Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2015 i Yachting World

With a dedicated onboard reporter on each yacht during the race, and a careful selection procedure for the role, this Volvo Race will be remembered for the most prolific videos and some of the finest images to come from any ocean race at any time. The photographers managed to capture the excitement, the mood of the ocean and the crew on board with an intimacy we have never seen before. Many superb images come our way at Yachting World, but these stood out. “I loved the reportage style, the way they told the story. The photos are gritty and hard-hitting, and they really got to the truth of the way the crews were feeling,” comments Art Editor Robert Owen, who has picked out some of his favourite shots of fast-paced…

Aearch was called off in June after 48 hours of searching for Carly du Preez, wife of round the world sailor Pete Hill. She was lost overboard from their 33ft twin wingmasted, junk-rigged catamaran, Oryx, as the couple were on passage between Durban and Madagascar. Pete Hill reported that he went off watch to sleep and when he came back up on deck du Preez, 58, was missing. She was reportedly not wearing a lifejacket, but conditions were not rough. Hill said: ‘We set sail from Durban on the Thursday towards Madagascar and by Friday morning we were about 50 miles north-east of Durban. After breakfast together I turned in at 0800 to catch up on my sleep and woke again at 1000. The sailor’s worst nightmare: Carly was no…

America’s Cup World Series Portsmouth – 23-26 July On 23 July, the first event of the 35th America’s Cup cycle kicks off in Portsmouth, UK, with the opening America’s Cup World Series (ACWS). The regatta is one of three taking place this season, which also includes races in Göteburg in Sweden in August and in Bermuda in October. It is the first time official America’s Cup racing has taken place in the UK since the trophy left British shores in 1851. Hosted in association with the British challenger, Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR), and coinciding with the official completion of that campaign’s impressive team base in Camber Quay, Portsmouth, the event is a big deal not only for the home team, but for the Cup organisation, which has made considerable changes.…

As the world’s largest and most notorious offshore race has gained in popularity, the competitiveness of the 380-boat fleet has increased. A few may be ticking another item on their bucket list, but the majority of competitors are out to win in some way, whether chasing overall victory or making a friendly wager with rivals. Diversity within the fleet has also increased. From heavily crewed supermaxis, to short-handed 33-footers, from paid to race to paying to race, the Rolex Fastnet Race continues to draw a huge variety of sailors, boats and teams. What remains the same, though, as its organisers, the RORC, celebrates its 90th year, is that the 605nm race is famously tricky when it comes to tactics and can be physically challenging when conditions pipe up. So what…

“The elegantly curved spars are painted a silver grey colour and are sculptural to look at, but monumental in scale. They terminate in a radical feature, a tapered finial” In a tidal reach at the northern end of Portsmouth Harbour, the giant spars of two enormous superyachts have been taking shape in strict secrecy over the past three years. The three masts of Project 787, the larger of these two, were finally revealed in June when the doors of Magma Structures’ sheds were opened and the exquisitely curved carbon composite spars were loaded onto a barge to be shipped to the yard where the hull is being built in Germany. The world’s tallest freestanding rigs were in plain sight for the first time. Reputed to be excess of 100m and…

SPECIAL REPORT For those who choose to escape the confines of conventional life and spend a few months, years or even the rest of our lives at sea there are many challenges to tackle. But it’s not necessarily storms, pirates or rocks that are the biggest problems. One of the hardest parts is the admin, the paperwork that follows us wherever we go: bank accounts, home maintenance and bills, taxes, mortgages and businesses. Unexpectedly, it can be the smallest things that trip you up when cruising. Receiving post – especially important documents – and even the basic process of making or receiving a phone call can all be tricky, especially when you throw in differences in time zones, language barriers or the fact that you no longer fit neatly into…

Cutting a dash Raching in a blur of speed across the Bay of Palma, this is the Baltic 108 WinWin on her way to a podium place in the Superyacht Cup in June. This year’s regatta attracted 21 entries, ranging from the new 60m Perini Navi Perseus^3, which cracked out her brand new giant 2,400m2 A2 spinnaker for the first time, to the new Oyster 825 Maegan. The fleet enjoyed ideal conditions in flat water, with building sea breezes in the afternoons over three days of racing.…

British sailor Steve White has announced a plan to attempt the non-stop solo westabout round the world record, the ‘wrong way’ feat against winds and currents that shot Chay Blyth to fame in 1971. Certainly the longest, most gruelling and least challenged of the all the speed sailing records, this has had only a handful of contenders in 44 years and been broken just five times (see right). It is currently held by Jean-Luc Van Den Heede, who set it in 2004 in his 85ft Adrien in 122d 14h. White, who completed the 2008/9 Vendée Globe in his IMOCA 60 Toe in the Water, has bought a Volvo 70, the former Telefonica Black, a Farr design from the 2008 Volvo Ocean Race. He aims to set off in autumn next…

The Artemis Offshore Academy is looking for next year’s trainees to undergo a programme designed to prepare British sailors for the standards set in the demanding one-design Solitaire du Figaro by top French sailors such as Michel Desjoyeaux, Roland Jourdain and Jean Le Cam. The chosen few are offered a funded programme with training in skills such as weather and navigation, media and campaign management. Artemis has sponsored the Offshore Academy since 2010 with the aim of fostering the next generation of solo ocean racing skills and talent – sailors such as Sam Goodchild, Conrad Humphreys and our consulting editor Pip Hare have been through its ranks. This year’s trainees have had promising results in the Figaro fleet, which made a stop in Torquay. Sailors are invited to apply to…

