Rolex Maxi72 World Championships: Race Recap Day 1
Monday, September 4th, 2017: Day 1 of Maxi72 World Champions. Bella Mente was victorious in race #1 today on the coastal course. Tomorrow is another day in the Maxi72 Worlds! Bella Mente is off to a great start with Hap at the helm!
Media Alert: Sailing’s glamor tribe and the downsides of paradise – CNN
Sailing’s glamor tribe and the downsides of paradise
A record 52 yachts from 60ft and upwards have turned up for a week of inshore racing and coastal sprints along the spectacular Costa Smeralda and its notorious stretches of water with names like “Bomb Alley.”
Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda offers stunning sailing among rocky islands.
Billionaire lifestyle
The sailors, globe-trotting guns for hire, exude an air of surf chic combined with preppy pro jock. The younger the sailor, the more disheveled the look. Much like life.
Hands are strong and coarse. Handshakes firm to crippling. Eyes crinkle into smiles, the effect of years sailing in sun and wind.
While the scene is glitzy, at least in the marina, the sailors’ office can be a dangerous salt-lashed bucking bronco with high stakes.
Chatting to the crews, the number one trade-off is not the risk but the time spent away from home and families.
“You’re part performance athlete and part hobo,” says Andy Green, a Newport, RI-based British sailor and America’s Cup commentator.
“You’re living out of a bag but living the life of a billionaire. When it’s all over you go back to your apartment or whatever and live a normal life.”
The big yacht circuit generally begins in the Caribbean with races such as the Caribbean 600 from Antigua in February and Les Voiles de Saint Barth in April before moving to the Mediterranean for the summer and regattas in oh-so chic spots like Majorca, Corfu, St Tropez, Porto Cervo and Palermo in Sicily.
Among the traveling tribe there is a distinct hierarchy at work.
At the top, at least on shore, are the owners. High-achieving businessmen with big bucks to lavish on their chosen sport. A new mainsail costs north of $160,000 and just the running costs for a summer campaign can be anything between about $1.5 million and $5.4 million.
“It’s highly competitive. All the owners are very friendly, we have drinks and invite each other to parties but on the water nobody gives you any quarter — on the water you want to kill them,” Sir Peter Ogden, owner of Maxi 72 Jethou, told CNN.
Britain’s Ogden, who built up UK company Computacenter and owns the Channel Island Jethou, adds: “The hardest part is signing the cheques. That, and steering the boat.
“But this is what I do to relax. Angst is when I go home and see the pile of envelopes.”
The Wally 107 Open Season in action during the 2016 Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup in Porto Cervo.
‘Testosterone-fueled’
To deliver the boat to these sun-drenched corners of the world and get it to the start line in one piece, the owners employ a full-time boat captain and a handful of permanent crew.
“We’re partly sailors, partly worker bees,” laughs England’s Mike Atkinson, boat captain on the Wally 107 Open Season, owned by former Bugatti boss Thomas Bscher of Germany.
His role involves logistics, crew transfers, accommodation, food, safety, maintenance and budgeting. Running costs “virtually doubled” from the previous 94ft Open Season to the current 107ft version — a “big learning curve”, says Atkinson.
“It’s a good lifestyle, you have to work hard and it’s definitely not 9-5 but it beats working in an office. I couldn’t work in an office,” adds Atkinson, who is based in Palma, Majorca, with his Spanish wife and two young kids.
He is backed up by first mate Tom Bayliss, who is responsible for all the rigging and fittings, and engineer Sally Weatherstone, an exception not just for being a woman but for being a female engineer.
“I started just crewing on boats, then I got a mate’s job, and we needed an engineer,” says Weatherstone. “I learned on the job, and when I did my exams they said I was the third girl that had been through in 10 years.
“It is a bit blokesy, it’s a testosterone-fueled week.”
Hap Fauth’s Bella Mente won the 2016 Maxi 72 world championship in Sardinia.
‘Stressful’
On the Maxi 72 Bella Mente, owned by Minneapolis businessman John “Hap” Fauth, the permanent crew of four swells to 20 for racing.
Skipper Peter Henderson leads a full-time team comprising a boatbuilder, a hydraulics and winches expert, and a junior. With a bigger budget, the role of travel organizer and logistics is separate.
“We’re on the road non-stop, you ask my wife. In 2013 I was on the road 300 days,” said Henderson, who grew up sailing in Michigan.
Unlike the more cruising oriented Wally class, Bella Mente is a stripped-out racer, a black carbon shell with no frills down below.
The toilet is of the “bucket and chuck it” variety. There is no galley in day-race mode, and sleeping facilities, should they be needed for longer offshore races, are pull down canvas shelves, operated on a “hot-bunk” basis for sailors on different watches.
Last year a storm in Porto Cervo meant Henderson and another had to sleep on board and take turns to keep watch as a big sea surged into the harbor, threatening to ram her onto the dock — Bella Mente’s keel is too deep to retreat further inside the marina.
“That was stressful. More so than the racing,” said Henderson.
