. As you can imagine, the story inspired the voicing of some strong opinions. But you might be assuming that the response was negative, criticising the OGR management or full of disparaging comments about all-male crews.

That assumption would be wrong.

The major theme that caught the attention of over 100 women on this group was about how hard it is to be the ‘only’ woman on board.

Article continues below…

Maiden refit: How Tracy Edwards’ sailing legend was brought back to life

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In an interview quoted in the OGR’s own press release, Capucine Treffot – who transferred from L’Esprit d’équipe after two legs – said: “It’s tough being the only woman on board. There is some stuff you can’t share and sometimes you feel really alone.

“I’d made very good friends on the boat, so I’m not missing friends, I’m missing another woman on board. A mixed crew should mean more than just one woman. It should actually be really mixed.”

Finding a woman who can sail is not that difficult. Every year the Magenta Project is inundated with applications from women to join its mentoring scheme. There are over 20,000 members of the Women who Sail Facebook group.

In the context of the OGR, Maiden is evidence that bolstering a crew with women is possible; they have managed to fill their entire boat with women. What’s more, both boats lost their sole woman not because they didn’t enjoy the race but because they too wanted to join the Maiden crew.

Therefore, the conclusion is that the real challenge if we want to diversify our sport is not to find women but to retain them.

Team SCA was an all-female entry into the Volvo Ocean Race

The OGR has proven that requiring a minimum of one woman on a crew is a way to bolster numbers getting involved, but it doesn’t address how long women stay on board. Perhaps those who are making and enforcing the rules do not fully understand women; I wonder how many of them are women?

The rule that there must be a woman on board is not diversifying this sport – you could argue it’s doing the opposite. Maiden is repeating history in more ways than one – just as in the Whitbread race of 1989, a women’s team in 2023 was again competing against all-male teams in what is classed as a ‘mixed sport’.

From my experience, the culture aboard a yacht becomes more inclusive the more diverse the team becomes, making 50:50 male-to-female crews more attractive to everyone. Adventure charter company 59° North has recently reserved two spots for women on its trips to avoid there being just one, and reported an increase in women signing up to over 30% of their overall crew numbers.

A Harvard Business Review also supports this theory. On investigating how to boost the proportion of women in boardrooms, they concluded that: ‘Solo women feel isolated and marginalised. Adding a second woman helps reduce the sense of isolation, [but] two women may be perceived as a separate group. A clear shift occurs when boards have three or more women. At that critical mass, women tend to be regarded not as “female directors” but as directors.’

The lesson I see for anyone hoping to sail with a mixed gender crew this season is to make sure you recruit more than just one woman. Ideally look to build a crew made up of at least three women. In theory, this should be all you need to retain women crew and avoid drop-outs.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

The post ‘Why it’s tough being the only woman on board’ – Nikki Henderson appeared first on Yachting World.

It is so notorious among sailors that you could say the Fastnet Rock is the northern hemisphere’s Cape Horn. Legends have formed around this famous landmark: of storms, and shipwrecks and the terrible events of the RORC Fastnet Race in 1979.

So you may find it surprising if you’ve never sailed there yourself, or if you’ve raced there only to turn round and sail 250 miles back to Plymouth, to discover that the Fastnet Rock is just six miles from the Irish mainland and four miles from the closest island. With a fair wind you can be grasping your first pint of Murphy’s within the hour at Ciarán Danny Mike’s on Cape Clear or O’Sullivan’s in Crookhaven.

It is geography that has made it so feared by mariners over the centuries. The Fastnet lighthouse stands on small outcrop of rock, off the first land that would have been seen for weeks for those sailing across the Atlantic in years gone by. If their navigation was even slightly out…

Often shrouded in low cloud and beset by strong winds and seas from a succession of Atlantic lows, it was a place where ships could – and did – come to grief.

Even today, with metres-accurate GPS positioning and radar to ascertain its position, crews are wary of ‘the Rock’. The weather is still as unpredictable as it ever was.

As recently as 2011, the iconic lighthouse silhouette was the backdrop the dramatic rescue of Rambler 100’s crew after the maxi yacht lost its keel and suddenly capsized shortly after rounding the lighthouse.

A reassuring light

The Fastnet Rock lighthouse was built to supercede an earlier light built on a clifftop on Cape Clear Island in the early 1800s. It could, in certain conditions, be obscured by a stratum of fog. An inquiry found this to a factor in the loss of an American packet on nearby West Calf Island in 1847, in which 92 of the 110 passengers and crew were drowned. After that, plans for a lighthouse on the Fastnet rock were drawn up.

The lighthouse on Cape Clear island that preceded the Fastnet Rock light

The tower you see today was started in 1897. There’s a bit of a myth that the rock for it was quarried locally at Crookhaven – not so. Most of the south-west coast is formed of old red sandstone (which actually ranges in colour here from dark grey to green). This is sedimentary rock prone to marine erosion, hence the characteristic striated appearance of the headlands of West Cork.

The elegant and beautifully waisted tower structure was designed by William Douglass, an engineer with Irish Lights, and built from coarse-grained Cornish granite that I believe came from the Cheeseswring quarry in Bodmin Moor.

Over 2,000 blocks were cut and shaped to interlock one into another. Each course is said to have been assembled in Cornwall before the granite blocks were shipped to Crookhaven and Cape Clear Islands, from which two teams of builders worked over five years.

Today, the only visitors to the lighthouse are maintenance teams and inspection tours. Once every two years, the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s Fastnet Race rounds the rock, but no longer does it send a delegation to keep watch in the lighthouse. Today, it stands empty, but its light is still a reassuring beacon.

The post Beautiful but deadly: Why the Fastnet Rock has always been feared by mariners appeared first on Yachting World.

Was the infamous Scallywag ‘breakfast show’ video offensive? To my mind, no. I watched it the day it was published, cringed slightly, then clicked onto the next.

My personal offence barometer has been calibrated by seasons spent racing with all-male sailing teams when I was younger, where some crews’ humour would make Witty and Hayles’ breakfast show look as innocent as Blue Peter.

Does that mean I’ve been conditioned to accept inappropriate comments? Not at all. There are plenty of things that rile me as unacceptable and I would call out, it’s just that I don’t happen to find a puerile joke about rubbing ointment on genitals offensive. And that is where most people’s interest in the ‘breakfast show’ would normally have ended. Willy gags: funny or not funny? Laugh, eye roll or ignore, then move on.

But the Scallywag video was published just as every news headline ran stories of sexual harassment, from the Houses of Parliament to Hollywood to sports. The #metoo campaign prompted everyone to reconsider just what they personally found acceptable.

The Scallywag Volvo Ocean Race crew, in their mid-Atlantic bubble, released a video that apparently showed a woman being questioned on how to rub cream onto her boss’s crotch. In that context, it looked like a glaring example of sexual harassment, and it was rightly challenged.

Some viewers felt that Annemieke Bes was the butt of the joke as the only woman onboard, and that is what rendered it unacceptable. Actually, on re-watching the video carefully, I’m not convinced gender comes into it.

There’s a mildly xenophobic joke about Bes as ‘Dr Cloggs’ being Dutch, but none of the humour is directed at her being female. She is scripted as a beard-wearing doctor, not a Carry On-style nurse. And it is the male ‘chin lords’, as skipper David Witt calls Tom Clout and Alex Gough, who are tasked with applying the imaginary ointment – Bes just has to tell them how. Except she can’t, because she is either too shocked, or laughing too hard, to speak – depending on your interpretation.

