There is a difference between fuelling a crew and feeding one. One keeps them going. The other keeps them human.

It was somewhere off the west coast of Scotland, late afternoon, cloudy, damp beating hard before a building north northwesterly, when the four of us smelled it. Not the sea. Not the diesel. Bread.

Fresh bread, on a damp leaking race boat, in the late afternoon in a steady 25knots with the thought of another 10days of it, it lifted our spirits … a bit, even if we knew it was another ground hog day!

I was racing Morning After a classic S&S 34 yacht that I, with help, had spent rebuilding during Covid in barn on the Isle of Wight. With 4 crew we were in the latest Round Britain and Ireland Race one of the most demanding offshore events in the British calendar, 2,000 miles of open coast, tidal gates, and weather systems stacking up off the Atlantic like freight trains. We were in full race mode, 4 on 4 off watches running, no stopping, we had issues, a leak, a dodgy engine but we were determined. I decided we needed a ‘heart starter’ (normally a tot of the hard stuff) but I had taken on board a few bags of bread mix and now was the moment to boost moral. I mixed the ingredients, flashed up the oven then proved the dough it in the warmth of the engine compartment, and put it in the oven.

What came out forty minutes later was not a masterpiece of artisan baking. It was dense, slightly lopsided, and had a faint aroma of bilge. We ate every last piece of it, with butter and tinned anchovies, all four us in wet gear, in the rain in 25knots with 30 degrees of heel and the mood at that moment changed completely. We were a crew again, not just a watch system.

That’s what food does offshore. Not the energy bars. Not the isotonic drinks. Not the freeze-dry pouches, however good the marketing. Real food, cooked and shared, is one of the most powerful performance tools available to any offshore racing skipper

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THE CALORIE REALITY

Before I talk about what to cook and how to cook it, we need to talk about numbers, because most offshore crews are operating on a chronic calorie deficit without knowing it.

In sail sports, calorie consumption runs between 150 and 300 calories per hour, and in severe conditions — depending on the boat and sea state — can exceed 500 calories per hour. That is the active work: the headsail changes, the spinnaker drops, the grinding, the bracing. But offshore racing is not just active work. It is cold, it is wet, it is sleep-deprived, and the body burns significant energy simply maintaining core temperature and cognitive function through the night.

In cold conditions, demanding offshore sailing can push calorie requirements beyond 4,500 calories per day for a physically active male crew member. To put that in context: a standard adult male consuming a normal diet ashore takes in about 2,500. In the Volvo Ocean Race, each sailor was burning approximately 6,000 calories per day — nearly three times the average — equivalent to about twelve rump steaks, 35 jacket potatoes, or 78 hard-boiled eggs.

Research from the 1993–94 Whitbread Round the World Race found that despite consuming what seemed like substantial food, energy turnover during offshore sailing was higher than expected at 18 to 20 megajoules per day, with crew members in negative energy balance throughout all three legs studied — meaning they were losing weight and condition even while eating.

For a 600-mile offshore IRC race lasting four to six days with a crew of six, this matters. A crew in calorie deficit by day two is a crew making worse decisions, responding more slowly, making mistakes on the foredeck, and losing the will to push hard when the race is won or lost. Feeding them properly is not a luxury. It is race preparation.

Individual meals should be heavy on carbohydrates, light on fat, with protein in between — and eating four smaller meals across the day rather than two or three large ones helps sustain energy levels and avoid the sluggishness that follows a big feed.

One other thing nobody talks about enough: fibre. Constipation on a yacht is not just uncomfortable for the individual — it is uncomfortable for everyone. A diet high in processed foods, energy bars, and freeze-dried meals with minimal fresh vegetables will produce a crew who are, within 48 hours, distinctly unhappy in ways that affect morale profoundly. Porridge, dried fruit, and proper meals with vegetables are not just good nutrition. They are essential plumbing maintenance.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GETTING IT WRONG

The offshore sailors who came before us are instructive

as much for what they got wrong as what they got right.

Ernest Shackleton provisioned his 1907 Nimrod Expedition with genuine ambition: the packing list for 15 men over up to two years included 1,600 pounds of finest York hams, 1,260 pounds of sardines, 1,470 pounds of tinned bacon, and 25 cases of whisky. The whisky, at least, sounds defensible. But the calorie mathematics were brutal. By modern estimates, Shackleton and his contemporaries were consuming roughly one third of the calorie intake their journeys actually required. When the Endurance was crushed by ice and rations ran out, Shackleton led all 27 of his men to survive on a diet of sled dogs, penguins, seals, seaweed, and the occasional piece of elephant seal snout. Leadership of the highest order — but it might have been less desperate with better provisioning mathematics at the start.

Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition fared worse. Scientists estimate his party was up to 3,000 calories short of the daily intake required for Antarctic travel. The entire expedition perished from exhaustion, cold and hunger, two months after reaching the South Pole. The tragedy was partly meteorological and partly logistical. But starvation was a contributing factor.

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, circumnavigating solo aboard Suhaili in 1968–69, took the practical approach of the merchant mariner he was: monotonous rations supplemented by fishing. He made it round. Sir Francis Chichester, on Gipsy Moth IV the year before, reportedly considered the day he ran out of gin to be his lowest point of the voyage. Both men survived on tinned food and determination, in an era before freeze-drying, before Huel, before any of the tools available to the modern offshore crew.

The lesson of history is consistent: the people who thought carefully about food performed better, survived longer, and kept their crews together. The ones who treated food as an afterthought suffered for it.

THE MODERN ARSENAL AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY COSTS

Today’s offshore sailor has more options than any previous generation, spanning a spectrum from complete meals in a pouch to powdered nutrition science, with everything in between.

Freeze-Dried and Dehydrated Meals

The backbone of most offshore race provisioning. The quality has improved dramatically in the last decade. Firepot, made in Dorset using 100% natural ingredients, are widely considered among the best-tasting options — their posh pork and beans and dal and rice with spinach regularly top blind taste tests, at around £6.95 to £8.82 per meal. Expedition Foods, a UK brand favoured by sailors and rowers, offers high-energy versions delivering 800 or 1,000 kilocalories per pouch — the chicken tikka at 809kcal weighing just 140 grams is among the best calorie-per-gram ratios on the market.

At the budget end, Trek’n’Eat average 600 calories per pouch at lower prices, with a five-year shelf life that makes them useful emergency locker stock. The honest verdict from sailors who’ve eaten them regularly is that they’re functional rather than enjoyable — which matters more than it sounds on day four of an offshore race.

Military Ration Packs

British Army Operational Ration Packs (ORP) deserve more attention from the sailing community than they get. Each 24-hour pack delivers around 3,800 to 4,000 calories across multiple meals and snacks, is ruggedised for extreme conditions, and costs around £20 to £25 per person per day through surplus suppliers. They’re not gourmet, but they are genuinely comprehensive and built around the same physical and cognitive demands that offshore sailing places on a crew.

Huel and Powdered Nutrition

Huel represents the newest category: nutritionally complete powdered food. Founded in 2014, it’s made from oats, rice protein, pea protein, sunflower, flaxseed, and coconut oil MCTs, providing all 26 essential vitamins and minerals in every serving. At roughly £1.50 to £2.50 per 400-calorie serving, it is the cheapest complete nutrition available. For offshore use it has genuine advantages: no cooking required, no water beyond what you’d drink anyway, no waste, no smell, no washing up. The disadvantages are the ones that don’t show up on the nutrition label: it does nothing for morale, it provides none of the warmth and comfort that real food delivers at 0300 in a Force 6, and eating Huel for five days in a row while wet and tired and short on sleep is, by all accounts, a profoundly joyless experience. Use it as a supplement particularly for overnight watches when cooking isn’t practical not as a replacement for meals.

WATER — THE CALCULATION NOBODY DOES PROPERLY

Water is food. It enables food. Without enough of it, everything else in this article is irrelevant.

Most offshore crews think about water as a passive issue you’ve got a tank, you’re careful, it’ll be fine. This is wrong, and it gets more wrong the harder the race and the more people you put on the boat.

The non-negotiable baseline is drinking water. Men require around 2.5 litres per day, women around 2 litres and that increases by 15 to 20 percent in temperatures above 28°C, and another 15 to 20 percent if you’re physically active. On a hard offshore race, you’re physically active and possibly cold and wet, and the body burns hydration processing stress and maintaining temperature even when you don’t feel thirsty. Thirst is a lagging indicator of dehydration. By the time a crew member feels thirsty, they are already measurably less sharp.

Water Budget by Zone

North Atlantic / UK offshore waters (Fastnet, Round Britain, RORC races): Cool to cold, low sweating rate. Drinking requirement 2 to 2.5 litres per person per day. Cooking and basic hygiene adds another 2 to 3 litres. Dishes washed in saltwater. No showers. Minimum: 5 litres per person per day. Comfortable: 7 to 8 litres.

Mediterranean or tropical passages: Heat pushes drinking requirements to 3 to 4 litres per person per day. A basic deck rinse becomes desirable. Minimum: 8 litres per person per day. Comfortable: 12 to 15 litres.

For a six-person crew on a five-day 600-mile UK offshore race, that means carrying a minimum of 150 litres of fresh water with no margin, or 240 litres with sensible contingency for a passage that runs long. A standard 40-footer carries 150 to 200 litres in fixed tanks. You can see immediately why water management is a real calculation, not an assumption.

The freeze-dry food model changes this arithmetic significantly. Every freeze-dried meal requires 400 to 500ml of boiling water per pouch. Multiply that across two meals per person per day and your food provision alone is consuming 5 to 6 litres of fresh water daily for a six-person crew — roughly a full day’s drinking allocation. This is the hidden cost of freeze-dry provisioning that the packaging never mentions.

Watermakers: The Case for Fitting One

For races of five days or more, a watermaker stops being a luxury and starts being a water security system. A watermaker running for two hours a day can generate enough water to cover the entire crew’s needs, freeing tank capacity for contingency.