Alan Bond, one of Australia’s best-known personalities and sailing figures, has died at the age of 77 following complications during open-heart surgery. Bond came to fame by winning the America’s Cup from the New York Yacht Club in 1983 at his third attempt, breaking the longest sporting run in history. Australians marked it by taking a national holiday. From then on, anything Bond touched appeared to turn to gold. Stock in his Bond Corporation soared. He took over the Swan brewery, the Chilean telephone system and bought Australia’s Channel 9 TV station for A$1 billion. He even bought a country estate with a complete village in the UK. It was all bought on tick, but only one person saw this burgeoning mountain of debt for what was – Roland ‘Tiny’…

Now in its 90th year, the biennial Rolex Fastnet Race has developed into a multi-faceted competition with a double-handed class as well as fully crewed yachts. This year the fleet will number more than 380 and include multihulls, IMOCA 60s, maxis, Class 40s and Figaro one-designs alongside the IRC classes. For the previous fortnight they may have spent countless hours watching weather forecasts develop while they fine-tune a race plan, but now the priority is to decide the best spot to start on the Royal Yacht Squadron start line in preparation for two or three hours of inshore racing towards the Bridge Buoy and the open sea. In a race this long the big calls keep coming and while it’s tempting to judge process against the boats around you, how…

When cruising in the tropics – or indeed sailing round the world – the time spent actually sailing is surprisingly insignificant and, apart from the ongoing task of yacht maintenance, provisioning and just existing, the rest of your time is spent exploring and adventuring. On Skyelark we like to explore the islands and get a feel for life on shore, so our harbour time is usually spent hiking into the mountains, cycling the coast paths or taking tours, hiring cars and frequenting restaurants, yacht clubs and bars. But the one thing we do nearly every day at anchor is to head off for a snorkel. Series author: Dan Bower Dan and Em Bower, both in their thirties, are lifelong sailors. Six years ago they bought Skyelark of London, a Skye…

A fleet review of yachts belonging to members of the Royal Yacht Squadron (RYS) in Cowes was conducted in June by Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, to mark the club’s bicentenary. To commemorate the anniversary of the exclusive yacht club, some 180 yachts turned out, dressed overall. Prince Philip, who is Admiral of the RYS, was joined by The Princess Royal, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and Prince Michael of Kent along with European royalty’s keenest sailors: King Harald of Norway; King Constantine II of Greece and Queen Anne-Marie; Prince Albert of Monaco and King Juan Carlos of Spain. The RYS fired a 21-gun salute as Prince Philip climbed aboard HMS Ranger to conduct the review of yachts as varied as the William Fife-designed gaff cutter Mariquita and…

Students on a leading yacht engineering degree course put their design ideas to the test in June when they raced models of their yachts . The annual model yacht race held by Southampton Solent University has been running for more than 40 years and this year was won by Pierre-Antoine Tesson from France. The race is held on Gosport boating lake and students put forward designs as part of their first-year assessment for the university’s BEng Yacht and Powercraft Design and BEng Yacht Design and Production degree courses. The students spent 100 hours designing and building the vessels to conform to the yacht design rules, and 85 per cent of the marks awarded are for their computer-aided design and the build quality of the models, and another 15 per cent…

It’s a funny thing, the further I sailed away from northern Europe, the more attention my boat attracted in marinas and anchorages. In Cornwall, people barely noticed the little Folkboat with the chimney. In France and Ireland, the more curious passers-by wanted to know where I had come from. In Morocco, the locals couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and so didn’t even comment. By the time I was in the Canary Islands, where this chapter of my story starts, I could barely pop my head out of the hatch without being bombarded with questions. The most common one was always: “Did you sail that thing here?” which puzzled me slightly. It seemed to me a bit like watching someone park their car, and then asking them incredulously if…

What downwind sails should you buy for an Atlantic crossing or cruising beyond the Caribbean? This is one of the biggest questions skippers face when equipping a yacht for bluewater sailing, yet in some ways the most difficult to answer. It’s tricky because there are so many variables: size of the budget; how many crew you have and the watch systems you intend to run; as well as whether or not you will be regatta racing afterwards. To get an idea of the choices and their relative merits, we turned to the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) and asked a small selection of skippers what sails they had taken, which they used and for how long, and if they would change anything in hindsight. Even on a tradewinds passage, winds…

FACTS Test Editor Toby Hodges Where we tested: Monfalcone, near Trieste in the Adriatic Sea Conditions: light: winds from 3-14 knots over calm water Model: upgraded sails and carbon rig, standard threecabin, two-heads layout, but fnished in whitewashed oak Production yachts are rarely referred to as trendsetters. Like a mainstream saloon car, their primary goal is to offer maximum potential value, rather than seek admiring glances. So if asked to name a catwalk model in the world most of us inhabit – that is a monohull, built in series from a mould – how would you answer? For decades the staple response could have been Swan. But now that the Finnish frm is more focused on large yachts and superyachts than on everyman performance cruisers, who can rival it for…

“The boat heeled over to 40°, with her keel out of the water, before coming back up a moment later” This classic image from the dominant era of the Admiral’s Cup is of the Irish one-tonner Jameson Whiskey having a moment while preparing for a race start off Dun Laoghaire, in Ireland. Photographer Rick Tomlinson had been asked to photograph the Irish trials for the Cup and when he got there it was blowing hard and very gusty. He gave up trying to shoot from a 5m RIB and clambered onto the committee boat. In the seconds before the start, the Ed Dubois-designed Jameson bore away and started running down the line. As she did so, a strong gust hit her and she broached. “The leeward runner was on too…