Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i Yachting World

It is incredibly hard these days to tune out the noise. There are so many ever increasingly shouty, shiny things competing for our attention. Sailing is no different – I am as guilty as anyone of getting distracted by the recent crash-bang-wallop coverage of The Ocean Race Europe and SailGP in Sassnitz (see page 14), where spectacular collisions and drama dominated over the actual skills on show. Even coverage of cruising can sometimes fall into the same trap. If you spend any time on YouTube whatsoever (and the all-seeing algorithm knows you enjoy boats) you’ll no doubt have been fed an endless stream of sailing ‘vloggers’ content. Each channel tempting viewers with ever-slicker edits, and, inevitably, the promise of drama or emotional outbursts. So it was an absolute treat to…

Two major professional racing events were marred by collisions and potentially race-ending damage in quick succession, demonstrating the risks of racing high speed foiling desings over compact courses. On 10 August a crash between two foiling IMOCAs at the start of The Ocean Race Europe in Kiel resulted in both yachts having to withdraw from Leg 1. In the incident, Allagrande Mapei Racing (formerly Thomas Ruyant’s Vulnerable), skippered by Ambrogio Beccaria collided with Holcim-PRB, skippered by Rosalin Kuiper. Holcim-PRB had got the best start of the seven-boat fleet, before Paul Meilhat’s Biotherm swiftly took the lead. Allagrande Mapei was to windward of Holcim-PRB as the two boats reached in strong breezes, both fully powered up to the point of being on the edge of broaching, when they violently came together.…

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…

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ADVANCED AC72 Italian boutique yacht builder Advanced Yachts has turned its attention for the first time to multihulls. Active in the 60-80ft monohull sector, Advanced offers semi-custom yachts with fine Italian styling requiring a small crew of two or three. It has started building the moulds for a 72ft catamaran that fits the same brief, with naval architecture by the renowned Reichel/Pugh. Performance is certainly an important consideration, but this is really designed to be a comfortable offshore cruising cat for bluewater voyaging – or just loafing round the Med. It’s built in E-glass with a carbon-fibre deck and superstructure to keep the centre of gravity down and displacement to 35.5 tonnes. The former is important when you add in the low-profile flybridge and towering carbon rig from Lorima. It…

It’s safe to say that the cat is truly out of the bag when it comes to the appeal of multihulls as cruising platforms, and not just for a week-long charter in the BVI’s. The mono vs cat debate has long raged, and while there will always be those who will never consider a yacht without ballast as seaworthy, the number of long-term cruisers crossing the world’s oceans on catamarans is increasing steadily. As they’ve become more popular, they’ve also moved beyond the charter-style offerings of mass production catamarans. While Gunboat remains the brand that defines the performance breed, the likes of HH, McConaghy, Marsaudon Composites, Outremer, Balance, Kinetic and several smaller boutique brands are building multihulls that seem to demand little compromise in comfort yet offer near-raceboat levels of…

What does it take to pass the RYA Yachtmaster exam? Theo Stocker takes the test to find out Many very competent and highly experienced yachtsmen and women don’t have any qualifications at all and are content to keep it that way, but not being a Yachtmaster bothered me. I was pretty sure I was up to the standard, but I didn’t know. Becoming an RYA Yachtmaster is something I’ve wanted to do for years. Unlike RYA Day Skipper etc, the Yachtmaster is not an attendance-based course, but a one-day exam in which an examiner will form an objective opinion of your abilities, and recommend you to the RYA/MCA Yachtmaster Qualification Panel to become a Yachtmaster… or not. Technically, no instruction is required beforehand and the theory course is not compulsory.…

Running a successful offshore campaign on a budget requires some smart thinking. Winner of the Rolex Fastnet Race Young Skipper trophy, Lawrence Herbert, shares some tips with Andy Rice. Lawrence Herbert loves his offshore racing but he and the Corazon crew are campaigning their J/133 on a tight budget. Necessity being the mother of invention, the 28-year-old and the rest of his 20-something crew have come up with some ingenious cost-saving approaches with minimal or zero compromise to performance. Herbert learned a lot about boat maintenance and reliability in the Caribbean where he worked for a few seasons on race boats including the J-Class yacht Lionheart. This hard-earned knowledge has equipped him well to run much of his own maintenance programme rather than paying others to do the work. Having…