The Spectra Newport 400C — one of the most popular units in the offshore racing community — operates on as little as 15 watts per gallon, making it viable for solar-supplemented electrical systems without running the engine. The Cape Horn Extreme is a favourite for ocean races including the Vendée Globe and The Ocean Race, producing up to 56 litres per hour with dual pumps — if one pump fails, it continues at half capacity. Rugged, proven, expensive. Budget from £3,500 to £8,000 for a properly specified race-grade unit.

For the IRC offshore racer on a tighter budget: a 12V system drawing 16 to 19 amps, producing 20 litres per hour, needs about 2.5 to 3 hours of running to generate 50 litres consuming roughly 45 to 55 amp-hours, well within range of a 300-watt solar setup even in cloudy conditions. Entry-level 12V units from makers like Rainman or LEDI start around £1,500 to £2,500 and are genuinely capable for a six-person crew on a five to seven-day race.

The portable option — the Katadyn PowerSurvivor 40E — draws just 4 amps, weighs 11.3kg, and produces 30 litres per hour. It stows in a locker, requires no permanent installation, and can go on any race boat as emergency water security. Around £1,200 to £1,500.

The critical rule: never run a watermaker in harbour, marina approaches, or near shipping channels. Reverse osmosis membranes are sensitive to fuel contamination and biological load. Run them offshore in clean water only, and flush the membrane with fresh water before switching off for more than a few days.

The Alcohol Policy

We ran a nearly dry ship on Morning After. (Enough gin for one tot per person per day) The reasons are partly safety and partly performance: alcohol is a diuretic, increasing fluid loss at the very time you’re managing a finite water supply carefully. Dehydrated crew make worse decisions. A tired crew on a dry ship makes better decisions than a tired crew with a couple of beers inside them.

The exception — and I mean this as a genuine offshore tradition worth preserving — is a small hip flask of brandy stowed away. Not opened until the finish line is crossed or the anchor is down. There is something deeply satisfying about a small measure of brandy when the race is done and the boat is safe, that no amount of isotonic drink can replicate. It’s not about the alcohol. It’s about the ritual of completion.

THE COOKING QUESTION

Most offshore IRC race boats operate with a single gimballed gas burner or a two-burner setup, and a proportion have a full oven. The gas versus alternatives debate is worth addressing briefly.

LPG is heavier than air and fumes can settle in the bilge, creating potential for explosion if proper installation, usage and safety protocols aren’t followed. A gas locker that drains overboard, solenoid isolation valves, and regular hose inspection are not optional safety theatre they are the difference between a cooking system and a bomb. On an offshore race boat with a tired crew, corners get cut. Do not cut gas safety corners. Ever.

JetBoil-style stoves are widely used in the offshore racing community they boil water in an astonishingly short time using minimal gas, and can be safely bracketed for use on a heeled boat. For a race boat without a full galley setup, two JetBoils can feed a watch system with hot food faster than a full galley on a boat that’s slamming upwind.

Induction cooking is increasingly viable as battery technology improves, but it remains an option primarily for well-specced boats with large solar arrays and significant battery capacity. The advantages are real only the pan heats, not the cabin, no condensation from burning gas, and the safety implications of open flame are eliminated — but the power draw means it doesn’t suit most IRC race boats unless they’re already running a substantial electrical system.

The engine compartment proving trick for bread works on any diesel with a warm engine space. Bread mix, proved for an hour in the warmth of the engine bay, baked in a gas oven: total active time about ten minutes, total elapsed time ninety. Fresh bread for the watch change. Simple, transformative.

THE PRESSURE COOKER, AN OFFSHORE GALLEY IN A POT

The pressure cooker is the most underrated piece of kit on a race boat. On a boat with a single gas burner and no oven, it is not a supplementary tool — it is the galley. If you have one and know how to use it, you can produce food that will genuinely astonish your crew.

The principle is simple: sealed pressure forces the boiling point of water higher, meaning food cooks faster at lower fuel cost. A whole chicken that would take 90 minutes in a conventional pot is ready in 25. A dense stew that needs an hour on the hob is done in 15. Gas consumption drops dramatically. And a sealed pressure cooker on a heeled, moving boat is considerably safer than an open pot.

But here is the thing most sailors don’t know: a pressure cooker can bake. Not quite like an oven, but close enough to change the character of an offshore passage completely.

Three Recipes Worth Knowing

1. Pressure Cooker Chocolate Cake

Morale weapon. Deploy on day three when spirits are at their lowest.

You need: 135g plain flour, 50g cocoa powder, 125g icing sugar, 1 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda, 125g long-life yoghurt, 50g melted butter, 1 egg, pinch of salt, 1 tsp vanilla extract.

Mix the wet ingredients with the sugar. Sift in the dry ingredients and fold together gently — don’t overwork it. Grease a smaller round tin or heatproof bowl that fits inside the pressure cooker. Pour a cup of water into the bottom of the cooker and place a trivet or scrunched foil ring to keep the tin off the base. Put the batter in the tin, cover loosely with foil, lower into the cooker, seal and bring to pressure over medium heat. Cook at pressure for 35 to 40 minutes. Release pressure slowly.

The result is a dense, moist, genuinely delicious chocolate cake that requires no oven, no temperature control, and costs almost nothing in gas. Serve in watches. The impact on crew morale at 0300 on day three is out of proportion to the effort involved.

2. Stew with Drop Dumplings

The cold weather watch-warmer.

Make a basic stew first: tinned beef, tinned tomatoes, stock cube, potatoes, whatever vegetables you have. Bring it to pressure and cook for 12 minutes. Release pressure. Meanwhile mix: 200g self-raising flour, 100g suet (or cold butter, grated), a pinch of salt, enough cold water to bring it to a sticky dough. Drop tablespoon-sized lumps of dough onto the surface of the simmering open stew. Put the lid back on — not sealed for pressure this time, just covered — and simmer for 20 minutes without lifting the lid.

The dumplings steam and swell into dense, doughy, deeply satisfying rounds. This is the offshore equivalent of a Sunday roast. Your crew will talk about it for years.

3. Steamed Golden Syrup Sponge Pudding

The end-of-race treat that nobody expects.

You need: 150g self-raising flour, 100g caster sugar, 100g melted butter, 2 eggs, 3 tbsp golden syrup, splash of milk. A pudding basin or heatproof bowl that fits in the cooker.

Put the golden syrup in the bottom of the greased basin. Mix the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, fold in the flour with enough milk to make a dropping consistency. Spoon into the basin over the syrup. Cover tightly with foil. Place on a trivet in the cooker with 500ml of water. Seal and cook at low pressure for 45 to 50 minutes. Release slowly. Turn out onto a plate — the golden syrup pours over the sponge like a glaze. Serve with tinned custard, warmed in a pan.

On a cold night passage, three days from shore, this is not just food. It is civilisation.

A 6-litre stainless pressure cooker costs £30 to £60. A small heatproof insert tin adds another fiver. The investment is negligible. The return is enormous.

THE ONE RULE

From Shackleton’s seal meat to Chichester’s gin to fresh bread proved in a diesel engine bay off the Outer Hebrides, the history of offshore food resolves to a single principle:

Hot food, shared, changes everything.

The freeze-dry pouches are fine. The Huel is nutritionally adequate. The energy bars will keep people on their feet. But none of them do what a proper meal does to a crew at sea — which is to remind them that they are people, not machines, and that the people around them are worth feeding properly.

That is not sentiment. That is race management. The crews who eat well offshore outperform the ones who don’t, because they recover faster, make better decisions, stay warmer, maintain morale longer, and finish races in better condition.

The skipper who feeds their crew properly — who plans the water, controls the gas, bakes the cake at 0300 — has a boat that races harder, longer, and better than the one that ran out of ideas at the freeze-dry pouch stage.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

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The first time I understood how completely a handicap rule could shape offshore racing, I wasn’t in a committee meeting.

I was trying to win the Commodore’s Cup.

At the time, David Murrin and I owned the Farr 40 2XL together. It was a serious commitment for both of us, which made the uncertainty surrounding the competing rating rules far more than an abstract committee debate. We were not choosing a paint colour. We were placing a bet, with real money, on which rule and which events would still be standing in five years.

I had owned Barking Mad, the Swan 40, also at the time and I knew the reality of funding a campaign yourself, assembling a large crew and trying to stay competitive against ever better-funded programmes. It was exciting. It could also be expensive and lonely. The Farr 40 was different. It wasn’t only a boat. It was an idea. Around the world, owner-drivers were buying into a genuinely international one-design with strong fleets, professional organisation and close racing. The attraction wasn’t just the hull and rig design. It was the confidence that came from joining something with momentum, and knowing there would be a fleet to race against and a market if we ever sold.

Looking back, that confidence turned out to be the whole point. At the end of the 1990s it was in short supply, because nobody knew with confidence which rule the sport was going to keep. A quarter of a century later the fog has cleared, and offshore racing has arrived somewhere none of us predicted. It now has two thriving international rules, and the one that rates the most boats in the world is not the one that rates its most famous races. How we got there, and whether it can last, is a story about confidence far more than mathematics.

The names changed faster than the uncertainty

The Royal Ocean Racing Club and France’s Union Nationale pour la Course au Large introduced the Channel Handicap System, CHS, in 1984, a deliberately simple, owner-friendly rule that could rate almost any shape of boat. Through the 1990s the RORC also ran the International Measurement System, IMS, the scientific, measurement-and-VPP rule that had grown out of the American tradition. The old International Offshore Rule (IOR) was, in practice, finished as a design force by 1993. At the end of 1997 the RORC and UNCL announced IR2000, and in 2000 the picture changed again: CHS was renamed IRC, and a brand new published rule, IRM, arrived for grand prix boats. IRC took international status from ISAF, now World Sailing, in 2003. IRM was discontinued at the end of 2007, having never gained much support beyond a relatively small Solent-based fleet.

