Racing her once a year

For fifty weeks of the year a sailing superyacht is a beautiful way to have lunch somewhere. For one or two, on a start line off Porto Cervo or Saint Barths or Palma, she is a race boat with twenty two people on deck, a professional tactician, a bowman who is not being paid to be polite, and an owner who has discovered that all of this is considerably more fun than the lunch.

The circuit

The superyacht racing year has a handful of fixed points. The Caribbean opens it in the spring, the Mediterranean carries the summer with events in the Balearics, Sardinia and the Gulf of Saint Tropez, and the classic fleet keeps its own calendar in the same waters. Around them sit the J-Class gatherings, which happen when enough of the five or six sailing boats can be in one place, and are consequently the most photographed sailing on earth.

Fleets are small, between ten and thirty boats, and are handicapped so that a fifty metre ketch and a thirty metre sloop can finish within minutes of each other. The racing is real, the protests are rare and the prizegiving is long.

What a regatta actually costs

Entry fees are trivial. What costs money is everything the entry implies: a racing crew flown in and housed, a sailmaker on standby, the sails themselves, the berth in a harbour that has doubled its rate for the week, and the preparation that takes the boat out of cruising mode and back again.

Why owners do it anyway

Three reasons, and they come up in every conversation on the dock. The first is that racing is the only time the boat is sailed to her design, which after a season of reefed comfort is a revelation. The second is the crew: a permanent crew who race together for a week come back to the summer as a different team, and the retention effect lasts a year. The third is the company, because the owners on the start line are the only other people who know exactly what their season costs.

How to do a first regatta properly

Enter a friendly event, not the most competitive one. Hire a tactician and a bowman who have done it and let the permanent crew fill the rest of the positions, because the point is the team rather than the trophy. Book the berth through the organiser in January. Sail the boat hard for two days beforehand so the first time the kite goes up is not on the start line. And accept that something will break, because that is what racing finds.