I’ve interviewed Witt a couple of times during this Volvo Ocean Race, and he’s made me laugh each time. Humour is a big part of his communication. He is also disarmingly direct, and you get the sense you would have to be a strong character to feel comfortable challenging him on anything important.

I don’t know Annemieke Bes, but I have heard Witt rate her highly as a professional sailor, a particularly fast driver, and as a good fit in the crew dynamic. I suspect she, like all the female sailors in the Volvo Ocean Race, is pretty badass and completely aware of what she was getting herself into.

Annemieke Bes on board Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag. Photo by Konrad Frost/Volvo Ocean Race

And it’s hearing that many of the female sailors in the race are upset about the ramifications of this that shows the damage this kind of incident does. I’m not offended somebody made a video with a scrotum quip in it, but am fed up that after just two legs of watching truly mixed crews competing in one of sailing’s grand prix events we seem to have gone right back to the beginning in the debate about whether women can fit in with male-dominated teams.

If one skipper or team boss or potential sponsor decides they can’t risk the reputational damage of a story like this, and they choose to remove that risk by sailing with an all-male rather than mixed crew, then both the video and what was clearly a ‘test case’ protest will have done damage to professional women’s sailing prospects.

These were unintended consequences. There was no precedent to suggest publishing this video would lead to a protest questioning whether two men on a boat in the middle of an ocean were bringing an entire sport into disrepute through a minute and a half of not very funny jokes.

There were no clues that this would escalate to a situation that ultimately saw a highly experienced professional stepping off a boat mid-campaign, tens of thousands of dollars spent on legal fees, and the possibility that an entire Volvo team might have to withdraw from the race if their skipper was banned from competing.

But that is why the lads banter culture has to change; people’s livelihoods are at stake. For years female sailors haven’t known what happens to their slot on the boat, or their next career move, if they put their hands up and say, ‘Hang on, I’m not comfortable with this.’ Now all sailors will have to consider whether their actions or comments might offend, and what the impact on them might be if they do.

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As the saying goes, when you win the Cup you make the rules. The champagne was still running down the outside of the Auld Mug and the sailors still drenched from their Moët moment on stage when Emirates Team New Zealand’s CEO, Grant Dalton, announced that the Challenger of Record would be the Italian yacht club, Circolo della Vela Sicilia, represented by Luna Rossa.

It’s an interesting choice and confirms the gossip that was floating around. It is no secret that the man behind Luna Rossa, or Prada as the team was also called, Patrizio Bertelli, was never that keen on the move to multihulls. Assuming that his position hasn’t changed, this presents a tricky issue for Dalton going forwards as he negotiates the 36th America’s Cup.

The Kiwis set the foiling agenda in the build-up to the last Cup in 2013 by brilliantly identifying and exploiting a loophole in the rule to make their boat fly. By doing so they inspired a new generation of foiling designs that has changed sailing forever and is still expanding today.

They have also proved that they are the current foiling masters. Surely they wouldn’t want to abandon that expertise for the next Cup?

“I think we’ve seen some unbelievable advancements here with the boats and the type of races we’ve seen and it’s great for our sport,” said Kiwi skipper Glenn Ashby. “From a sailing perspective it’s going to be hard to sail anything else after what we’ve seen in these boats. The technology is just absolutely amazing.”

But if their hand is being forced by the Challenger of Record they may have to compromise more than they would like. And then there’s the issue of hosting the show.

New Zealand hints at 36th America’s Cup for 2021 with tighter nationality rules

Audience potential

Aside from the sporting triumph, you can see why the Kiwis are so excited about winning the Cup. The spotlight is quite rightly on them.

But for what it’s worth I think that the next Cup has to be something different from the last New Zealand event in order to get the best out of it, both for country and sailing.

New Zealand is a wonderful place, but it’s a long way away from the major audiences. It’s expensive to set up camp down there too and from my experience of 2002-03, the potential audience of a country with a population of 4.5 million doesn’t justify the cost.

Since it was last down there the game has moved on considerably and not just with the style of boats. Spectator sailing is now the norm and the AC LiveLine telemetry has brought the event to a much bigger audience. But the show is an expensive one to put on.

Financial success

Auckland in 2002 cost around $20 million to host. Valencia $200 million, while Bermuda is said to have cost $100 million. But that’s just the show in the Cup year. The build-up in the years before will cost more on top of that.

Defending the Cup is one thing, but hosting the gig costs around the same as running another team.

To make a financial success of the next Cup surely means taking it on tour, another version of the World Series. An Asian circuit one year followed by a European one the next, before the Cup goes down under for the match itself? That way New Zealand gets to show off its trophy to a much bigger market while the backers do too.

That then leads on to the type of boat.

Going on tour like this would surely rule out big monohulls with their huge rigs and deep keels. Multihulls on the other hand fit the bill very well in the performance/size/shipping ratio.

When it comes to racing in a variety of conditions, the high power-to-weight ratio that can be achieved with a foiling cat means that these boats can race and fly in just 6 knots of breeze.

The next stage needs to be creating a rig or configuration that can cope with up to 30 knots and waves. Extending the range of conditions helps keep the show rolling. That keeps the broadcasters and corporates happy which keeps the money coming in.

None of this is new; this has been the goal for more than a decade now. But making big changes in the world’s oldest international sporting trophy takes time. And money.

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Having been a skipper of other people’s yachts in my former life and, for almost three decades now, a ‘poor bloody owner’ – most of the time employing skippers – I am well qualified to comment on the interesting and often stressful scenarios that can arise between the two when they are on board at the same time.

These incidents occur in the range of between 60ft and maybe 100ft in length. On anything smaller a professional skipper would frankly be in the way.

Nearing 80ft and certainly above the 100ft mark, the game changes and a professional skipper is a requirement for his/her sailing expertise to keep things safe, while management skills are also needed to keep the whole show on the road. And that might include making sure the cocktails are shaken not stirred.

It is also a given that in this size range, more times than not, a skipper will be a swashbuckler who is in it for the sailing and the travel. He/she would want to take on full responsibility and make their mark, most likely in hopes of climbing the ladder and running bigger vessels in future. And that means not counting time in too many marinas.

When the owner comes on board for a sail or a longer cruise, possibly also having come up through the ranks of owning smaller boats and knows a thing or two, you might have the perfect storm brewing. It requires a certain maturity on both sides of the equation to weather that possible blow.

But where should the line of responsibility be drawn in that shared experience of sailing together?

Rebel without a cause

I can remember many occasions from my youth of being heartily disappointed and at times disgusted and angry by witnessing incompetence from owners on yachts while in their employ – so much so that one American gentleman nicknamed me the ‘rebel without a cause.’ Those were the days when I was living out of a sea bag, fancy free and come what may, needing little in the way of sustenance other than a pint or six and certainly no regard for a pension.

Only when a few financial priorities raised their ugly head did I realise that I had to toe the line, behave myself and swallow humble pie, even if that meant letting the owner crash into the jetty leaving me to make the repairs. There was the next job to think of and when you got it, a reputation to maintain.

I readily admit that it is nigh on impossible at times not to interfere with the running of my boats while I am on board as a supernumerary during our various charters in southern waters. I have hired the best crew to run these boats for me and therein lies the dilemma – how to let go.

Taking the helm

My interest in being on board in the first place is really more about getting ‘there’ and engaging with the land, whether it be leading people in the mountains or simply walking with them amongst the penguins. I am an ‘expedition leader’ in the parlance.