I remember it, honestly, as IMS and IRC competing for the future, though the truth was messier. When I first became involved, the real choice was usually IMS or CHS. Then CHS became IRC, IRM arrived for the grand prix boats and IMS had not yet gone away. From an owner’s seat, the names changed faster than the underlying uncertainty. You were not tracking a rule. You were tracking a moving target, and trying to guess where it would come to rest.

Around this time I joined the RORC Committee. People imagine committee members spent their evenings arguing over handicap formulas. The reality was less dramatic. The Rating Office, quite rightly, owned the mathematics. Those of us on the Committee worried about the direction of the Club. What I saw was not a war between visionaries and traditionalists. It was a group of intelligent people, all wanting the same thing, and none of them certain how the story would end. That uncertainty was not confined to committee rooms. It was on every dock in Cowes, and it had a simple practical form: should I build, should I wait, and will this rule still exist when I want to sell.

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When the Admiral’s Cup was gone

If one event captured that period for me, it was the Commodores’ Cup.

The Commodores’ Cup began in 1992, a three-boat international team event run under IMS, conceived as a more Corinthian answer to the Ton Cup format, with strong owner-driver involvement and a more attainable level of spending. It was never formally created to replace the Admiral’s Cup, which was still running when it started. But to those of us who remembered the Admiral’s Cup at full strength, with nineteen national teams and serious selection trials just to be chosen, the newer event could never feel like an equivalent. It carried some of the structure and much of the camaraderie. It did not carry the same weight. That’s the way it was, however, it was the achievable ‘top of the game’ in the UK at the time so I went for it.

I skippered 2XL at the 2000 Commodores’ Cup, which happened to be the first edition ever run under the newly introduced IRM. The event’s last IMS edition had been 1998, and by 2002 the same regatta had already moved on again, this time to IRC. So I took a grand prix campaign to a major championship under a brand new published rule, and then watched, within a couple of seasons, as the event dropped that rule in favour of the confidential club rule that would shortly bury IRM altogether. Few things teach you the instability of that era faster than watching the rule you have just optimised for get discarded while you are still paying for the sails.

IRM is the part of this story that history has quietly buried, and it is the most instructive. Where IRC kept its mathematics confidential, IRM did the opposite. The rule text and the rating spreadsheet were published openly on the RORC website. Anyone with a home computer could download it, see exactly what it rewarded and design towards it. It deliberately favoured a lighter, stiffer, more powerful boat, the sportboat-influenced style then coming into fashion, and the Farr 40 fitted it well. It was transparent, modern and openly racing-oriented. On paper it looked like the future, and clever people said so. Writing a primer on the new rules in December 2001, the designer Mark Mills judged:

“Whatever rule enters widespread use internationally in future, I would be surprised if it didn’t integrate many of the core elements of IRM.”

He was describing a simple, transparent, spreadsheet-based, time-on-time rule, and it is a fair description of a good rating system. Reading those words today is fascinating, because history chose a different path. IRM never established itself and was withdrawn at the end of 2007. The rule that grew into the handicap system used across the world was IRC, whose defining feature was the opposite of transparency: its mathematics stayed secret, and stays secret still. Nobody at the time thought they had backed the wrong horse. You rarely do. You find out later.

The facts of where the rules are today

Twenty-five years on, offshore racing is not searching for a rule. It has two mature, thriving, international ones. They have not settled into a neat hierarchy, though. They have settled into a paradox.

By population, ORC is now much the larger, with more than 14,000 certificates issued to some 9,600 boats across 45 countries, and still growing. It descends from IMS but has evolved a long way from it, running a modern velocity prediction program, offering full measurement through ORC International and an easier route through ORC Club, with several ways of scoring a race depending on the conditions expected. Its size is not one homogeneous racing fleet. Most of it is club, cruiser and short-handed racing rather than the grand prix end, as the breakdown below makes clear.

By comparison IRC is smaller, and at the moment slightly shrinking: around 3,500 boats in 35 countries, down a little on the year. It keeps its formula confidential to discourage designers from optimising against it, issues a single number, and is deliberately simple to administer.

So ORC is almost three times the size of IRC by rated boats. That is not a close-run thing. And yet, if you list the offshore races a sailor most wants to win, you are largely listing IRC events: the Rolex Fastnet, the Rolex Sydney Hobart, the Rolex Middle Sea Race, the RORC Caribbean 600, the Rolex Giraglia, the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup, Cowes Week, and the revived Admiral’s Cup, which returned in 2025 under IRC.

This is the paradox at the heart of the rating world today. The most widely used international rating system and the rule behind many of the sport’s most prestigious trophies are not the same rule. A newcomer would assume the biggest rule owns the biggest races. It does not.

The map beneath the numbers

ORC owns continental Europe, most of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and it has grown steadily in the United States alongside the domestic rules. IRC owns the United Kingdom, the great offshore classics, and a belt of territory that surprises people who still think of it as a parochial British system. It is strong in Hong Kong, Singapore and the major South East Asian regattas, it rates the Rolex Sydney Hobart in Australia, and from 2025 it scores the Caribbean’s marquee events in partnership with the local CSA rule.

The granular detail is where it turns political. Germany runs essentially no IRC events, yet German owners still take out IRC certificates so they can race abroad. Italy, a deep ORC stronghold, had only around 157 active IRC certificates at last count. France, IRC’s own co-parent through UNCL, has slipped slightly. Ireland’s leading events have declined dual scoring even after ORC offered free club certificates to encourage take-up, and there has been similar free-certificate pressure from ORC in Turkey. None of this is dramatic in isolation. Together it sketches a world in which the two organisations are not so much sharing the sport as quietly contesting its borders, region by region and certificate by certificate. The single figure of “almost three times larger” is true, but it is an average laid over a patchwork, and the patchwork is where owners actually live.

The American complication, which makes the point sharper

For American readers, all of this will sound familiar, because the United States has lived with rating pluralism longer and more deeply than Europe. US Sailing administers not two systems but several, including IRC, ORC, PHRF and, above all, the Offshore Racing Rule. And the rule behind America’s greatest ocean races is neither of the two this piece compares. The Transpac, Newport Bermuda, the Chicago to Mackinac and the Pacific Cup all run under ORR, increasingly with forecast-based scoring that adjusts each boat’s handicap for the weather it is actually expected to meet.

So the American sailor already knows in the bone what the rest of the world is learning: one sea does not mean one rule, and the rule with the most boats is not the rule with the most silverware. The United States is living proof that a sport can carry several rating systems at once without collapsing. Whether that is reassuring or exhausting rather depends on how many certificates you are paying for.

Two philosophies, honestly compared

The two main international rules embody a genuine disagreement about how to be fair, and there is a lot of friction between the two.

ORC trusts the model. It measures the boat thoroughly, runs the numbers through a published velocity prediction program, and produces performance predictions across a range of wind speeds and angles. Its promise, in the organisation’s own words, is “an equal chance to win”, built on physics you can inspect and challenge. That transparency is its strength and its burden. An owner who feels wronged can interrogate the calculation. A designer who wants to optimise can study the same document.

IRC trusts the outcome. It measures selectively, keeps the formula closed, and hands you a single number. Its promise, in the phrase the RORC likes, is a rule “made by sailors for sailors”, judged less on theoretical perfection than on whether the racing it produces feels fair across a mixed fleet of different ages and types. Its opacity is its strength and its vulnerability. Because you cannot design straight to the rule, extreme optimisation is discouraged. But an owner who thinks his number is wrong has little external recourse, and no spreadsheet to argue with.

Both work. Both produce close, competitive, hard-fought racing. Neither is a con, and the tired dock wisdom that one is honest and the other a fix says more about the speaker’s last result than about the rules. The honest summary is that they solve the same problem from opposite ends, and a boat optimised hard for one will rarely be optimised for the other.

Is the sport drifting together, or apart?

The interesting question is not which rule is better. It is whether their continued separation still serves the sport, and there is real evidence pointing both ways.

Convergence is not a fantasy. It has been tried at institutional level before. At ISAF’s urging, the RORC and ORC opened merger discussions in February 2010, aimed at forming a single company to manage both rules. In 2012 the ORC, US Sailing and the RORC Rating Office went further and explored a Universal Measurement System, a common measurement passport from which different rating rules might draw. Neither produced a merger. But they prove the idea of a shared foundation is old, serious and institutionally respectable, not the daydream of a man writing in a marina bar.

And dual scoring, once a curiosity, is now spreading. The Aegean 600 has scored under both major rules. In October 2025 IRC formalised a dual-scoring partnership with the Caribbean Sailing Association across the region’s marquee inshore regattas. Jason Smithwick, Director of the RORC Rating Office, framed the direction of travel like this:

“The dual-scoring system at the RORC Caribbean 600 and Nelson’s Cup has already shown how well the two rules can complement each other. Together we’re giving sailors more ways to compete while keeping the essence of Caribbean racing front and centre.”

He was speaking about IRC alongside the Caribbean’s own CSA rule rather than ORC, which is telling in itself: the instinct now is to let rules coexist and score twice, not to force a single winner.

But dual scoring is an experiment, not an answer, and its own advocates know it. The RORC’s committee minutes record the obvious problem: at a dual-scored event the rule with the larger local fleet tends to dominate the trophies simply by weight of numbers, which, given the regional patchwork above, is precisely why some countries have kept their distance. And scoring one race under two philosophies can hand you two different overall winners from the same fleet on the same course, both mathematically correct, which is a strange thing to explain at a prize-giving.

The case each way, without bias

The argument for keeping two rules is stronger than the tidy-minded like to admit. Competition between systems drives development in a way a monopoly never would. The two rules genuinely serve different markets, one built on published physics, the other on closed simplicity. And a single global rule authority would carry a real systemic risk: one serious error, one political falling-out, one bout of type-forming, and almost the entire international fleet would feel it at once. Plurality is insurance.