‘Dangerous’
While the permanent crew are the workhorses, the stardust comes from the tacticians and other members of the “brains trust,” the big-money signings making the racing decisions.
Among those calling the shots this week are Open Season’s Jochen Shuemann, a multiple Olympic champion and former sporting director for America’s Cup outfit Alinghi, and former America’s Cup-winning tactician and skipper Brad Butterworth on Jethou.
The tactician can also have an input on the rest of the crew, often beginning with the top pros in their specializations.
Kiwi Warwick Fleury, who has competed in eight America’s Cups with Team New Zealand and Switzerland’s Alinghi, is the mainsail trimmer on Jethou.
“It sounds glamorous and probably looks glamorous, but the downside is time traveling and away from home,” said Fleury, who will join 30 or so other sailors for a charter flight to Mahon, Menorca for the TP52 Worlds as soon as this is over. “But even then, a bay day is not all that bad.”
Crew work is vital, everyone has their role onboard.
Like all freelancers, the next gig comes through contacts, word of mouth and old-fashioned cold calling. Some have to work harder than others.
“There’s not huge job security. And it can be dangerous,” adds Green, who was once skippering a yacht in Sardinia when a crewman broke six ribs and later lost his spleen when he was thrown against the rigging.
“You have to be enthusiastic, you’ve got to keep current, and keep winning.
“It can be challenging. It’s all about building relationships. You sometimes have to have difficult and frank conversations about how to make a boat go fast. Some people have very strong opinions, so you have to be a diplomat and a racer, it’s a difficult balance.
“But you go to some amazing venues and meet some really interesting people. It can be incredibly rewarding.”
Media Alert: No Favorite at Maxi 72 World Championship – IMA
No Favorite at Maxi 72 World Championship
Published on August 30th, 2017
Competition is set to be the tightest ever at next week’s Rolex Maxi 72 World Championship, taking place once again as part of the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup in Porto Cervo, Sardinia. This annual event is jointly organised by the event’s hosts, the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, this year celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the International Maxi Association, the body sanctioned by World Sailing to represent the Maxi classes.
Five custom-built Maxi 72 racers are taking part ranging from the older, but heavily revised and optimised, to the newer, potentially faster, but less refined boats.
So far this season, Italian Dario Ferrari’s brand new Botin Partners-designed Cannonball claimed Sail Racing PalmaVela in May, while George Sakellaris’ Proteus took honours in the brand new Corfu Challenge on his home waters in early July. The 36 Copa del Rey MAPFRE, in Palma in August, was won by German Dieter Schön’s MOMO.
With three different winners already this year, competition in the Maxi 72 class is currently wide open.
As Proteus’ George Sakellaris explains: “All the boats now are evenly matched so anyone can win and there is very good competition. We all fine-tune our boats so well that the game for everyone has come up.”
Defending World Champion is Bella Mente of International Maxi Association Vice President Hap Fauth (also President of the Maxi 72 Class). He agrees that the game in the Maxi 72 class has changed. While possibly his US-based team was favourite the last two times they won the Rolex Maxi 72 World Championship, this is distinctly not the case this year, maintains Fauth: “Everybody has made improvements and is either equal to, or faster, than us at the moment, which will make this really interesting. Our boat is six years old now.
“This year we have not been as quick as either MOMO or Proteus and, in a lot of cases, Cannonball – they are still figuring out the buttons on that boat, which takes about a year, but they have great flashes of speed. This season we have been at the bottom of the fleet – we get great starts, but if you don’t have legs on that first windward leg you are at the back of the pack.”
Fauth confides that since Copa del Rey they have made some modifications to their keel foil and are hoping that this will provide the boat speed boost they sorely need. “We’ll see if that works. I love sailing in Sardinia, even if we have had a not-so-good season.”
Maxi 72 Class Manager Rob Weiland says the Rolex Maxi 72 World Championship will see a continuation of the close competition they have enjoyed at their three regattas so far this season in the Mediterranean. “It is open who is going to win. Cannonball is slowly getting stronger and stronger and MOMO is better than ever and Bella Mente isn’t bad and Proteus is always near the top. The only unknown quantity right now is Caol Ila as this will be her first encounter with the others this year.”
As to why they repeatedly return to Porto Cervo, Weiland says that the Maxi 72s are particularly appropriate for racing along the magnificent Costa Smeralda: “The Maxi 72 is one of the few classes set up for both windward-leewards and offshore/coastals. They have all the specialist reaching sails, which makes them a more complete package and quite honestly more interesting to race in Porto Cervo than boats and classes primarily set up for windward-leewards.”
The Rolex Maxi 72 World Championship takes place as part of the annual Maxi Yacht Rolex Club. The Maxi 72 class is one of two classes affiliated to the International Maxi Association along with the J Class. The Wally class is also associated to the International Maxi Association.
Racing at the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup and Rolex Maxi 72 World Championship takes place from September 4th to the 9th with a layday scheduled for Thursday September 7. Fifty yachts are currently entered.
Class details – Event details – Entry list
Source: IMA