If you, as an owner, are only sailing focused then it becomes more difficult and problematic in developing a mutual cooperation with your skipper where on one hand it is your boat and you should ‘take the helm’ so to speak, and on the other side when things get tricky to step back and let the skipper and crew get on with it. That is what you hired them to do.

By the same token, a skipper worth his salt will step back and let the owner take command without making an announcement, and even let him make a few mistakes. The more experienced the skipper, the more this will appear seamless and natural.

On the Pelagics my complaint seems to be that the mainsheet is always over-trimmed. I claim to feel this in my guts while in my bunk. When I rise in my skivvies, unasked for, and rush into the cockpit to dump off a few metres of mainsheet the crew, knowing my idiosyncrasies, are always highly amused.

After having made many mistakes overly interfering as an owner I now have a foolproof formula, especially during those all-critical docking manoeuvres in heavy winds: go below, make a cup of tea and do some emails. When you hear the engine shut down it is safe to come on deck. Your skipper and crew will appreciate this.

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They say you should be careful what you wish for but nothing could be further from the truth. I am delighted to have been named skipper of team Turn the Tide on Plastic in the Volvo Ocean Race, but I can barely get my head around the enormity of the challenge that lies ahead.

There are several requirements that the team needs to meet: 60 per cent of the crew will be under 30 years old and half will be women.

Those two aims alone mean our team will have much less round the world or Volvo Ocean Race experience than our competitors. So we are considered the underdogs from the start, but I am OK with that.

The Volvo Ocean Race and, before that, the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race, has always been a closed shop. Selection came down to who you knew or who you could connect with; many of the sailors were selected race after race as experience was identified as being important. This made it very difficult to get the experience required, thereby making it hard to break the cycle and give new, young sailors a pathway into the race.

The rules have now changed and each team has to select two sailors under the age of 30, which has helped. I am now offering six places for sailors under 30 and making three of those available for young female sailors. There has not been an opportunity like this for young sailors since ABN AMRO 2, and never for young female sailors.

Within hours of the press release going out naming me as the skipper my inbox was full. Lots of congratulations, but also lots of sailing CVs. I have never been so popular with young sailors before! It was refreshing to see such high calibre sailors wanting a chance.

No passengers

I now head into the trial period with excitement but also a certain level of trepidation. I must get the right crew selected quickly and that is tricky. Some basics are obvious, such as strength and power. It is physically demanding to sail these boats competitively and I do not have the time to offer the crew a gym programme for building strength. I need them ready and raring to go.

Sailing ability and experience is next but the overwhelming attribute is attitude. Can the sailor be a team player and work together with others to deliver excellence? Will they go the extra mile? That is what I must discover in just a few days on the water.

Liz Wardley named first crew member of Turn the Tide on Plastic.

Time is my limiting factor. I am late to the party for such a new crew and so I needed someone with experience at the management level to get me up to speed. I was very fortunate to be able to appoint Phil Allen as the team director. He has worked with Ian Walker’s last three Volvo Ocean Race campaigns, finishing the last edition victorious. He knows what success looks like and I think he is the right person to help get me there.

Racing started at Cowes Week

The race effectively started this summer. All the Volvo Ocean Race teams were at Lendy Cowes Week to take part in the Sevenstar Triple Crown Round the Island Race on Wednesday 2 August. Then we all competed in the Rolex Fastnet Race and from Plymouth we started Leg 0, racing to Lisbon via St Malo (the final leg of which was cancelled due to lack of wind early on 16 August). These were all qualifying miles for the race that starts in October.

As a team, we must complete mandatory training courses and complete any missing qualifications. Medical and dental checks must be carried out and let’s not forget we need to learn how to sail the boat effectively as a new crew. Once crew selection is finished, I will have names and sizes for kit to be ordered and the machine can start rolling along in the background, but it all hangs on the choices I make over the next few weeks.

I feel a mixture of excitement, nervousness and panic. I am tired already just trying to keep up with my inbox. To be perfectly honest, I just need to go sailing to regain clarity and perspective and remember why I wanted to be in this position in the first place.

I believe this project was meant for me. Team Turn the Tide on Plastic is a culmination of all the programmes I have been involved in and campaigns I have promoted and talked passionately about. We will raise the profile of an environmental cause I believe in, promote diversity in sport and society and it is an opportunity to develop the future stars of sailing.

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Seeing Tracy Edwards reunited with her Whitbread Round the World yacht Maiden, which she raced with an all-women crew in 1989, stirred some memories. The yacht has come full circle back to Hamble for a refit to start another adventure, with a similar theme.

Maiden illustrated what female sailors could do when given the opportunity. This opportunity came about with sponsorship from the King of Jordan. Now, his daughter, Princess Haya Bint Hussein, continues the legacy in supporting The Maiden Factor, trying to give the opportunity for girls in all countries to get an education.

I have been staggered by the engagement and support. So many people clearly remember seeing that yacht finish the Whitbread Round the World Race in Southampton Water, particularly as it was the first all-female team, that it made me start thinking about iconic images and events that create memories for future generations.

A day in the life of the all-women EF Education team in the 1997-98 Whitbread round the world race

Who are the inspirational role models who will drive the dreams for sailors of the future?

The America’s Cup is providing those exciting dreams for many boys, but where are the inspirational female sailors for the girls?

There were no female sailors in the 35th America’s Cup – not in the race teams, tuning teams or the reserve sailors. But the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup, set up to provide a clear career path to identify young sailors ultimately to take on the America’s Cup in the future, fills me with hope.

Aimed at sailors aged 18-24, this event took place in June 2017 with female sailors in the crew lists. To get time within a team environment like this, training alongside the guys, is a step in the right direction, developing the talent of female sailors physically, psychologically and in skills acquisition.

In the Olympic side of the sport, the ‘Three Blondes in a Boat’, Shirley Robertson, Sarah Ayton and Sarah Webb, became one of the most famous images of the 2004 sailing Olympics. Rio delivered the smiling Saskia Clark and Hannah Mills.

Recent rule changes mean the Olympic movement is committed to equalise the number of men and women competing. Even more importantly now, female sailors are racing in skiff classes; it looks cool, exciting and something that new sailors dream of doing.

Hearing stories of their hard work and tenacity can be pivotal in encouraging young people to stay in the sport.

Xu Lijia, 2012 Laser Radial Olympic Gold Medallist, was recently speaking to junior Topper sailors in the UK. When female sailors who have achieved great things in the sport come back and share their experiences at the grass roots of the sport, it can make the difference between young sailors walking away from the sport, or being inspired to go on and do something special.

This year there are five female Figaro sailors working towards the pinnacle solo offshore event, La Solitaire Urgo de Figaro. This is hugely encouraging when the most recent edition of the Vendée Globe was raced with no female skippers for the first time in many years. I am sure future editions of the race will involve female participation and how exciting if it is one of these Figaro sailors rising through the ranks of solo offshore sailing.

In 2016, history was made with the M32 World Match Racing Tour. Skipper of Team Magenta 32, Sally Barkow, secured a tour card. This was the first time in history a female skipper had done so.

Also last year, a rule change in the GC32 class that changed crew numbers and crew weights produced the first ever all-female team entry in the Extreme Sailing Series.

But the biggest and probably most influential rule change to come last year was in the Volvo Ocean Race. This will incentivise teams to take a mixed crew and could provide opportunities for female sailors, creating female inspirational role models for youth sailors.