The argument for greater unity is just as real. An owner who races internationally increasingly needs both certificates, IRC for one classic and ORC for a national championship, and pays and measures twice for the privilege. Much of the underlying boat data is the same, yet the formats, declarations and assumptions differ. The sport now routinely communicates two versions of the word “overall”, which does nothing for the newcomer or the sponsor trying to understand who actually won. And underneath all of it sits the point I felt personally in 1999: fragmentation quietly taxes confidence. Two systems today do not recreate the chaos of the late 1990s, when four names were in play and the great team events were losing their identity. But they do reproduce a slice of the same strategic hesitation, and hesitation is exactly what keeps an owner from commissioning the next boat.

Each rule also carries its own strategic danger. IRC’s strength is concentrated in the prestige events and its historic territories while its worldwide boat count slipped a little in 2025. A rule can hold the greatest trophies and still, slowly, lose the ordinary club fleets that feed them. ORC’s danger is the mirror image. Volume does not automatically confer prestige or simplicity, and a system offering full measurement, multiple wind-angle predictions and several scoring options can look intimidating to the very amateur it wants to attract. Its challenge is to turn certificate growth into a story an ordinary sailor, and an ordinary sponsor, can tell in one sentence.

Back to how it was for the punter!

When David and I owned 2XL, we thought we were buying into the future we were both young just 40 years old and probably wanted to trust the system more than we shoukd have. We did not pick the winning rule. We could not have. IRM, the rule most in fashion for a boat like ours, no longer exists. What we actually bought was insurance of a different kind. The Farr 40 was a recognised international one-design, so the boat had a purpose and a value that did not depend on any single handicap formula surviving. The rating landscape could shift around it, and it did, and the boat still had a fleet to race in and a market to sell into. That, far more than any clever rating bet, is what protected us.

Which is why the rule has never been the thing I lose sleep over. Whether I have been racing Silver Shamrock, Morning After or coaching owners to get the best from their own boats, the challenge has been the same. Understand the boat. Prepare properly. Build the right team. Make fewer mistakes than everyone else. Those principles have survived IOR, CHS, IRM, IRC and ORC alike, and I suspect they always will. The certificate has never once sailed the boat.

So I will not tell you which rule should win, because I do not think that is the real question, and I do not think it has a single answer. Both IRC and ORC work. Both are trusted by thousands of owners. The sport has arrived, without anyone quite deciding it, at a settlement where the biggest rule and the grandest trophies belong to different systems, and where the United States runs most of its great races under a third rule entirely. That is not chaos. It might even be healthy. But it is worth asking, honestly and without tribal loyalty, whether two parallel systems, two certificates and two versions of “overall” still serve offshore racing better than a shared measurement foundation with a choice of scoring on top.

The rule was never what made offshore racing great. What made it great were the owners who kept buying boats, the crews who turned upon deck cold and wet at three in the morning, and the clubs and volunteers who somehow held the whole improbable thing together. They are the people who still believe that days at sea, chasing an invisible finish line against boats they may never even see, is one of the finest tests there is. The sea has always been big enough for more than one good idea, and it clearly has room for two rating rules, or three, or five. The only thing offshore racing cannot afford is to give the next owner one more reason not to race.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

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What this article is about: Offshore racing has matured into two distinct disciplines. Two-handed racing , brutal, self-sufficient, brilliantly sailed, is rightly named and rewarded as one. Crewed racing, the team discipline that recruits and builds most offshore sailors, is not: it is simply the unnamed remainder of the fleet. After four consecutive two-handed winners of the RORC Season’s Points Championship, this piece argues for one modest addition. keep IRC Overall, keep IRC Two-Handed Overall, add IRC Crewed Overall so that both disciplines are celebrated alongside each other, and neither at the other’s expense. But before you throw the winch handles out with the kite read on…

In October 2023, at the end of the Middle Sea Race, the first race of the RORC’s 2024 season’s championship, a fully crewed 93-foot maxi beat a double-handed 33-footer by twenty-four seconds.

Bullitt, a 93-foot Wally crewed by names from the America’s Cup and round-the-world circuit, won on corrected time ahead of Red Ruby, a 33-foot boat sailed double-handed by Christina and Justin Wolfe. Six hundred miles of racing. Twenty-four seconds. On the podium, Bullitt’s owner invited the Wolfes up to hold the trophy with him.

It was a generous gesture, and an accurate one. Because what stood on that stage were not two versions of the same challenge. They were two profoundly different disciplines within one sport sharing a rule, a course and a trophy, and demanding almost nothing else in common. Both of them, at their best, are magnificent.

This piece is about the winners we’ve stopped naming because, perhaps, we didn’t really notice what was happening to our sport.

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Two disciplines, both brutal, both brilliant

Consider what each of those boats actually did for six hundred miles.

Aboard Red Ruby, two people ran everything. Every sail change, every reef, every repair, executed by a pair, one of them often already prett tired no doubt, or trying to sleep through the other’s manoeuvre. The autopilot working as the third crew member. No margin for injury, indecision or a badly executed peel. Both sailors carrying the weather, the routing, the systems and the boat in their heads, because there is nobody else to carry them. It is a discipline of self-sufficiency and endurance, and the people who do it well are among the most complete sailors alive.

Aboard Bullitt, with a large crew, but was a lot to do, which is a different problem entirely, and in its own way just as hard.

Someone recruited that crew. Someone trained them, built the watch system, decided who helms in the dark hours and who calls the sail changes. Through six hundred miles, the bow team, pit, trimmers, navigators and watch leaders had to function as one team, communicating through all the weather and fatigue, absorbing each other’s mistakes, holding the boat at its potential when half of them were asleep and the other half wished they were. A two-handed crew must manage exhaustion. A crewed boat must manage people, their differences, their moods, their mistakes and their brilliance and anyone who has ever tried to get ten humans to peel a spinnaker cleanly at 0300 knows exactly which problem is harder to solve with engineering.

Neither discipline is purer. Neither is easier. They are difficult in gloriously different ways, the loneliest form of teamwork, and the most crowded. When this piece says the hardest thing in offshore racing is other people, it means hardest in its own dimension: the challenge unique to the crewed boat. The two-handed sailors own a different set of challenges in actual fact.

But only one of them is explicitly named by its crew configuration.

Two-handed racing has its own division and a national championship contested through RORC races and of course lots of double handed events elsewhere in the World, especially France of course. Crewed racing is honoured through the overall title and the class prizes, and honoured well but nowhere in the structure is the team discipline named as a discipline. It is simply what’s left over: the undivided remainder of the fleet.

And the last few years results now make that omission impossible to ignore.

Rob Craigie’s Sun Fast 3600 Bellino, raced two-handed with Deb Fish, has won the RORC Season’s Points Championship three years running. Add Jangada’s overall win in 2022, and the largest offshore series in the world has crowned a two-handed boat four seasons in succession. Bellino took six trophies home from the Centenary Dinner. The leading fully crewed boat, Géry Trentesaux’s Long Courrier, finished second overall and was recognised through the existing overall and class structure but no title anywhere in that structure identified it as the season’s leading crewed campaign.

The comfortable response is to say the handicap system might be wrong. I don’t believe it is or at least, nobody has shown that it is. The more interesting response is to ask what these results actually reveal and I suspect the answer has less to do with ratings than with how a season championship works. But suspicion is not evidence, so treat what follows as a hypothesis. What it points toward, either way, is the same conclusion: crewed racing has become a discipline that deserves its own place in the structure.

Look at how the season is actually scored

None of what follows is the argument itself. It is the first and clearest piece of evidence for it. I beleive that it is one of the reasons that explains why the case for specifically naming crewed racing has become urgent now and might start a new trend.

The overall winner under IRC is determined by cumulative score across the season. The six IRC class titles are decided differently, on each yacht’s best five results from a possible sixteen races.

The class titles forgive absence. The overall title rewards presence. On the club’s published description of the scoring, every race entered and finished feeds the cumulative total which means the overall championship is won not only by sailing well but by sailing often.

Now ask which configuration can sail often.

A settled two-handed partnership has two diaries to coordinate and, in fairness, no cover at all if either sailor drops out. But a crewed campaign must field six, eight or ten competent, available people for every start, usually drawn from a larger rotating pool if the programme is to survive the season. The aggregate burden of recruitment, training and continuity is of a different order and any owner who has tried knows that the crew list for the Cervantes rarely survives contact with the De Guingand Bowl.

This is not a flaw in the two-handed boats. It is a feature of the scoring interacting with a fact about human logistics. A season championship weighted toward participation will, other things being equal, favour the configuration that finds participation easiest.

The champions themselves describe it exactly this way. “Stick to what works, keep the boat reliable, keep the programme active,” was how Rob Craigie summarised the campaign. And at the Centenary Dinner: “We never set out to make history; we just love the racing. Every season brings a new mix of weather, courses, and rivals, and the goal is always the same: prepare well, race hard, finish every race.”

Prepare well. Race hard. Finish every race.

That is more than a boatspeed strategy. It is a complete season strategy preparation, reliability, performance and sustained participation. And sustained participation is precisely what cumulative scoring rewards. Nothing in it requires a rating advantage which is precisely my point.

But be clear about what the scoring argument is and is not doing in this piece.

The 2H dominance is not the only argument for recognition. The disciplines earned that on their differences alone: they demand materially different campaign structures, different skills and different sailing practices, and one of them is already named by its crew configuration. What the recent dominance has done is make the asymmetry impossible to keep ignoring and what the scoring mechanics suggest is that if a participation effect exists, no adjustment to IRC could ever address it, because the season genuinely asks something different of a two-handed campaign than it asks of a crewed one.

The remedy for that is not a rating change. It is a named result.

Race by race, the picture changes

Here is the evidence that should stop anyone blaming the handicap.

In the 2024 Cervantes Trophy Race, the overall winner after IRC time correction was Trevor Middleton’s Sun Fast 3600 Black Sheep, crewed. Third overall, under four minutes behind after correction, was Bellino. Sisterships of the same design, one crewed, one two-handed and the crewed boat won.