‘I have so many wonderful memories on this boat’ CLARISSE CRÉMER NOMINATES THE MINI 6.50 “My Mini 6.50 was a Pogo 3,” recalls Crémer, who raced as a ‘bizuth’ or ‘rookie’ in the 2017 Mini Transat, making an impressive ocean racing debut in the pint-sized class that races from France to the Caribbean. “It was my first single-handed offshore racing boat, the first time I did a transatlantic and the first time I spent a night at sea by myself. The boat was brand new when I got it, so I got to name it and make all the small modifications I could to make it better and faster.” Mini 6.50s are short and beamy, nearly half as wide as they are long (just 21ft). The Verdier-designed Pogo 3 is…

Not an abstract painting, but an aerial view of the entrance to Angostura Mischief in Estero Peel, Patagonia. Skipper and photographer Lauric Thiault explains: “Few sailboats venture here because the narrows are notoriously difficult, with strong currents, opaque water, uncharted depths, and drifting growlers. The abstract patterns on the surface come from a nearby river carrying sediment-rich waters into the fjord. In the top-right corner, you can spot grounded ice – a clear sign of where not to go! “The pass takes its name from WH Tilman’s yacht Mischief. Tilman was away on an expedition in the 1950s when his boat ran aground here. I won’t blame the captain on this one, the narrow is really tricky!” At the blunt and leading edge of aquadynamics, Team Malizia and a common…

Cruisers are being urged to be cautious while cruising the Baltic Sea near Russia after a German couple on a Malo 40 were apparently pursued by an unmarked submarine while sailing near Kaliningrad in June. Gerd and Anke Schoekan, aboard Emaloca, were on a 110-mile passage from the Polish port of Władysławowo to the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda. In their blog the sailors say the planned route would see them “well outside the 12-mile zone” of Russian territory, although it took them within Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) which is part of international waters. Their blog recalls: “We spot the submarine around 5pm. It’s approaching us at an acute angle, matching our speed exactly. Therefore, we can’t pass in front of or behind it. Our adrenaline levels are rising.” After…

Just the two of us Most cruisers sail as a couple, but taking your on-land partnership on board isn’t always straightforward. We get advice from those who’ve done it on how to manage a big adventure, on a big boat, two-up. A season in the US and Caribbean Whether you’re about to complete your first transatlantic, or cruising down the eastern seaboard, where are the best places to spend a season in the US and Caribbean? We share some enticing itineraries Best sailing gear: tried and tested The Yachting World team pick some of their favourite gear that they’ve put to the test on the water all year. Expert knowledge Pro tips and expert advice on ocean navigation, night watches, buying the right boat for you, plus much more. Boat…

In 1925, on Saturday 15 August, seven mismatched yachts set sail from the Royal Victoria Yacht Club at the mouth of the picturesque Fishbourne creek on the Isle of Wight, heading for Ireland on the very first running of the ‘Ocean Race’, later to become the famous Fastnet. It was a very far cry from this year’s centenary edition of the Rolex Fastnet Race, which saw the largest ever fleet start an offshore. An incredible 444 yachts lined up at the Royal Yacht Squadron cannons on Saturday 26 July in a sequence of nine starts, including four Ultimes, 23 Class 40s and 380 IRC monohulls. Helicopters wheeled overhead, crowds lined the shore in Cowes, 10-deep in places, and the shallows off the Green were fender-to-fender with jostling spectator boats. Back…

Patagonia isn’t a place you rush through. At least not if you want to experience it fully. Its fjords and channels, carved by glaciers and swept by wind, demand patience and reward curiosity. On a 35ft glassfibre sailboat, you don’t rush – not through williwaws, not through ice, and certainly not through the wilderness and remoteness you rarely find anywhere else. Curiously, I never dreamed of being a sailor. My ideas of adventure were more about where I wanted to go than how I’d get there. I was drawn to the idea of wild landscapes and vast spaces, far from everything. Sailing came later – almost by accident – when my partner Nao and I realised it might be the perfect way to reach those places. We first bought Tupaia,…