This really does fill me with confidence that we can create sailing icons that inspire and encourage the young girls of the future to achieve great things.

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Knocked out at the semi-final stage of the Louis Vuitton Challenger series by 5-2 against the eventual America’s Cup winners, ETNZ, Ben Ainslie’s start-up team Land Rover BAR did much that was right. Ainslie, flanked by backers Sir Keith Mills and Sir Charles Dunstone, built a superb new base in Portsmouth and assembled an almost fully British team of some of the world’s best sailors. The team also set up a sustainability programme and the 1851 Trust to promote education in science, engineering and maths.

They came into the Round Robin series as winners of the America’s Cup World Series. And with a £90 million budget, Land Rover BAR had all the money as well as the talent needed to win the Cup.

But they didn’t. They did not even come close. Why? What will Land Rover BAR be looking at in their debrief?

“When we arrived in Bermuda in November and lined up for the practice regattas we realised we had a speed issue,” sailing team manager Jono Macbeth tells us. “It was not a dramatic one from a pure performance point of view, but when we were on the race course that was amplified.

“We were not going to run out of money, we were going to run out of time.”

There is a trade off between the speed of foils and their stability, managed by control systems. “It’s a bit of an evolution of all three together,” explains Macbeth. “If your system isn’t accurate to control your boards properly, you lose your stability and you can’t realise the full speed of them.”

Design in detail – exactly what made Emirates Team New Zealand so fast?

Ben Ainslie has not spoken much about the reasons, but in the days after their elimination he did give this very interesting perspective to Bermuda’s Royal Gazette.

“We knew we had issues looking back as far as last summer, testing in the UK, because we had a lot of structural failures in our daggerboards and our rudders. That had a knock-on effect of taking away critical testing time on our daggerboard design and rudder design.

“Lining up against the other teams and then seeing they were so far in front wasn’t a surprise; we knew we were on the back foot.

“Our daggerboard design ultimately wasn’t aggressive enough. That’s not pointing the finger at our designers; that’s the truth of it.

Design in detail – exactly what made Emirates Team New Zealand so fast?

“We were still putting new components, new rudders, on to the boat after racing began. It was a high-risk strategy, but we needed to do that because it was obvious that we were not quick enough.

“Taking more time to get the key strategy right would have helped us…. [Our] strategy was wrong and that goes a long way back; you can’t learn that from the other teams.

“You don’t know where they are going to go until they bring the boat out on the water. By then it is too late.”

Land Rover BAR is in the position now that Emirates Team New Zealand was in 2013. Some key people are leaving the team (the contracts run out in August) and new people will be brought in and/or poached. The soul-searching will be a painful experience.

How thinking outside the box won the Cup for Emirates Team New Zealand

BAR will carry on with the backing of Land Rover and their network of private supporters, and much of the campaign can be chalked up a success.

But who calls the shots, and what those shots should be, are the questions they need to answer to ‘bring the Cup home’.

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Although we are in the business of providing uncertainty as one of the mainstays of the Pelagic experience, there are times when you do feel your head banging against a wall as the weather puts the kibosh on yet another well-planned expedition. And, typically, the wall in question is the mountainous wall of South Georgia.

Located between 54° and 55°S, South Georgia is a sub-antarctic island that cuts through the Polar Front – an ecological boundary between the cold South Atlantic water and the really cold Antarctic water. It is perhaps the most problematic region to which we travel, especially if the goals are mountaineering.

Some 750 miles from Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands to first shelter at the north-western tip of the island, it is not that far to sail downwind going east. Getting back west is another matter of course, but the sailing is always accepted as a rough and tumble affair.

When we started voyaging to South Georgia back in the late 1980s the obvious time of year was late spring or high summer, which is November through February.

The theory that holds true in high latitude regions near Antarctica and the high Arctic is that the summer period will be the most settled, with high pressure having moved in. The ferocious weather we always encountered in summer was apparently the norm, so we soldiered on for several years supporting climbing expeditions, along with various colleagues doing the same.

However, the fact is that although South Georgia is a high latitude destination, it is not really high enough. With better weather analysis and some trial and error, we realised that the winter to early spring period was preferable.

In the southern summer, depressions that pass through the Drake Passage tend to track south of the island. This means that the speed of the system is additive to the wind speed around the low.

During early winter until early spring, storm tracks move just far enough north to pass directly over or to the north of the island with some frequency. This results in either a dead spot under an elongated area of low pressure or, better still, a less intense easterly airflow as the low moves up and through.

During those early years in summer our failures in the mountains outnumbered the successes, and failure to even get started off the beach was not uncommon. In winter and early spring, not only is the weather somewhat kinder, but colder temperatures make for easier sled pulling with skis. Of course there are never any guarantees.

In August 2014 – mid-winter in the south – we set off on an expedition to South Georgia in sub-zero temperatures (down to -7°C at times). We experienced ice accumulation up to three metres off the deck on the sails and rigging from an almost imperceptible mist and our single plastic hammer had to be deployed every four to five hours up forward.

Unfortunately, in spite of a deep winter itinerary, even a landing at the south end of the island was untenable because of gale-force south-west winds produced from a stationary high pressure out to the west.

In 2016 we repeated the itinerary and the high pressure eventually cooperated. We managed to sail and motor in light winds directly to the south-west corner of the island and land at a seldom visited shelter called Trollhul.

The next day we were off and up on the glaciated terrain just in time to get caught out in a five-day storm that kept us pinned down in relative comfort in our tents. Then a dream scenario unfolded.

The high to the west moved over the island and stayed there for the next three weeks. We traversed 65 kilometres of glacier to St Andrews Bay on the north coast over the next 12 days, climbing two virgin summits on the way – Mt Starbuck and Mt. Baume.

We were in a comfort zone that is rarely experienced on the island where technical climbing was feasible with little chance of getting caught in extremis. To top things off we sailed back to Stanley in three-and-a-half days flat – the all-time record.

Dangerous complacency had set in on all fronts!

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Ben Ainslie is not averse to controversy. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest he thrives on it. Where most sailors perform less well when they lose their rag, it seems that it’s only when you’ve shown a red rag to Sir Ben that he really starts to charge.

Five years ago at a windy Olympic regatta in Weymouth Bay, Ainslie was struggling to get on terms with the Danish Finn sailor Jonas Høgh-Christensen. However, the Dane committed the fatal error of ganging up with Dutchman Pieter-Jan Postma on Ainslie, forcing the Briton to take a 720° penalty turn.

Ainslie was fuming as he came ashore that afternoon five years ago. “They’ve made a big mistake,” he said. “They’ve made me angry and you don’t want to make me angry.”

Back then, not only did Ben sound like the Incredible Hulk, his beefed up 93kg frame was superhero-sized too. These days the Land Rover BAR skipper is closer to 80kg, as every kilo he can lose is another kilo that his powerhouse crew of four grinders can add to their sculpted physiques.

Although it seems an age ago now, a pre-start collision with Emirates Team New Zealand during the final phase of America’s Cup practice racing in Bermuda suggests that while Ainslie has shed a few kilos, he’s lost none of his competitive fire. Kiwi skipper Peter Burling had secured the favoured leeward end of the start line but Ainslie tried to steer his AC50 between his rival and the mark into a gap that was not wide enough.