One race proves nothing, and I am not pretending it does. What it demonstrates is narrower but still useful: IRC does not make a two-handed 3600 unbeatable by a crewed sistership. What it cannot tell us is whether either configuration performs better on average, in particular conditions or across a season that needs the data, not one Channel race.

Which sharpens the real question considerably.

If crewed boats can win the races, why can they no longer win the season?

The data still deserves study

None of this means the on-the-water questions disappear. Several owners have written to me since FirstShift launched describing the same race.

It starts in a breeze. The crewed boat is quick weight on the rail, hands for every change, the investment in assembling the team visibly paying off. Then the wind dies, the sea flattens, and the crew, a typical six-person team might represent about 650 kilograms, are no longer righting moment but simply displacement. Nearby, a Sun Fast carrying roughly 170 kilograms starts to slide away. The picture is not one-sided even then: spare hands can hold a big boat closer to its optimum in light air, moving weight precisely and executing changes a tired pair might skip. But the mass itself does not leave. Twenty minutes later it carries the fair tide through Portland Bill or the Alderney Race, and the crewed boat arrives at the gate as the stream turns. A modest speed difference has become an unrecoverable one. (Obviously you could reverse this senario, however, outcome would be similar)

Was that rating, weight, timing, weather, or simply better sailing? Nobody can currently say and IRC is a single number system unlike ORC, which I’ll come onto later.

I remain deliberately cautious here. Crew weight cannot be examined in isolation: its effect depends on displacement, beam, ballast ratio, stability, sail area and the leverage of bodies on a rail. Modelling it properly starts to resemble a full velocity-prediction problem, and demanding a two-handed correction factor off the back of four championship results would be exactly the kind of lazy conclusion this piece exists to avoid.

But there is an analysis nobody has published: take the designs raced in both configurations the 3600s, the 3300s, the JPK 1010s and 1030s, across ten years of RORC results, and compare corrected-time performance by conditions and by races entered. Done properly it needs weather reconstruction, tracking data, certificate history and care with selection effects a genuine research project rather than an afternoon’s spreadsheet. It is still worth doing, and the Rating Offices are the natural home for it. Evidence first. Rating changes only if the evidence demands them.

If any reader has access to that data, or has run anything like this analysis privately, I would be interested in it.

I have sailed both

I should declare where I stand, because it is the only qualification I have for asking the question at all.

Almost everything I know about offshore racing was taught to me on crewed boats. I came up through campaigns where learning your place in a team was the whole apprenticeship, Admiral’s Cup boats, Sigma 33s and 36s, Swan 40s, Farr 40s, and a 12 Metre season in 1982 when I was mast man on Victory under Harold Cudmore. Fourteen Fastnets and more than two hundred RORC races later, most of my miles are still crewed miles: someone recruited me before I was useful, someone taught me to trim, someone let me helm at night before I deserved to, and eventually someone trusted me with a watch and then a boat.

But I have also raced Silver Shamrock ( a Ron Holland Half toner) and Morning After (S&S 34) double-handed, and I learned quickly that the boat you step onto with one other person is not the boat you knew with eight. Sail inventories shrink. Manoeuvres are redesigned around what two tired people can safely execute. Reliability stops being a virtue and becomes the entire strategy. The autopilot stops being a convenience and becomes the third member of the crew. It is a different discipline, and doing it changed my respect for the people who do it well from theoretical to earned.

So this is not a traditionalist’s complaint dressed up as analysis. I have been the beneficiary of the crewed pathway and a student of the short-handed one. That is exactly why I think the sport is currently now only naming only one of them by default.

What we lose if crewed racing quietly shrinks

Now the part of this I care about most.

Most offshore sailors of my generation were made through some version of the same process. You began as ballast on the rail. Someone moved you to the mast, then the pit, then the bow. A watch leader let you helm in waves at night. A navigator let you sit beside them through a tidal decision. Somewhere across those seasons, participation became competence, and competence became responsibility for a boat and the people on it.

That production line has one requirement: spare berths. A boat with eight aboard can carry a novice. A boat with two cannot, not as criticism, as arithmetic. Both sailors must be able to keep the vessel safe while the other sleeps. Two-handed racing creates exceptional sailors; it does not create entry-level positions, and it never will.

France has built structured short-handed pathways through the Mini and the Figaro a depth and continuity of institutional support that few other countries have matched. Closer to home, RORC’s Griffin programme is putting young sailors afloat and deserves real credit. But centrally funded berths, however valuable, cannot substitute for the hundreds of developmental places a healthy crewed fleet generates organically every season. For most of the offshore world, the pathway remains the crewed boat and the owner willing to fill it with people who don’t yet know what they’re doing.

I am not claiming the current structure is driving crewed campaigns out. I have no evidence of that, and recruiting difficulties, cost and time pressures were squeezing crewed racing long before Bellino’s streak began. The point is about direction, not blame. If crewed participation dwindles, for whatever combination of reasons, the sport does not just lose entries. It loses the mechanism that manufactures its future and a championship structure that names the team discipline is one small, cheap way of leaning against that tide.

A small change, offered as a question

I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying, because this is the first time in these pages I have proposed changing anything.

I am not proposing that two-handed boats lose the overall trophy, or that any rating rise, or that a crewed Fastnet is harder than a two-handed one. Both disciplines should remain capable of winning the combined title, and the best boat in the fleet, however, many crew should keep lifting it.

The proposal is narrower. Keep IRC Overall exactly as it is. Keep IRC Two-Handed Overall. Add IRC Crewed Overall every boat not entered two-handed, whether it carries five or fifteen.

A results table and a trophy. That is all. No result rewritten, no winner displaced, no rating touched.

But sporting bodies communicate direction through what they choose to name. Two-handed racing was named and supported as a discipline while it flourished its strength now runs right through the results. Crewed racing has never needed naming because it was simply what offshore racing was. That assumption no longer holds, and what goes unnamed in a championship structure eventually goes unnoticed in one.

Nor does the question stop at the RORC. Every offshore organiser combining fully crewed and short-handed entries in one structure should be asking whether its trophy cabinet reflects the sport it has today or the sport it had twenty years ago.

Perhaps the existing structure is right. Perhaps four championships in a row is nothing more than brilliant sailors running the best-organised campaigns in the fleet there are worse explanations for winning.

But here is what I keep returning to.

The hardest thing in offshore racing is other people.

Finding them. Training them. Persuading them to commit to a season. Discovering who remains dependable when the forecast deteriorates. Building watches that work. Teaching people without slowing the boat unnecessarily. Trusting them to helm in the dark. Leading them through a filthy night at sea and bringing them ashore still wanting to return for the next race.

That challenge built much of offshore racing.It is still building offshore sailors. Two-handed racing has earned its name, its championship and its silverware. Crewed racing does not need protecting from it. It needs to be recognised alongside it for the different challenge it represents and the different contribution it makes. Keep the combined overall title. Keep the two-handed award. Add the crewed award.

Then let both disciplines race for everything offshore racing has always promised: competition, adventure, improvement and, when it all comes together, the chance to win.

Is time the silverware said so?

Stuart Greenfield
FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Subscribe now

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“You are not seriously telling me that rope is now stronger than steel?”

It is a reasonable question, usually accompanied by a slightly sceptical look towards a modern race boat covered in soft shackles, lashings, lightweight sheets and several components that appear to have been tied on rather than engineered. The answer depends on what we mean by stronger, what sort of fibre we are discussing and, most importantly, how the complete system has been put together.

The amusing part is that yacht racing accepted this revolution years ago without making much fuss about it. Wire halyards disappeared, low-stretch synthetic sheets became normal, stainless shackles were replaced by loops of woven fibre, and lashings began carrying structural loads that would once have demanded fabricated metal fittings. Because these changes arrived one component at a time, most of us never paused to consider what had happened.

Standing rigging feels different. Halyards and sheets may be important, but the shrouds and forestay hold up the mast. Stainless steel looks structural, permanent and reassuring. A textile stay, however impressive its breaking-load certificate, still looks to many sailors like rope.

Forty years ago I would have shared that instinct.

In Newport, Rhode Island, during the British America’s Cup campaign of 1982 and 1983, I was mastman on Victory ’82 and Victory ’83, the British 12-Metres. The boats represented the leading edge of British yacht design, engineering and sailmaking at the time, but one of my more important pieces of personal equipment was not a sophisticated America’s Cup development. It was a large roll of duck tape.

The tape was not being carried for an emergency repair. I wrapped it around the palms and fingers of my sailing gloves because the halyards, sheets and heavily loaded guys contained wire or wire sections with rope tails. As the wire aged and worked, individual strands could break and form tiny burrs. They were difficult to see, but remarkably good at cutting through gloves and into hands.

It was simply part of the mastman’s job. You protected your hands, watched for damaged wire, dealt with the grooves it wore into winch drums and sheaves, and got on with the next sail change. Nobody on Victory thought the arrangement primitive. Wire gave us the low stretch and strength we required, while the rope tails allowed the crew to handle the load. It was an intelligent compromise based on the best practical materials available.

Had somebody walked into the Victory shed in Newport and announced that racing yachts would eventually abandon wire halyards and begin holding their masts up with synthetic fibre, I suspect they would have been listened to politely and then encouraged to have a quiet lie down.

Yet that is broadly what has happened.

I have written before about the quiet revolution in running rigging and what these new ropes demand from crews who use them. This article takes the next step. It looks at the fibres themselves, how they moved from halyards and sheets into structural applications, what can go wrong, what they cost and whether it is now sensible to consider replacing stainless-steel standing rigging.

The simple answer is that synthetic standing rigging works. The more useful answer is that we are not comparing a length of wire with a length of rope. We are comparing two complete engineering systems, including the fibre, rope or cable construction, terminations, fittings, tensioning method, protection, inspection regime and the competence of the person who puts everything together.

The fibre may be ready. The boat, owner and support system also have to be ready.

The material behind the revolution

The word rope is both convenient and misleading.

Traditional rope is a manufactured assembly of fibres, but the associations remain familiar: something flexible, relatively forgiving and ultimately expendable. Modern high-performance cordage is better understood as an engineered load-bearing structure.