When you consider how you got into sailing and how the next generation might do so, it prompts some searching questions. Is sailing dying as a sport and a pastime? Does our increasingly time-precious world demand a rethink, some sailing saviours, and if so, in what form? Think back to the emergence of snowboarding. Skiing looked endangered. The glory days of Klammer and Maier’s downhill racing were being elbowed out by a young baggy-pants-wearing brigade. Then something glorious happened – carving skis were invented. These hourglass-shaped planks seemingly changed the game overnight. What the rad folk were doing on boards, whether in powder or parks, could now be done on skis. It got cool again and hasn’t looked back since. Perhaps sailing needs its own carving moment. Is this it?…

MCCONAGHY SAPPHIRE PLUS MC & PANTHER While it built its name on its high-performance and record-breaking maxi monohulls, McConaghy has proved that it can build anything, from AC40s and their hydrogen chase boats to a deep-sea submersible. It’s also no stranger to multihulls, including its largest craft to date, the sensational, futuristic 42.5m trimaran Adastra, which launched 10 years ago. Latterly, it’s really honed in on the large cruising multihull market, with its MC range of sailing cats. These Jason Ker designs, with their signature flybridge-mounted aft helms, began with the MC50 in 2018, and grew to include last year’s spectacular launch, the MC75 Jack. Such has been the interest in these large cats that McConaghy has recently conceived two full new ranges: a Panther line of electric hybrid yachts…

It’s 21 years since my old friend Andrew Bray, then editor of Yachting World, asked me to produce a six-part series taken from nautical literature entitled Great Seamanship. We started with Bernard Moitessier’s description of a Southern Ocean survival storm, then contrasted this with a whimsical tale of high latitude adventure from Rockwell Kent. From there, my wife and I continued to plunder the shelves of our own extensive library. As the column evolved, it became clear that readers were enjoying it and the supply of material showed no signs of drying up, so we carried on past the original shut-off date. Year followed year, the content moved from historical accounts to more up-to-date stories, and we branched out so that from time to time we could feature a delightful…

The Patí Català is a rudderless, boomless, daggerboardless 18ft catamaran, which blind sailor Dani Pich sailed around the Isle of Wight Local dinghy classes tend to evolve to suit the particular conditions of the waters they sail in, and the Patí Català catamarans are unique to their Barcelona birthplace. The catamaran is a development of the simple twin-hulled platforms that Spanish fisherman would paddle out to check their nets in the late 1800s. In 1942 two brothers from Catalonia added wooden spars and battenless mainsails to their boats and the sailing class was born. Often referred to as ‘skates’, the flat-bottomed Patí boats have no rudder, daggerboard, or foils of any kind, meaning they can be comfortably dragged across the sand of the Barceloneta and Badalona beaches. They’re also exceptionally…

The much delayed Protocol for the 38th America’s Cup has – finally, almost – been agreed, and there are some radical changes within it. After a first draft of the Protocol was ‘leaked’ in April, the anticipated June deadline for the release of the final version flew by with no news, only months of public disagreements between Cup holders Team New Zealand, headed by Grant Dalton; the Challenger of Record, represented by Sir Ben Ainslie; and other potential teams. However, on 12 August – after some emergency summits – a new Protocol was unveiled (although it’s worth noting that until the final ‘Partnership’ agreement within it is signed in September, this could yet all become null and void. Such is the way of the America’s Cup…). CREW CHANGES Some of…

Given what the IMOCA class was designed for – and the way in which blasting around the world non-stop, alone, on foils in just under 65 days grabbed everyone’s attention last winter with the Vendée Globe – we could be forgiven for thinking that a six-leg, fully crewed, stopping service around Europe is a walk in the park for the world’s top sailors and their 60ft rocket ships. You might not be surprised to hear they don’t seem to see it like that. After all, what’s the point in talking down an event that many of them have been talking up for months in the boardrooms of potential commercial backers? I spent a bit of time with the skippers and crews on board their boats and on the dock ahead…