“Ben was quite late and just ran straight into the back of us,” said Burling. “Just unnecessary a week out from the Cup. We are all here to learn and it’s a shame we have a pretty big metre dent now in the back of our nice boat.”

Emirates Team New Zealand CEO Grant Dalton added: “We know Ben well, he is a good guy but frustration is obviously getting to him and the red mist came down. It’s a lot of damage at a time we can’t afford it.”

To add insult to injury – at least, some were insulted whether Ainslie intended it or not – the Land Rover BAR skipper apologised with a tweet saying: “Bit of a love tap racing hard with @EmiratesTeamNZ  sorry guys and hope you’re back on the water soon”.

The ‘love tap’ comment didn’t play at all well on social media, although one wonders if this is all part of Ainslie winding up the psychological pressure on his rivals. By his own admission Ainslie has always been a Jekyll and Hyde character, a gentleman on shore who morphs into a monster on the water.

Perhaps this is another example of Ainslie doing what he needs to kick himself into top gear.
Judging by the results of the practice race sessions, round robins and playoffs, Land Rover BAR surely needs to find another gear if it’s going to progress to the challenger finals.

Artemis Racing was the team to beat in practice (although there is some interesting speculation as to why that might have been), with Emirates Team New Zealand and SoftBank Team Japan looking pretty competitive too. The British boat handling has been good, but not perfect, and the boat has not been foiling with the same level of stability and consistency as its faster rivals.

Top-end speed has been lacking and Ainslie has been unable to close out matches even when he’s taken an early lead. There was even a moment when the Brits looked incapable of dispatching Groupama Team France – the first to exit the competition. Now with their last chance to get into the challenger finals, they look to really have a fight on their hands.

Three years of hard work could all boil down to today for Land Rover BAR and Artemis Racing, and we wait to see who emerges as the contender to go up against Oracle Team USA for the America’s Cup Match which begins on 17 June.

The Americans had a few dodgy moments in practice racing with three capsizes but won the round robin series and take a point into the final. Also, while Oracle initially dismissed the cycle-grinding of the Kiwis, it’s been interesting to see the appearance of a single cycling position appear on the back of the boat, with tactician Tom Slingsby putting in a solo effort behind his skipper Jimmy Spithill.

The American team, consisting mostly of Australian sailors, performed well in the round robin stages, but no one knows better than Spithill that as far as the America’s Cup is concerned, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.

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Dwarfing not only any other yacht that happened to be on the River Eider, but even the buildings along the foreshore, the monolithic Sailing Yacht A made quite an impression when she was launched from the Nobriskrug yard in Hamburg in the autumn of 2016.

The 142m, eight-deck behemoth is the archetypal ‘gigayacht’, phenomenal not just in her dimensions but also in her radicalism.

The Philippe Starck-designed Sailing Yacht A, with her 20m freeboard, begs the question: is she even a sailing yacht? The last yacht to divide opinion, and attract the shock and awe of the non-sailing public in the same manner was Maltese Falcon, the glossy, experimental megayacht designed for Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins.

But the Falcon was launched a decade ago, and Sailing Yacht A is just one of a crop of extraordinary gigayachts, or sailing superyachts of 80, 90 or 100m plus, to touch the water in 2016.

Besides the 142m Sailing Yacht A, another three-masted design was launched from OceanCo this autumn, the 106m Black Pearl, which looks set to become the largest sailing yacht in the world – for a while at least. Black Pearl represents a modern evolution of the rotating Dynarig pioneered by Maltese Falcon. Meanwhile in the spring, the largest Bermudan rigged yacht ever launched, the 86m ketch Aquijo, powered through sail trials in preparation for a global adventure.

There are more in the pipeline also. Royal Huisman announced this autumn that they had been commissioned to design and build the 86m Project 400, another three masted design, this one more conventionally rigged. A proposal for the 114m Endurance has just been unveiled, an explorer concept designed to be able to cruise unassisted for three months. There is also the 86m Komorebi, an experimental wingsail-assisted hybrid trimaran design from the French multihull experts VPLP.

Rise and rise of the gigayacht

Why the sudden flurry of these stratospherically ambitious projects? In truth, it is not that sudden – initial pitches for what ultimately became Sailing Yacht A were invited back in 2008, and pre-studies began in 2011. A decade between projects seems rather shorter when design and build takes at least five years – gigayacht owners may be exacting, but they also have to be extraordinarily patient.

The 141m four-masted Dream Symphony is currently in build out of wood in Turkey, and includes vast living accommodation, and a swimming pool that converts to become a helipad platform.

What is remarkable, though, is how rapidly the yachts have grown in size – raising the upper ceiling from 88 to over 140m in a decade. Dutch naval architecture firm Dykstra has been instrumental in many of the world’s most innovative megayachts, including Sailing Yacht A, Black Pearl, and Maltese Falcon.

Managing director Thys Nikkels comments, “Ten years ago a big boat was a very different size than a big boat is now. I can still remember when I started working in ’91 a 40-metre yacht in those days was a big boat. In the mid-90s we started to design the yacht Athena, which we thought was the biggest boat we were ever going to see in our lives, as a sailing yacht she was 80 metres on the water.”

The largest single sloop rigged yacht in the world remains Mirabella V, launched back in 2003 and since renamed (and slightly lengthened during a refit) M5 at just over 77m. Rob Doyle, who worked on the project led by Ron Holland, recalls:

“We started designing her 17 years ago now. We hit a very natural sweet spot with Mirabella and that’s why it has taken so long for other boats to suddenly go over her length and over her rig height.

“Mirabella still has the highest ‘P’ measurement [distance from boom to top of mast] and the longest boom in the world, though there are taller masts now.

“She set a bar and we didn’t realise we’d actually set it. It came down to a ratio of the rig weight to the draught and the keel weights, and everything else to be able to carry that amount of sail and that ballast to satisfy the rules.

“We pushed technology a lot – about 16 companies went bust over Mirabella because the jump was so massive. We were jumping from a 64m to a 75m [yacht] and that jump was like learning to fly, then going to the moon!”

Article continues below

Video of Sailing Yacht A, the world’s largest sail-assisted vessel, during early sea trials

This video footage of Sailing Yacht A shows her with her towering free-standing masts and illustrates the jaw-dropping scale of the world’s…

A look on board the extraordinary 86m Aquijo, the world’s largest ketch

The largest Bermudan rigged ketch ever launched, the 86m Aquijo was designed by Bill Tripp and launched last year. The build came…

Ken Freivokh, who was responsible for the radical styling of Maltese Falcon, also points out that after the much publicised launch of the Falcon many buyers did not want to be seen to be emulating Tom Perkins’s unique style, preferring to wait, or opt for a conservative design. After the Falcon, Freivokh’s next radical Dynarig yacht was Black Pearl, which he began work on six years ago. At 106m Black Pearl dwarfs Maltese Falcon, with a 2,700GT volume that puts her just under the key 3,000GT limit.

Surprisingly, Dykstra’s Thys Nikkels says that the Dynarigs being built today are not markedly different to the one developed for Maltese Falcon a decade ago. “In concept it is not very different. In detail there are a number of improvements that have been made.

But Maltese Falcon was – for her time – years far ahead and she proved to be very successful in sail handling and sailing, so there are not many improvements to be done. Nowadays you just have different materials you can use, or different electronics and software systems that you can use for control.”

Maltese Falcon, launched in 2006, pioneered the Dynarig concept utilised on many of the next generation of larger gigayachts.