The material most sailors encounter is HMPE, high-modulus polyethylene. It is also commonly described as UHMWPE, ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. The terms approach the same family of material from slightly different technical directions and are often used interchangeably in the marine market.

The best-known trade name is Dyneema, developed by DSM and now owned by Avient. Spectra, manufactured by Honeywell, is another major UHMWPE fibre brand. These are brand names rather than generic terms, in much the same way that Kevlar is a brand of aramid fibre rather than the name of the complete material family.

At first glance polyethylene does not sound especially exciting. It belongs to the same broad chemical family as many ordinary plastic products, which makes claims that it can outperform steel sound slightly optimistic.

The clever part is not simply the chemistry. It is what happens during manufacture.

Ordinary polyethylene contains extremely long molecular chains arranged with considerable disorder. In HMPE production, these chains are drawn out and aligned much more closely in the direction in which the fibre will carry load. A plate of cooked spaghetti arranged randomly has little structural order. Align long, straight strands in one direction and pull along their length, and the load is shared far more efficiently.

This molecular alignment produces an extraordinary strength-to-weight ratio, very low water absorption, excellent chemical resistance and low elastic extension. The fibre also floats, which is not the first requirement on a standing-rigging specification but remains an entertaining characteristic for something capable of carrying several tonnes.

Calling it plastic is therefore technically accurate but not especially illuminating. It is rather like describing a carbon Formula One steering wheel as a piece of plastic. You are not completely wrong, but you have missed most of the point.

No mistaking, the science is important

The first mistake in discussing modern rope is to treat every product described as Dyneema as though it were the same.

There are three distinct levels to understand:

1. The fibre family and brand.

2. The particular fibre grade.

3. The finished rope or cable product.

Dyneema and Spectra are fibre brands. SK78, SK99 and DM20 are examples of Dyneema grades with different balances of strength, stiffness and creep resistance. A rope manufacturer then turns that fibre into a finished product using a particular braid, coating, heat treatment, pre-stretching process and, where required, an outer cover.

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Two products described as Dyneema can therefore behave very differently. One may be designed to run repeatedly through a clutch and around a winch. Another may be intended to remain stationary around a large-radius terminal under a sustained load. The fibre grade may be identical, but the finished engineering is not.

SK78 became widely used in marine applications because it combined high strength with improved creep performance compared with earlier HMPE fibres. It remains common in running rigging, soft shackles, strops and structural lashings.

SK99 offers greater tensile strength and stiffness, allowing designers to reduce diameter or increase the working-load margin. This can be valuable on highly optimised boats where weight and windage are being pursued aggressively. It does not automatically follow that the highest-strength grade is the best material for a permanent stay.

DM20 was developed with very low creep as a priority and is consequently associated with sustained static loads, including standing rigging. It may not produce the largest headline breaking-load figure for a given diameter, but a shroud is not a competition to see which sample survives longest in a destructive test. It must hold its length and tension under continuous load over years.

Spectra offers comparable high-strength polyethylene technology under Honeywell’s brand and has been used across marine, industrial and protective applications.

HMPE is not the only modern fibre.

Aramid fibres, including Kevlar and Technora, offer high stiffness and good resistance to heat. Their limitations include sensitivity to repeated flexing and ultraviolet degradation unless properly protected. Kevlar transformed sailmaking and found its way into specialist rope and rigging applications, but it also demonstrated that excellent straight-line strength does not guarantee a long life on a boat where almost everything moves, bends and vibrates.

Vectran, a liquid-crystal polymer fibre, provides low creep and excellent dimensional stability. It remains useful where holding length is critical, although it requires ultraviolet protection and does not offer the same overall balance of low weight and flex tolerance as HMPE.

At the grand-prix end sits PBO, commonly associated with the Zylon brand. PBO provides exceptional stiffness and very low stretch, which made it attractive for composite standing rigging. It is also demanding. The structural fibres require protection from ultraviolet light and moisture, inspection is specialised, and the cost and replacement philosophy are better suited to professional campaigns than to owners seeking a ten-year fit-and-forget system.

There is another important distinction. Not every synthetic stay is a conventional braided rope with an eye splice. Some high-end rigging systems use parallel fibres consolidated into a cable, protected by an outer jacket and connected through proprietary end fittings. From the dock they may look like textile rigging, but their manufacture and inspection have more in common with composite engineering than with ordinary cordage.

The owner is not buying a coil of fibre. He is buying a designed system.

The quiet takeover - it’s still happening

Synthetic fibre did not arrive on racing yachts through a grand announcement. It appeared wherever steel or polyester was too heavy, too elastic or too difficult to work with.

Wire halyards were among the first obvious targets. Modern high-modulus halyards could control sail shape without the handling problems of wire, and the rope tail became unnecessary because the whole halyard was now rope.

Sheets followed. Reducing sheet weight matters most in light airs, when a heavy line hanging from the clew can close the leech or collapse a sail that is struggling to remain filled. A lighter sheet also accelerates more easily during a gybe and creates less drag across the deck.

Soft shackles replaced metal shackles because they offered high strength at a fraction of the weight, did not damage decks or spars when flung around, and could often be opened without tools. Lashings replaced pins, bolts and bottle screws in applications where a textile connection distributed the load more effectively and allowed movement without metal-on-metal wear.

Modern fibres now appear in:

• halyards and sheets;

• soft shackles and strops;

• bobstays and tack lines;

• backstays and running backstays;

• structural lashings;

• sail attachment systems;

• lifelines on appropriate race boats;

• steering cables;

• emergency rigging and jury systems;

• towing lines and mooring systems;

• and complete standing-rigging packages.

This does not mean that synthetic fibre is automatically superior in every position. Polyester still makes an excellent sheet where some elasticity, good handling and compatibility with existing winches matter more than ultimate weight. Nylon remains useful where energy absorption is required. Technora makes an effective cover where heat and abrasion are the main problems.

The intelligent decision is not to replace everything with Dyneema. It is to understand what each part of the system is being asked to do.

That principle becomes considerably more important when the component in question is holding up the mast.

The four ways we hold up a mast

Most modern yacht standing rigging falls into four broad categories.

Stainless-steel wire

The familiar answer is 1 x 19 stainless wire with swaged, mechanical or swageless terminals. It is comparatively economical, understood by riggers, surveyors and insurers, and can be repaired or replaced in a large number of ports.

Wire also gives some visible warnings. Broken outer strands, rust staining, cracked swages and distortion can indicate trouble. The difficulty is that serious fatigue or crevice corrosion may begin inside a terminal where the owner cannot see it.

Stainless-steel rod

Rod rigging reduces stretch and windage and has long been used on performance yachts. It can be lighter and more aerodynamically efficient than wire, but its fatigue damage can be difficult to detect. Rod can look immaculate shortly before failure because a critical crack may be microscopic or hidden at a cold head, bend or terminal.

PBO and proprietary composite cables

PBO and related composite systems can provide very low weight, low stretch and minimal windage. The structural fibres usually require a protective jacket and specialist end fittings. Damage to the cover may expose the fibres to ultraviolet light or moisture, which means the outer layer is part of the protection system rather than decoration.

This is a professional solution with professional costs and inspection requirements.

HMPE rope or fibre rigging

HMPE standing rigging can remove substantial weight, cannot corrode and may allow individual stays to be replaced without swaging machinery. Some systems also permit direct visual inspection of the load-bearing fibres.

Against that, the stays need carefully designed terminations, control of constructional stretch and creep, protection from chafe and heat, and a different approach to tuning and maintenance. A braided stay will usually have a greater diameter than an equivalent rod stay, so reduced weight can be accompanied by increased windage.

The comparison is therefore not steel against plastic. It is weight, windage, fatigue, creep, inspection, cost, familiarity and service support.

Why designers love fibre

The selling point most often repeated is that HMPE can be stronger than steel by weight. That is true, but it does not fully explain why yacht designers are interested.

Most stainless-steel rigs are already strong enough. The problem is not that they require a greater breaking load. The opportunity is to carry the required load with considerably less mass.

Weight removed from the rig lowers the yacht’s vertical centre of gravity, reduces the inertia of the mast as the boat pitches and rolls, and can reduce the dynamic loads created when the masthead is accelerated through a large arc in a seaway.

A lighter rig can improve acceleration after waves and tacks, reduce pitching and allow the boat to carry sail more effectively. On a multihull, where righting moment and rig loads can be enormous, weight savings become especially valuable.

There is no universal conversion stating that one kilogram removed from the mast equals five kilograms removed from the keel. Such rules ignore mast height, displacement, beam, hull form and the exact location of the mass.

The principle remains valid. Ten kilograms distributed through the upper rig does not behave like ten kilograms beneath the saloon table.

For a heavy cruising yacht, the gain may be useful rather than transformative. For a light racing yacht, multihull or boat designed around a low centre of gravity, it can be significant.

The largest benefit appears when fibre rigging is considered during the original design. A lighter standing-rigging package may allow the mast section, chainplates and supporting structure to be optimised as well. Retrofitting lighter stays to an existing yacht provides the stay-weight saving, but it does not automatically unlock every structural benefit available to a new design.

Stretch is not one thing

Sailors tend to call every increase in rope length stretch, but three different mechanisms matter.

Elastic extension is recoverable. The rope becomes longer when loaded and substantially returns to its original length when the load is removed.

Constructional stretch occurs as the braid settles, the fibres align and the rope beds down. Manufacturing, heat-setting and professional pre-loading can reduce it, but a new stay may still require careful bedding and retensioning.

Creep is permanent, time-dependent elongation under sustained load. It depends on fibre grade, temperature, duration and the continuous load as a percentage of breaking strength.

Creep matters greatly in standing rigging because the shrouds remain loaded for months or years. This is why the fibre with the largest breaking-load figure is not necessarily the best standing-rigging choice.

A properly designed HMPE system controls creep by selecting the correct fibre grade, sizing the stay conservatively, applying suitable heat treatment and pre-stretching, and allowing for initial bedding during installation.