“Nostalgia is a seductive liar,” famously said American diplomat George Ball. Among the unmistakable buzz and anticipation that surrounded the teams gathering in Cowes for the 2025 Admiral’s Cup revival, there was a niggling question. More than 20 years after the embers died in the last throes of the Admiral’s Cup, could this resurrection of the unofficial world championships of offshore racing truly bring back its glory days? Certainly the presence of many of the world’s top sailors from fields as diverse as ocean racing, America’s Cup, and Olympics – plus a healthy number of returning Admiral’s Cuppers – suggested that the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s new formula had created a strong event. Even from the issuing of the Notice of Race it was clear that the RORC had knuckled…

‘Laaaaaaaaaand ho!’ The first shouts drifted through the companionway at 0545 on 25 April. Hiva Oa was visible in the pre-dawn light just off our starboard bow. French Polynesia: the South Sea Islands. I lingered in my bunk a minute longer, lost in a sleepy stupor from the low drone of the engine. The last hundred miles of the crossing had been frustratingly windless, but there is no better sleep aid than constant rpms. When I stepped into the cockpit, the island was close by to starboard. High green hills surrounded us on three sides as Falken approached the bay, a ragged ridgeline running down the centre of the island, and black volcanic slopes disappeared into the sea where the long south-easterly swell exploded onto the rocky cliffs in high…

There’s been the odd singular sailing multihull superyacht thus far, the likes of the 44m Pendennis-built Hemisphere and Perini Navi’s recent 46m floating art gallery ArtExplorer, while JFA has quietly gone about launching a handful of 85-110ft custom sailing catamarans. But a new pride of big cats is coming. Last year John Mountain launched his carbon bluewater Air Yacht 80 after failing to find his preferred blend of performance, space and superyacht quality. And it’s the performance element which has triggered this new trend that we centre on in these pages. Yachting World readers will have noticed a similar movement with monohulls of late, where production yards have stepped up to cater to a semi-custom demand in the 70-90ft sector. We dedicated these pages to them two years ago, detailing…

SUNREEF 43 Moulding the hulls for this sailing cat was completed back in February and constituted the largest one-shot infusion project in the world, according to Sunreef. Flybridge and bimini mouldings are also complete, with work well under way on the interior systems of this 140ft ‘supercat’. The hulls alone account for 1,700m2 of composite surface and will be embedded with part of the 250m2 of third-generation ‘solar skin’, capable of generating 60kW of electricity. It can be stored in the huge 1MWh battery system – a bank that can propel the yacht under silent electric power for 12 hours, or guarantee night after night of silent operation at anchor. A regenerative propulsion system allows the yacht to make electricity while sailing. The 43 Eco should sail too, with speeds…

The use of AI in sailing is distinctly different to the tools based on large language models such as ChatGTP and DeepSeek that became available in the last three years and garner a disproportionate number of headlines. Other forms of AI have existed for many decades. Machine learning, and neural networks trained on transaction data, for example, have been used by major banks since the mid 1990s. They significantly improved detection of credit card fraud and anomalies in real time. But there’s been a rapid acceleration of AI’s abilities in the so-called deep-learning era post-2012. Today AI is used across a wide swathe of applications in the boating world, encompassing safety systems, weather forecasting and routing, naval architecture, performance analysis, coaching and broadcasting. It’s also increasingly used in the domain…

It’s the second day of a race weekend, an early season shakedown for boat and crew. A pleasant 12-14 knots is blowing from the eastern entrance of the Solent. The first upwind leg takes us eastwards from Hill Head, along the mainland shore towards Portsmouth and the shining white Spinnaker Tower. We’re racing a 40-footer, and on handicap it’s the quickest boat in this fleet. So, we’re leading everyone towards the Lee-on-Solent beach, going to a mark that’s a mile away upwind. We know the left-hand side will pay on this leg, we’ve done it many times and, so far, the strategy – to win the pin and get as far in towards the beach as we can – is working. The big question for the navigator at this moment…

Is spending the kind of money you can buy a house for on a yacht actually the sensible option for taking a sabbatical? The average house in the UK today costs around £290,000. But rather than buying a house, you could spend that money on a yacht instead. While it might sound a silly comparison, the potential to cruise in comfort, at fast speeds, with most of the comforts of home, can be a big factor in making a cruising sabbatical happen – particularly when you’re trying to recruit family to join you. CALL TO ADVENTURE For many owners participating in the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, the yacht they have bought to take part marks a turning point in their ownership journey, one where they’ll live for an extended period…