Sail handling

Meanwhile a decade of development in superyacht rigs and sail systems, means that Aquijo’s owner could opt for a conventional ketch rig, which can deploy over 3,000m2 of sails in around six minutes.

Sail handling routines are necessarily different – the jib is furled when tacking. “Vitters organised a nice system that keeps just a nice amount of tension on the jib sheets furling in and out so that they are not flailing about,” explains Aquijo’s designer, Bill Tripp. “So it’s not a dinghy tack, but it is safe and orderly.

“The spinnaker is on a fast furler and furls up in 30 seconds, making gybes less complex. There is the ketch choreography of bringing the main and mizzen in, but the steering is precise and there is no need to put too much sail up for the conditions.”

Aquijo master cabin

The forces generated on yachts such as Aquijo may be enormous – mast compression can reach around 580 tons – but are no longer beyond the realms of riggers’ experience. “When we started building boats like Saudade [the 2009 45m Wally], 14 tonnes was a very big load. Once we understood racing these boats, and understood they were controllable, you can take another step.

“We were delighted when sailing Aquijo upwind in a lot of breeze that the load on the mainsheet was showing around 12 tonnes. It’s 2:1 so that’s 24 tonnes. I’m not saying that’s not a massive load, but it’s similar to what we have on Saudade’s big sheet 1:1, and we have years of experience with handling that.” Custom built 40 ton carbon and alloy winches help manage the sheet loads.

Tripp notes that a Dynarig was never considered as an option. “What you’re really asking is do you want the ease of sailing or do you want to be able to access something exciting? And we wanted both of them.

“Sailors tend to like the more fundamental experiences, and when the technology allows them to access those more fundamental experiences, well that’s a great joy.”

Aquijo is the world’s largest ketch, with a mainsail that can be furled or unfurled in around four seconds

Finding the limit

Just how big can a sailing yacht go? Five years ago plans were unveiled for a 101m sloop, with a single 125m carbon mast, which raised a few eyebrows and discussions over whether it might be possible. Malcolm McKeon worked on the proposal and says that it was the cost, rather than technical limitations, which put the brakes on the project.

“It was an evolving process. The owner has a 50m-plus sailing superyacht, and he wanted a new yacht big enough that he could put a reasonably sized chase boat on board. He wanted an explorer type sailboat that he could go to the Pacific on, and carry all his toys with him, and not have to have a support boat.

“The design started at 65 or 70m and it just grew and grew and grew until it got to 100m, and then it basically just got too expensive.

Recent sail trials on Sailing Yacht A saw the 1,464m2 mainsail unfurled from the 27.5m carbon U-shaped boom. Incredibly she is designed to heel up to a maximum angle of 12 degrees under full sail.

“The big problem with the large sail boats is the mast price goes up by a bigger proportion to everything else so the rig price becomes a much bigger percentage of the overall build. Technically it can all be done, it’s just the value of that part becomes a much more significant part and sometimes more difficult for an owner to accept.

“If somebody came to me and said they wanted to build a boat with a 200m mast I would think well, is that really possible? Certainly rigs up to 100m and a bit more I think are possible today, but where we’re going to go after that I don’t know.”

Rob Doyle points out that sailing superyacht owners pay around a 30 per cent premium over opting for a motoryacht, yet the boats lose around a third of the equivalent interior volume. However, for him the biggest limitations are the humans onboard.

“I think we are coming to a stage where we need a new type of rig, to be honest, to be able to safely deploy these sails without killing people. I think we are getting very close to where the metal meets the flesh at the deck level where the people and the guests are hanging around.”

With the ever-increasing winch and line speeds needed to handle the huge loads, serious hand and limb injuries can happen in the blink of an eye. “There is a moral hazard there that keeps playing on my mind,” says Doyle. “We are building very dangerous machines and we have to be very careful of people.”

The newly announced Endurance concept design is a 114m four-masted explorer design with a 6,000 mile range under power.

More prosaically, the bigger your gigayacht, the bigger the challenge of just getting on and off it. “Once you are getting to a stage where you can’t get into anchorages you are in constant fear of drifting – even putting down an anchor you need a huge amount of space around you.

“So then you anchor further out into the slop and the big waves, so the owners find it difficult to get on and off the boat, and suddenly other problems can overwhelm the project,” Doyle points out. One increasingly popular solution to that particular problem is a luxury landing craft.

Too big for the Panama Canal

It might seem counter-intuitive, but it is Aquijo’s owner’s focus on the sailing experience that has enabled the designers of the 86m ketch to push the size limits of a traditionally rigged yacht.

“Aquijo is a sophisticated machine and brings most aspects of a 1,600GT motor yacht with her,” comments designer Bill Tripp. “But she does not aspire to helicopters or submarines, the feeling of the boat is one of use. She is for getting out there, and for going out sailing. In Greece this summer, she would go out for an afternoon of sailing in 35 knot Meltemi because it is so much fun to sail at 20 knots, as if on rails.

“We have always done sailboats that can get under the Panama Canal bridge, and the biggest we were happy to do and put under the bridge was really 46m because after that we didn’t have big enough sails for the boat.

“Then five years ago we launched A Better Place, and the owner said ‘I’ll go around, I don’t want to limit my boat because of the bridges.’ With Aquijo they said, we want to go to these places anyway, so let’s get the best sailboat we can. So suddenly, instead of having this 63m limit on the rig, that all opened up and we could start doing a sailing boat that had a gross tonnage like some of the bigger motoryachts.

“I think we’re going to see more of that. You can look at the Strait of Magellan [an alternative route to rounding Cape Horn], as a place that’s a really long way away or a place you really want to go.”

The three-masted Black Pearl has an angular ‘Pacman’ bow with a wave-piercing reverse sheer lower section, and extended traditional foredeck above

The wish list

Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko is keeping his Sailing Yacht A tightly wrapped under non-disclosure agreements, but a few intriguing details have been released, including magnifying windows which appear larger inside than outside, and a gimballed crow’s nest, accessible by lift, 60m high in the curved mast.

An observation pod embedded in the keel with foot-thick glass gives a mesmerising – and frankly terrifying-sounding – view of the propellers, and there’s a three-man submarine.

Gigayacht designers have come up with some imaginative solutions to meet owners’ foibles and demands. Drawings for the 101m sloop incorporated an entirely retractable hardtop to the flybridge to give the owner his requested uninterrupted view of the sails and sky.

Plans for the Japanese-influenced Komorebi design feature a live tree on the aft deck. Watersports toys are old news – now tender garages are specified to house motorbikes, amphibious quad bikes, even custom-built marinised supercars.

On Aquijo, the headline feature is the ‘beach club’ on the lower deck. “For a sailing boat it is a huge area, they have a sauna, hamman [Turkish Bath], a rainfall shower, a relaxing area, this huge whirlpool in the middle, a little pantry, and enough space for gym equipment around the pool,” explains interior designer Robert Voges.

Beach club on Aquijo.

Voges says the trickiest element on the yacht was the flawless high shine steel mast claddings which run through the interior. “It is like a piece of art. The mast was going through the main saloon and guest corridor, and we didn’t want to hide it. So we decided to make a feature out of it with seamless stainless steel cladding with integrated LED strip lights from top to bottom over two decks.”

One of the most radical projects in progress is the 141m Dream Symphony, a four-masted design currently in build in Turkey. Originally slated for launch this year, the project is progressing slowly – in part due to the fact the yacht is constructed of wood. Her design includes a large aft deck swimming pool that transforms into a raised helipad area.