An owner who buys a coil of generic Dyneema because the breaking-load table looks impressive has not designed a standing-rigging system. The material may be genuine and still be wrong for the application.

Where fibre wins or fails

The middle of a correctly specified HMPE stay is rarely the difficult part. It is a bundle of extremely strong fibres carrying load in the direction for which they were manufactured.

The real engineering begins at the ends, where that load must move into the mast, chainplate, tang, deadeye or tensioning system.

Wire uses swaged, mechanical or formed terminals. Rod uses cold-headed or specialist terminals. Braided HMPE rigging commonly uses a splice around a thimble, deadeye or proprietary fitting, sometimes combined with lashings or a mechanical tensioner.

A correctly executed long-bury splice transfers load progressively through friction between the buried tail and standing part. The bury length, taper, fibre alignment, bend radius and surface finish all matter.

An abrupt taper can concentrate load into too few fibres. A short bury can slip. An eye bent around an undersized thimble loses strength. A rough metal edge can cut through fibres. A fitting designed for wire may have a radius or surface finish entirely unsuitable for textile rigging.

This is where the casual phrase rope rigging becomes dangerous. The visible rope is only one component. The termination is part of the structure.

The Marine Accident Investigation Branch’s investigation into the death of Andrew Ashman aboard the Clipper yacht IchorCoal in 2015 provides a sobering example. During an accidental gybe, a Dyneema preventer strop failed at a partially spliced section, releasing the boom across the cockpit. Laboratory testing concluded that “the primary failure mode was consistent with overload failure at the strop’s partial splice”, with uneven loading leaving fewer fibres to carry the load.

This was a preventer, not standing rigging, but the engineering lesson is directly transferable. The material did not fail because Dyneema was inherently weak. The finished assembly failed because the load was not transferred effectively into the full fibre structure.

A system is only as strong as the path by which the load enters and leaves it.

FirstShift engineering check

Before accepting a synthetic standing-rigging proposal, ask for:

• the manufacturer and exact rope or cable product;

• the fibre grade and finished construction;

• the minimum breaking load of the complete termination, not merely the raw rope;

• the normal static load as a percentage of breaking load;

• the creep calculation and expected long-term change in length;

• the minimum permitted bend radius;

• the pre-stretching and proof-loading procedure;

• the inspection interval;

• the retirement criteria;

• and confirmation that the mast fittings, chainplates and tensioning system are compatible.

Without those answers, the proposal may be interesting, but it is not complete engineering.

The most dangerous part is not the fibre

An experienced sailor can learn to splice HMPE. Many owners make excellent soft shackles, strops, lashings and running-rigging eyes. One attraction of the material is that useful structural work can be completed without a swaging press or specialist rod-rigging machinery.

Standing rigging requires a different threshold.

The issue is not whether a splice looks tidy. The issue is whether the complete stay has been specified, measured, tapered, pre-loaded and terminated to produce a known working strength and predictable length under load.

Common amateur mistakes include:

• choosing the rope by breaking load without considering sustained working load or creep;

• using instructions intended for a different rope construction;

• making the bury too short;

• tapering too abruptly;

• twisting or disturbing the braid;

• damaging fibres while cutting or melting;

• using a thimble with too small a radius;

• failing to protect the eye from movement and chafe;

• fitting the rope over hardware with sharp edges;

• measuring without allowing for bedding and tension;

• combining components from different systems without understanding the load path;

• and assuming that survival of the first heavy sail proves the installation is correct.

Some errors reveal themselves through slipping or loss of tension. Others remain hidden. A poor taper may look excellent while only part of the fibre bundle carries the load. Chafe can begin beneath a cover or inside a fitting. Local heat damage may leave no rust stain or broken wire strand to warn the owner.

Learning through inspection and replacement may be acceptable for a non-critical lashing. A cap shroud supporting a 40-foot mast offshore deserves more respect.

Owners should understand the system and be capable of inspecting it, but the original specification and standing-rigging terminations should be produced, checked and preferably proof-loaded by a specialist with direct experience of that product.

The fibre is too good to be blamed for poor engineering.

How expensive was the first fibre revolution?

Running rigging shows how modern fibre moved from specialist racing equipment into normal use. It also demonstrates why the best specification is rarely to fit the most expensive material everywhere.

Take a typical 40-foot performance cruiser-racer with an 18 to 20-metre mast. A mainsail halyard may require 40 to 45 metres of rope, a jib halyard roughly 38 to 42 metres, a pair of genoa sheets 30 to 36 metres, and lightweight spinnaker sheets 45 to 55 metres.

At indicative UK retail prices, a competent 12 mm polyester double-braid might cost approximately £4 to £6 per metre. A covered HMPE-core performance rope suitable for a heavily loaded halyard may cost £8 to £14 per metre, with specialist SK99 and highly optimised products costing more.

These are budgeting ranges for the rope alone, before splices, shackles, tapering, stripped sections, cover work or delivery.

They are not an argument for installing HMPE everywhere. Polyester may be entirely suitable for a mainsheet because it is comfortable to handle, compatible with the winches and provides some useful elasticity. A highly loaded halyard controlling luff tension makes a much stronger case for an HMPE core. Lightweight spinnaker sheets may justify the cost because a heavy sheet can distort the clew in marginal conditions.

The intelligent specification is to identify where elongation or weight is costing performance and spend money there.

On a 40-footer, changing the principal halyards and sheets from conventional polyester to well-specified HMPE-core products might add approximately £1,000 to £2,000 to the rope package. A fully optimised system with specialist covers and professional splicing can cost more.

That sounds expensive until it is compared with a modern sail wardrobe. Owners spend many thousands of pounds on a sail designed to hold an exact shape, then sometimes support it with a halyard whose elongation alters the luff tension as the load rises.

The correct halyard is part of the sail-control system. It is not merely the rope used to pull the sail up.

The price of getting the ends right

A straightforward professional eye splice in running rigging might add approximately £25 to £60, depending on diameter and construction. Tapering a cover, adding a chafe sleeve, producing a stripped race halyard or creating a specialist termination adds labour.

Standing-rigging terminations are more involved. The rigger must determine the loaded length, choose the thimble or deadeye, calculate the splice, produce a controlled taper, protect the bearing surface, pre-load the assembly and often retune the rig after it has settled.

On a 40-foot yacht with multiple shrouds, forestay and backstay, professional termination and assembly work could add £1,000 to £4,000, and sometimes more where proprietary hardware, proof loading, chainplate alterations or mast work are required.

This is why comparing the price of a metre of wire with a metre of HMPE tells us very little. Wire also requires terminals, swaging, turnbuckles and fitting. Synthetic rigging may remove some heavy stainless components but replace them with deadeyes, lashings, specialist tensioners and skilled manual work.

The valid comparison is installed system against installed system.

Wire against fibre: the 40-foot bill

A conventional stainless-wire re-rig for a 40-foot yacht may fall somewhere around £5,000 to £8,000, although mast configuration, wire diameter, number of terminals, forestay system, turnbuckles, crane charges and replacement of worn fittings can move the final number considerably.

A professionally engineered HMPE conversion may cost a similar amount at the simplest end, but it can also cost 20% to 50% once proprietary hardware, engineering, splicing and installation are included.

The premium buys reduced weight aloft, freedom from corrosion and potentially easier replacement of individual components. It can also bring a greater need for owner involvement, regular inspection and access to a specialist familiar with the exact system.

The question is therefore not whether HMPE is cheaper. Often it is not.

The question is whether the performance, handling and maintenance advantages are worth the installed cost on that particular boat.

A light performance yacht or multihull may present a strong case. A heavy cruising yacht travelling to places where stainless wire can be replaced in almost any reasonable boatyard may reach a different answer.

How fibre ages

Synthetic rigging eliminates corrosion. It does not eliminate ageing.

Chafe

HMPE has excellent abrasion resistance in many conditions, but a loaded fibre moving against a sharp or rough surface will eventually lose. Spreader ends, mast fittings, chainplates and terminals must be designed to prevent movement and local wear.

A stay that remains stationary on a generous radius may have an easy life. One that vibrates or moves a few millimetres under every change of load may gradually damage itself.

Heat

HMPE has a lower melting temperature than aramid or polyester. The realistic marine danger is usually frictional heat at a clutch, winch, turning point or poorly moving termination rather than exposure to a flame.

This is predominantly a running-rigging issue, but every synthetic system should avoid local movement under high load.

Ultraviolet exposure

Modern HMPE products use coatings, heat treatments and protective covers where required, but ultraviolet exposure remains a genuine ageing mechanism. The rate of strength loss depends on fibre, construction, coating, latitude and exposure.

It should be managed through correct sizing, inspection and a replacement interval based on the manufacturer’s guidance rather than the surface appearance alone.

Protective covers and chafe sleeves also require inspection. A cover which protects PBO or aramid fibres may be a critical part of the system.

Creep and tension loss

An unsuitable or undersized HMPE stay may lengthen permanently under sustained load. Initial constructional bedding can also reduce rig tension and may be mistaken for creep.

A properly designed system includes bedding, tensioning and follow-up tuning rather than assuming the stay will emerge from the splice at its final lifetime length.

Compression and unsuitable hardware

Fibre rigging works in tension. Crushing the rope in an unsuitable fitting, bending it around a small radius or loading it against a sharp stainless edge can remove the advantage of the material very quickly.

Hidden damage

Synthetic rigging is sometimes described as easy to inspect because the fibres are visible, but not every failure begins on the surface. Heat, fibre-on-fibre abrasion, uneven load sharing and damage beneath a sleeve may be difficult to detect.

Stainless steel is not always as honest as nostalgia suggests either. Fatigue cracks and crevice corrosion can develop inside swages and beneath terminals.

Both systems require informed inspection. They simply speak different visual languages.

Insurance, surveys and replacement intervals

This may be the least glamorous part of the decision, but it could be the one that determines whether the conversion is practical.

