Where are the real men (and ladies)?

It has been a very encouraging start to the Maxi season in the Mediterranean, with our increasingly popular IMA European Champion ship being the first major event. We are now in the third edition, based in Naples Bay and including the classic offshore Tre Golfi Race as the opener.

The Tre Golfi is a Mediterranean classic and a jewel in the crown of organisers, the Circolo del Remo e della Vela Italia. Once again this was quite a test with every sort of weather and a photo finish in a rainstorm! We then added four days of inshore racing, windwardleewards, coastal and the now traditional race around Capri.

On the last day – displaying both skill and patience – our race officer, Stuart Childerley, hung on til the last possible minute to get a race in despite painfully light conditions.

Throughout the week the other challenge was to run racing from a single start for maxis of wildly different performance; at one extreme the Wally Centos and at the other a vintage Swan 65… In the end Hap Fauth was able to tear himself away from some other rather important business in Barcelona (Fauth is heavily involved in the NYYC American Magic Cup challenge) for his only event on Bella Mente this year – and his team was rewarded with the new IMA European Championship title.

Maxi sub-class 1 raced for the Loro Piana Trophy which went to Karel Komarek’s 100-footer – simply named V. This Mark Mills design has been much modified from her previous incarnation as Tango, with impressive results. Her new rather experienced tactician Ken Read was delighted with the changes. This bodes well for great competition this season between four relatively similar 94-100- footers, the others being Bullitt, Galateia and Magic Carpet Cubed.

Water ballast is now all the rage in the Maxi fleets, allowing for crew reduction for which we now award a rating allowance… a popular move among teams, it seems. Meanwhile, weather forecasting despite the use of increasingly sophisticated systems and supercomputers remains a somewhat black art.

The large number of available routeing models and the vast amounts of other data appear to make it no easier for the modern offshore navigator. Today programmes such as Expedition and Adrena give the option of detailed weather routeing, rather than just sailing from A to B by the apparently shortest route. Added to that are the complexities of tides and currents introducing further variables to race planning. I am dwelling on this as for the last two distance races involving maxis the pre-race planning prompted by the use of various models has caused massive disruption – something that simply would not have happened in the past.

The historic ethos of offshore racing has always been to be prepared for anything and everything that Mother Nature might decide to throw at you. In the not so distant past, weather forecasts were much less accurate so this was the only option. Now it seems there is increasing pressure to postpone, alter the course or even cancel racing if so much as a mildly unpleasant forecast is received.

In theory – or so we are told – modern yacht design has evolved to make boats that are more seaworthy, and indeed this is probably true of most modern hull shapes and equipment. The change is probably ‘mission creep’ from today’s deeply ingrained Health and Safety culture which no longer allows owners to take sole responsibility for the decision as to whether or not to race.

In more and more countries, France in particular, race organisers can now be held responsible for any accident to the extent of being arrested for involuntary manslaughter (as was the case with the former Nioulargue in St Tropez). This means that inshore races are now cancelled if the mean windspeed exceeds 25kt.

The obvious knock-on is that boats and crews are only geared up to sail with winds up to that strength. Various types of larger boats have evolved from featuring more or less offshore capability to become pure inshore day racers. The obvious examples are the TP52s, now a long way away from their original title of ‘Trans Pacific’.

The Maxi 72s have gone the same way. The Wally classes rarely sail further offshore than the captain’s cell phone range, especially as only a vanishingly small number feature a reef in the mainsail.

At the recent 151 Miglia the expectation of a Mistral at the first rounding mark, the Giraglia Rock to the North of Corsica, meant that the first leg from Livorno would be in ‘25kt and more’. The local organisers therefore moved the course south where the fleet would be sailing in the long wind shadow of the Corsica cliffs.

That turned the race back into another light-weather affair, which it has been for all the previous editions. A good deal of the course was upwind which favoured the eventual winner, the 20-year-old Atalanta II, a well-maintained traditional Felci design belonging to Carlo Puri Negri – who was very pleasantly surprised by their success against the modern planing canting-keeler Cippa Lippa X.

Most disappointed by the switch to a light-air course was the founder of the race, Roberto Lacorte, who did not find the consistent breeze to keep his foiling Flying Nikka up and out of the water long enough to achieve line honours. That privilege went to the 100ft Arca of Furio Benussi, which kept the lead despite being becalmed for three hours at one stage. So much for the Mistral.

This week I have been at the Giraglia in Saint-Tropez, now with a new title sponsor, Loro Piana. The maxi entry has been the best ever with 32 in total and 24 entered for the preceding inshore series now extended to four days. We have been lucky with a good range of conditions with testing sea states and winds up to 20kt. The maxis were divided into two fleets with separate starts. There was further sub-division by performance rather than length. Winning Fleet A was the extended Maxi72 – now 77ft – Jethou belonging to Sir Peter Ogden. Galateia won the ‘big boat’ sub-class. Cippa Lippa Xwon subclass 3, and Benoît de Froidmont’s venerable Wally 60 Wallyño won Fleet B.

Now the surprise – this regatta has always been about the main race from Saint-Tropez to Genoa, the inshore series a later addition. This is the 71st running of the race. The forecast is for a Mistral from the west with great opportunity to break the 15-hour record. However, almost the whole maxi fleet has pulled out as ‘no longer equipped to cope with strong conditions’ even though the course is almost entirely downwind. Looking back at the early rough upwind conditions in last year’s Rolex Fastnet it was again some of the newest and fastest large yachts that either broke or withdrew.

It seems that the market is happy to be designing and building large and essentially unseaworthy yachts suitable only for day racing. When I took over at the IMA I launched the IMA Mediterranean Maxi offshore series to try to get owners back to offshore racing. We have some great races, the Rolex Middle Sea and now the Aegean 600 – but we also need offshore-capable maxi yachts.
Andrew McIrvine, IMA

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