This is the type of concept which seemed fantastical just a few years ago, but is now reality in the motoryachts world where designs like the 81m Alfa Nero have deployed it successfully.

“It’s a good solution because you usually have to drop down all the stanchions and any elements that are higher than the helipad itself, whereas if you lift the helipad you don’t have to lower the other elements,” explains Dream Symphony designer Ken Freivokh.

The 141m four-masted Dream Symphony

“The brief did not call for a resident helicopter that would have its own hanger – it’s just a ‘touch and go’. You don’t want to set aside space for a helicopter permanently that’s almost never there, so if you have a reasonably sized swimming pool why not use the base of a pool to just receive the helicopter, and then once the helicopter flies away you can put it back to normal operations?” Why not indeed?

No matter how grandiose your ideas, however, not even the vast volumes of a gigayacht can be entirely filled with art galleries and Reiki studios. Robert Voges explains that, like any other ship, “We have to start with all the emergency exits, the corridors, staircases . . . and from there we can work with the other areas which are left over.”

Ken Freivokh estimates that at least 20 per cent of the interior space has to be allocated to the back-of-house systems required to maintain the equivalent of a small hotel – air conditioning, waste, media, and other unglamorous elements behind the touch-screen luxury.

Edge of reason

At 12,700 GT, Sailing Yacht A has the vastest volume of all. But can she be called a sailing yacht? She carries three of the world’s largest carbon rigs – curved, unstayed, capable of rotating a maximum of 70 degrees – featuring in-boom furling that can deploy 3,747 square metres of sail area (67 per cent more than Maltese Falcon) from a finger tip command. And yet she cannot help but look implausible.

The hull has a maximum beam of 24.8m and includes 24 shell doors.

No matter how innovative the technology on board, or how vast the expense, the elements will not bend to the will of man or millionaire. Various estimates have put her cost at $400-500million, or in the region of £320 to £400 million – to put those sort of figures in context, the bill for the London Olympics Aquatics centre came in at under £300m.

Sailing Yacht A will be ‘sail-assisted’, not wind-powered. Confounding, aggressive in her styling, she’s a yacht that has attracted scathing opinions as often as wide-eyed wonder. But what is the point of creating a gigayacht that doesn’t?

“It is a creative process with the owner,” comments Aquijo’s designer Bill Tripp, “They have this idea that they can make something that speaks to them. They don’t write symphonies, and they’re not great painters or sculptors, but on the other hand money is vital energy, and they can create these things that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

“It’s great when someone says, ‘Life’s short, I’m just going to do this.’”

The post The world’s biggest yachts – what’s behind the growth of the gigayacht appeared first on Yachting World.

Gino Morelli and Pete Melvin, more commonly known as Morelli & Melvin, are at the centre of almost every development in catamaran performance technology over the last three decades. Their credits include extensive developments with the A Class catamaran, Steve Fossett’s Playstation catamaran, BMW Oracle America’s Cup winner, the Emirates Team New Zealand AC72 that brought the world to foiling, the Olympic Nacra 17 and the junior class, Nacra 15.

So the chance to race around St Maarten aboard one of the team’s latest performance catamarans, the luxurious, high-speed HH66, R-Six, was not to be missed (HH catamarans – a new range of performance cruisers from China). Morelli then joined us on the dock after the race for a bit of a chat.

Gino Morelli on designing performance superyachts

I began by asking his views on the current state of the superyacht market and whether M&M had plans to get into superyacht design. “The performance-oriented superyacht market is still just starting out,” he replied. “There’s a bunch of giant 150-footers that are basically just powerboats with rigs – Mousetrap might be the only one that’s even close to being a decent sailboat.

“I think it’s taken a while for the technology, the rigs and sails, and boat construction to get owners enough confidence that you can build a 100-plus footer. We did the Gunboat 90 – that’s the biggest luxury [boat we’ve done] – and that boat can still fly a hull. Like the HH66, it flies a hull in about 25 knots true – it’s not a powercat with a rig, it actually goes sailing.

“We’re seeing pressure to move up the food chain. From 60s to 80s to 100s. Hopefully we’ll get those jobs. We’re pining for the opportunity to spend somebody’s $20-30million and looking forward to smoking half the traditional superyacht fleet – teaching them what sailing can be like.”

What foiling configuration is ‘best’?

The HH66 has 4m of daggerboard in the water at full draught with about a metre of curvature. This creates around 15 per cent “lift fraction”, which is a reference to the percentage of the boat’s overall weight (around 20 tonnes) that the boards can lift. On our round-the-island race, R-Six did fly for a few minutes with the wind on the beam and boat speed at over 20 knots. But I wondered which of the many semi-foiling, foil-assisted, four-point, three-point set-ups he currently favours.

“We’re working on the TF10 – it’s a trimaran foiler, 10m long, [commissioned by] five guys from NY yacht club. It’s basically a flying Corsair trimaran. Built out of all carbon in Holland by Holland Composites. It’s a fully flying four-point foiler.

“It’s really what we call a gentleman’s racer. So it’s not quite GC32 or AC45 stupidity, but it’s close. You still might want to wear a helmet, but it doesn’t quite have the acrobatics involved.”

“Currently the most user friendly [foil configuration is] what we call the four-point foilers (Read our review of the Formula Whisper four-point foiling catamaran dinghy). Just because it eliminates the need to raise and lower the boards.

“If you’re going across the ocean and don’t change the foil for three days, a three pointer is probably going to win you some miles, but the slight delta in speed between the three-point and four-point boat in any sort of short, enclosed course… for this kind of stuff, four-pointers are much more user friendly, safer, more forgiving – you don’t quite have to be Jimmy Spithill to keep it flying.

“That’s kind of our current track. I keep saying ‘We’re like the Wright Brothers. We just learned to fly, like, a week ago.’

“We go through variations in design in a two month cycle. It’s horrible for manufacturers because the next idea is probably better. It jumps so much.

“We did the Nacra 17 Olympic class cat [designed in 2011] and that was right on the edge when we were just learning how to fly with Team New Zealand. It had the curved boards but didn’t have the T-rudders yet. We didn’t have time to develop the T-rudder before the Olympic trials – and then, they went with it.

“So we had this funny, bizarre boat that’s very difficult to sail but good guys can actually fly it ‘teeter-totter’ on the single foil. It’s a tough boat to sail well.

“So then we developed the 15-footer as the youth training boat – and that boat from the get-go has four-point foils, so it’s immediately faster than the 17. So ISAF, says ‘Hold it. You mean the smaller youth boat is going to be faster than the Olympic boat?’ So we’ve actually detuned the 15 a little bit so it doesn’t quite leap-frog the 17 too quick.

“That’s how fast it’s developing. Our new boat is always faster than our old boat.”

DSS foils on catamarans

“We’ve been fooling around with the moustaches and the top-downs and the DSS foils they all have their sweet spots but the trouble is – what are you trying to fly?

“On this boat (HH66 R-Six) we’re flying dishwashers and washing machines and refrigerators. You know – this boat has 15 per cent lift fraction on its daggerboards – an AC72 has 100 per cent lift fraction. [Gunboat 66] Extreme H2O has got another metre of daggerboard [than the HH66] it’s lighter by at least 1.5 tonnes, it’s got a big rig, so it has about 30 per cent lift fraction. I can see a trend that lift fractions will go up but how many dishwashers, washing machines and coffee makers are we going to be flying upwind?

