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Runner-up Cole Brauer was the star of the first Global Solo Challenge pursuit race last winter but it was the sanguine and vastly experienced French master mariner Philippe Delamare who got home first to lift the overall trophy. Delamare started a month before Brauer, but on his heavy 46-footer Mowgli he took only 17 days more than his American rival on her Class40. And the trick, nothing new, Delamare sailed far fewer miles than any of his rivals….
Prepare to party
With just under a year until the start of the 2025 Transatlantic Race, a feeder from North America for next year’s Rolex Fastnet Race, it is timely to consider the place of this race in the history of offshore sailing. While the RORC Transat from Lanzarote to Grenada is an annual fixture, for our centenary in 2025 it will also have a lead part in the quadrennial west-to-east Transatlantic which we run jointly with our friends at the New York Yacht Club with the further support of the Storm Trysail Club and Royal Yacht Squadron. Just 15 years after America’s famous victory around the Isle of
Wight, the first edition of the Transatlantic Race was held in 1866. This was the result of a drunken wager between three brash young members of the New York Yacht Club and owners of the three giant schooners Fleetwing, Vesta and Henrietta, each contributing to a prize purse of US$30,000 ($1,400,000 today). The race was won by New York Herald heir James Gordon Bennett Jr (the same) – the only one of the three owners to sail onboard his yacht. But little seems to have been understood about offshore racing
by the trio as the race departed from New York bound for the Needles in mid-December, in the height of winter. All three schooners were designed to be raced inshore and yet remarkably all three made it to the finish line – and ‘with only six hands’ losing their lives, the record shows, all washed off Fleetwing’s deck in a gale. Perhaps the most famous Transatlantic Race took place in 1905,
on the occasion that the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, racing the schooner Hamburg, put up as a prize the supposedly solid gold Kaiser’s Cup. Nine years out from WW1 some political theatre was at play here, with Hamburg the favourite, a nod to Germany’s growing ambition to challenge Britannia ruling the waves. But among 11 participating yachts Hamburgwas soundly beaten
by American Wilson Marshall’s luxuriously appointed 227ft three- masted schooner Atlantic. Marshall, his three-time America’s Cup- winning skipper Charlie Barr and a crew of 50 covered the course from New York to The Lizard in just 12d 4h 1m 19s, a record that would stand for the next 75 years, before being finally broken by Eric Tabarly on his foiler-trimaran Paul Ricard. (Banque Populaire V’s present record is 3d 15h 25m 48s – an average of 33kt). West-to-east transats on a variety of courses ran sporadically thereafter, often doubling as Fastnet Race feeders. Famously, in
72 SEAHORSE
1931, when the race was run by the Cruising Yacht Club of America and the Ocean Racing Club (the fledging club had yet to be granted a Royal Warrant) the young Stephens brothers Olin and Rod won that year’s Transatlantic Race from Newport, RI to Plymouth on their 52ft yawl Dorade, then going on to claim two back-to-back Fastnet victories. The classic race was reinvigorated when the New York YC held
a special edition in 2005, the centenary of Atlantic’s Kaiser Cup victory. The Rolex Transatlantic Challenge took place on the race’s original course – from Sandy Hook, off New York Harbour, to the Lizard – but then on to a second finish line off Cowes. Open to yachts of over 70ft, fittingly it was Robert Miller’s 140ft modern- day schooner Mari-Cha III that reached the Lizard first in a tad over 10 days with the Kiwi 100-footer Maximus in hot pursuit. With a fleet that included the giant triple DynaRig-equipped super -
yacht Maltese Falcon, the 2011 edition ended up a two-way fight between George David’s Rambler 100 and Puma Ocean Racing’s Mar Mostro. The VO70 won overall but Rambler established a new monohull race record of 6d 22h 8m 2s which still stands. In 2015 George David was back, now with the nimbler Rambler 88, but on this occasion took on Jim Clarke’s 100-footer Comanche, which was first home but lost out to Rambler 88 on corrected time; however, George David was to be thwarted once again, the overall prize under IRC going to Bryon Ehrhart’s 63-footer Lucky. The 2025 Transatlantic Race is scheduled to start on 18 June
2025. Once again the course will run from off Newport’s Castle Hill eastbound across the North Atlantic roughly 3,000nm to a finish off the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes. A gate will be included off the Lizard, as Newport-Lizard is now an established record course with the World Sailing Speed Record Council. The 2025 Transatlantic Race will also count towards the Atlantic
Ocean Racing Series. Other contributing events are the Caribbean 600, Rolex Fastnet Race and the Middle Sea Race. Participation in at least three of these, including the Transatlantic Race, is manda- tory. The Transatlantic 2025 is open to IRC yachts, classics, super - yachts, multihulls, Imoca 60s, Class40s and other open class yachts of 40ft+ (there is no maximum length). Entry at
sailracehq.com. Jeremy Wilton, CEO
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