Gino Morelli

Why is St Maarten Heineken regatta so special?

“It’s a combination of things,” says Morelli. “The round island race is one of those benchmark races [because the course hasn’t changed over the years], so there is a true historical record. Also, the racecourse is right there. You don’t have to motor out for three hours getting to the startline.

It’s very easy for people in the US to fly without changing time zones, there’s direct flights from all over the place to St Maarten, there’s plenty of hotels around here.

I’ve been four or five times and my wife comes with me and hangs out and we enjoy the food – it’s very cosmopolitan between the French and the Dutch – I think the BVI’s are probably a little easier for Americans [to get to] but the racing here is hard to beat.”

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One of the unwritten rules of the America’s Cup is that every decision the defender makes must be in the interests of self-interest. What sets the Cup apart from every other major sporting event is the inherent unfairness of it all, that if you win it you get to make the rules. So it naturally follows that if you do get to write your own rules, you write them in such a way that it’s nigh on impossible for anyone else to prise the Auld Mug out of your hands.

Seven years ago, when BMW Oracle Racing beat Alinghi 2-0 in that extraordinary mismatch between the Americans’ wing-masted trimaran and the soft-sailed Swiss catamaran, Larry Ellison and Russell Coutts were seen as the white knights who would clean up the Cup after accusing Ernesto Bertarelli of skewing the deck in his favour. Since then Coutts has gone on to make himself every bit as unpopular as his former Alinghi boss, with a number of controversial decisions that have been seen as self-serving.

But while some of those accusations may be true, the one for which the five-time Cup winner really deserves some credit is Coutts’s decision to downscale the size of the boats, and to make them one-design in many important respects. From the hugely complex and expensive AC72s that contested the 2013 Cup in San Francisco, an AC62 was briefly envisaged before that was superseded by the more affordable AC50s, six of which we are about to see go into action this summer.

Some of the biggest components of the class have been tightly defined and controlled in the AC50 rule, such as the hulls, the platform and the wing rig. As Oracle skipper Jimmy Spithill told me recently: “It just doesn’t make sense that the teams spend a whole lot of time and resources designing hulls, because the hulls aren’t in the water anymore. The three big things that will win the Cup will be the foil design, the control systems, and aerodynamics.”

Without making large elements of the AC50 one-design, smaller teams like Groupama Team France and SoftBank Team Japan wouldn’t be on the start line. The other thing that has really benefited the Japanese in particular is the opportunity to train on the Great Sound in Bermuda alongside the well-funded campaigns such as Oracle and Artemis Racing.

Finding the secret to the foiling tack

Although Land Rover BAR won the America’s Cup World Series after clinching the final event in Japan in November, Spithill believes Ben Ainslie’s team have been missing a trick not getting to Bermuda sooner. It’s when you line up alongside and against the other teams that your learning curve rises exponentially, says the Oracle skipper. A case in point, perhaps, is that Dean Barker and the Japanese team claimed to be first to pull off a foiling tack, with the Americans and Swedes also managing to achieve this most difficult of manoeuvres. Ainslie will be keen to nail the foiling tack sooner rather than later, as this is thought to be the killer move that could determine winning or losing on the tight race course.

The Brits did relocate from Portsmouth to Bermuda just before Christmas but the French and the Kiwis aren’t expected in Bermuda until February. Although the teams weren’t permitted to launch their 50ft race boats until the New Year, no one did launch straight away and probably won’t until early February. This is due to a surprise new rule that states: “a blackout period of 28 consecutive days shall be taken by each competitor, which must begin on or after 9 January 2017”.

Although there hasn’t been an official explanation for the blackout, it’s thought to be part of a package of consolation prizes for Emirates Team New Zealand, which won a dispute against the America’s Cup Events Authority after the ACEA reneged on an agreement to hold the round-robin AC qualifiers in Auckland. The Kiwis are shipping their boat to Bermuda during January, so the blackout period effectively prevents the others from getting more training time in their race boats.

Once they do get their race boats wet, the teams won’t have a moment to waste. It will be full bore until 26 May for the start of the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup qualifiers and challenger playoffs.

America’s cup teams sign up to historic new format – without Emirates Team New Zealand

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How rare it is, to be left to your own devices on a wild island. From the tropics to the high latitudes, more often than not when you think you are alone and have achieved a sense of isolation, allowing your imagination to conjure up allusions of first contact, as in the voyages of Captain Cook, someone comes steaming around the headland and drops anchor next door. Or else the prefecture or a park warden will materialise out of thin air asking for your cruising permit.

Indicative of the interest in worldwide cruising beyond the well-charted, well-known waterways of the Mediterranean and Caribbean (in large part thanks to Jimmy Cornell), over time, many of the uninhabited islands in far flung locations have seen a steady traffic, publicised even more so now on social media websites and cruising forums.

Cruising guru Jimmy Cornell transits the North West Passage in Aventura IV

Tropical island destinations were first on the hit list, a trend that began in the middle of the last century. The average cruiser was more than capable of dealing with the navigational challenges of coral atolls and fringing reefs, plus the elements that might make the experience in part miserable, such as the heat, jungle environments and the critters that infest them. Surrounded by shoal waters cruisers could provide for themselves by fishing or diving for their dinner, no permit needed, which satisfied the primeval desire of otherwise urbanites to ‘live off the land’ in solitude. For any cruisers less adventurous flotillas now regularly ply these waters, which, in one sense, seems to deflate the purpose of getting away from it all.

High latitude destinations certainly offered more challenges. Considerations for the cold, risk of ice, short seasons and generally heavier weather mean these austere outposts have found focus only in relatively recent times. Many sub-antarctic islands as well as arctic equivalents were, as a rule, ravaged by sealers and whalers for hundreds of years and then forgotten by territorial governments. This created a vacuum, opening up a golden period for bold navigators willing to make the necessary preparations and take the necessary risks to visit them.

Lately, though, sovereignty has had to be reinforced either for potential mineral exploitation or, altruistically, to protect a unique ecosystem for scientific study. An organised tourist destination is also a motive. At present there are no sub-antarctic islands you can visit without a permit and many where no permits will be issued at all. A few are even off limits for the scientists. This due diligence also extends to the entire Antarctic continent as per the terms of the Antarctic Treaty. Permits are now also required throughout much of the Arctic, which is all sovereign territory. In many cases daily position reporting is a requirement. The ‘golden period’ of showing up on a voyage of personal discovery unencumbered by bureaucracy seems to be truly over.

A great shot of Penguin chicks surrounding a single adult penguin on South Georgia. Photo Stephen Davis

In September our early season South Georgia mountaineering expedition on Pelagic Australis was, as usual, well planned out with the full approval of the South Georgia government, having gone through a rigorous permitting process. The difference, though, in going down in early September was that we would be the only yacht on the island and well ahead of the tour ship season, which opens in mid to late October. Although the administrative base at King Edward Point alongside the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken, now a museum, is manned by a British magistrate and a harbour master plus a retinue of British Antarctic Survey scientists, this staff is restricted to their station and the immediate environs of Cumberland Bay.

The point is that while roaming around on the beaches and in the mountains we were utterly alone – not counting the penguins, seals and other flying birds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Although we are aware of and adhere to all the guidelines regarding the wildlife and biosecurity protocols, there was a certain sense of freedom knowing there would be no-one sharing our anchorages and no-one to ‘bump into.’ A liberating experience indeed.

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