Stainless-steel standing rigging sits inside a mature support system. Surveyors, insurers, yards and riggers understand it. Many insurers apply age-based expectations, although the actual condition of ten-year-old wire can vary considerably.

Synthetic standing rigging does not yet have one universal convention. A surveyor may be highly experienced with wire but unfamiliar with a particular HMPE or composite system. An insurer may ask for evidence of professional installation, product specifications, inspection records and a defined replacement interval.

A future purchaser may regard the system as a performance advantage or as something expensive which will need immediate professional review.

Before converting, an owner should obtain clear answers to four questions:

1. Will the insurer accept the system, and under what inspection or replacement conditions?

2. Who will document or certify the design and installation?

3. Who can inspect or repair it in the area where the boat normally sails?

4. What records will a surveyor, insurer or future purchaser require?

A technically excellent system that cannot be insured, surveyed or supported may still be the wrong choice.

The enviromental question?

HMPE is a polyethylene-based material derived mainly from petrochemical feedstocks. It is not biodegradable, and established end-of-life recycling for used high-performance marine rope remains limited compared with metal recycling.

Stainless steel carries its own environmental burden. Iron, chromium and nickel must be mined, refined, alloyed and formed, all of which require substantial energy. The finished rigging is also heavier to transport.

Its significant advantage is a mature recycling system. Stainless steel has residual value and can be returned to the metals industry repeatedly.

Synthetic rigging uses far less material by weight and may reduce manufacturing and transport impact. Weight saved aloft can also improve sailing performance, although it would be excessive to claim that changing the shrouds on a 40-footer will transform its lifetime environmental footprint.

The system-level benefits may be more meaningful on a boat designed around reduced rig and structural weight from the beginning.

Some HMPE manufacturers now offer fibres made partly from renewable or circular feedstocks. The term bio-based needs care. It describes the origin of the feedstock, not a biodegradable final product. The resulting fibre behaves like conventional HMPE and will persist in the environment if it is discarded carelessly.

Neither system is environmentally innocent.

Stainless steel begins with energy-intensive extraction and manufacture but ends with a well-established recycling route. HMPE begins with a much lower material mass and may offer advantages in manufacturing and transport, but its recovery at the end of life is less mature.

The responsible choice is to specify the correct material, maintain it properly, keep it in service for an appropriate period and ensure that it enters a credible recovery route when retired. Replacing sound rigging early simply to own the latest fibre is not automatically sustainable.

Should a 40-foot owner change?

For an owner considering new standing rigging today, I would divide the answer into three broad cases.

The strong case

Synthetic standing rigging deserves serious consideration on a light, performance-orientated yacht where weight aloft is particularly damaging, the rig geometry suits the available systems and the owner has access to a specialist installer.

Performance multihulls are an obvious example. So are race boats undergoing a complete rig refit where the mast, fittings, chainplates and tuning method can be assessed together.

The possible case

A performance cruiser-racer may benefit, but the decision should be based on actual numbers rather than enthusiasm.

How much weight will be removed, and at what height? What are the calculated loads? Which fibre and finished construction are being proposed? What creep allowance has been used? What are the bend radii? How will the terminations be protected? What does the insurer require? What is the replacement policy?

Without those answers, the proposal is not yet engineering.

The weak case

For a heavy cruising yacht travelling far from specialist support, conventional stainless wire may remain the better answer. It is familiar, widely available, relatively easy to repair and understood by insurers and surveyors.

That is not resistance to progress. It is matching the technology to the operating problem.

The fastest offshore racing solution and the best long-distance cruising solution are not always identical. Racing asks how much performance can be extracted from a supported, managed system. Cruising also asks what can be repaired in a small harbour after the carefully planned system has met something entirely unplanned.

Both are legitimate engineering questions.

Would I trust my mast to fibre?

Yes, provided I trusted the system.

I would want the loads calculated, the fibre and construction selected for continuous duty, the fittings designed with suitable radii and surfaces, the terminations correctly manufactured and pre-loaded, and the complete rig accompanied by a credible inspection and replacement schedule.

I would not trust it because somebody told me that Dyneema is many times stronger than steel by weight. That statement may be true in a particular comparison, but it does not tell me whether the stay, splice and fitting on my boat are safe.

I would trust the engineering.

That is the same standard we should apply to stainless steel. Wire is not infallible. We trust it because more than a century of experience has taught riggers how to specify, terminate, inspect and replace it.

Synthetic standing rigging is building that accumulated knowledge. The material has advanced faster than the culture and service network around it, which is why the argument often becomes emotional. Stainless steel feels structural. Fibre still looks temporary.

I understand that instinct. On Victory, I trusted wire because every serious racing yacht used it. The burrs cutting through my gloves and the grooves worn into the winches were accepted inconveniences rather than reasons to question the material.

Technology rarely becomes normal when it is invented. It becomes normal when the knowledge, standards, maintenance and support systems catch up.

Wire will not disappear from every marina for a very long time. It remains effective, familiar and widely supported. Synthetic systems will spread first where the gains are largest, the engineering support exists and owners are willing to understand the rig rather than install it and forget about it.

Forty years ago we used wire halyards because rope could not do the job. Today the wire halyard has almost vanished, and high-performance fibre carries loads that would have seemed absurd when I stood at the mast on Victory with duck tape wrapped around my gloves.

The question is no longer whether modern fibre is capable of replacing steel. In many parts of a racing yacht it already has.

The useful question is whether the complete fibre system offers a better answer for your boat, your rig and the way you sail it.

That is more difficult than comparing breaking-load figures, but it is the only comparison that matters.

FirstShift conclusion

The fibre revolution is larger than standing rigging. It has changed halyards, sheets, shackles, strops, lashings, sail attachment systems and the way loads are distributed throughout modern race boats. Standing rigging is simply the point at which the change becomes difficult to ignore.

Synthetic fibre is not replacing stainless steel because steel has suddenly become weak. It is spreading because modern materials can carry the same loads with less weight, resist corrosion and be engineered into systems that metal cannot easily match.

The catch is that extraordinary fibre strength places even greater importance on everything around it: grade, construction, creep, bend radius, splice, fitting, pre-load, inspection and the competence of the installer.

The material revolution has already happened.

Trust, as ever in yacht racing, still has to be earned.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

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Two different challenges, forty years apart

As Crew Boss on Giant Panda in the Admiral’s Cup in the 1980s, my job before the start was never just tactics. It was people. Ten of them, I had to work out who was genuinely up for it and dependable, who was playing at being a ‘rock star’ (as we called them then), who’d be seasick, and who was still hungover, living on cigs and coffee, and needed watching at 0300 when the breeze built and it was time to peel the kite. The boat was the easy part. The crew was always the challenge. In

Thirty years later I raced the Fastnet two-handed on Silver Shamrock, my Ron Holland classic half tonner. Different century, felt like a different sport. For long stretches I was effectively alone: co-skipper asleep below, autopilot steering (well sometimes working), me trimming, navigating, eating, and keeping the watch. No one to brief. No one to develop. No one to manage but myself. Bliss?

So over the years I have been privileged to race both crews and short handed seriously, and I can tell you they are related, of course, but not exact versions of the same thing. They are almost two different sports, at the extreme, that happen to share a start line. That split, and what it means for how the sport trains its people and gets new recruits, is what this article is about.

Regular readers will recognise pieces of this argument. In April I asked whether offshore racing was in crisis or just evolving, and concluded the pathway was broken. I have written about command at sea, about what the watch system teaches, and about why a Fastnet builds better leaders than a business school. Each of those was a piece of the picture. This is my full view of where I think we are, and where the sport is going next for the benefit, I hope, of all the new subscribers (thank you). But challenge me… as my son says ‘You’re just a barking mad boomer with attitude’

Let me say this early, because otherwise the argument will be too easy to misunderstand. Double-handed racing is not the enemy. It is one of offshore racing’s great modern success stories. It has kept owners racing, produced brilliant sailors, driven better boats, improved auto-pilot use, sharpened preparation and made serious offshore racing possible for people who no longer want to spend every Thursday night trying to assemble a crew from WhatsApp, old emails, text, and the odd telephone call.

The problem is not that double-handed racing exists. The problem is that the sport has quietly started treating it as if it does the same job as fully crewed offshore racing. I don’t think it does but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its place… l’ll explain:

The numbers: a sport dividing in two

The data is no longer subtle.

When the RORC introduced the IRC Two-Handed class in 2005, twenty boats entered. By the 50th Rolex Fastnet Race, more than a quarter of a record IRC fleet exceeding 400 entries was racing two-handed, and that excludes the IMOCAs, also sailed double-handed. The landmark came earlier: in 2013 Pascal and Alexis Loison won the Fastnet Challenge Cup outright on the JPK 10.10 Night and Day, the first double-handed crew ever to do it in the race’s history. Second overall was another JPK 10.10.

Meanwhile the boats getting much of the design attention are still smaller and faster. The JPK 10.30, Pogo RC, the Sun Fast 3300 and 3600, the new scow-bowed generation. These are purpose-built to be raced hard by two people, stable enough to carry full sail in conditions that would have had an older fully crewed 40-footer reefing, and balanced enough to sail fast under auto-pilot whilst maintaining target speeds.

Walk the RORC results and the same pattern repeats. The weight of the fleet has moved decisively into the smaller IRC classes, much of it double-handed, while many of the boats that need six, eight or ten trained crew have thinned. I wrote in April that offshore racing’s middle is disappearing. This is where it went.

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Why owners chose the smaller boat- not difficult to understand

A smaller boat costs less, needs fewer sails, fewer hotel rooms, fewer flights, fewer berths, fewer meals, fewer crew shirts, fewer lifejackets, fewer diaries and fewer late cancellations. It gives the owner more racing for less organisational pain. It allows a serious sailor to put his capacity into the boat rather than into the weekly human puzzle of finding, training, briefing and retaining a crew.

In that sense double-handed racing is a superb adaptation to all these consequences of modern living and recreation.

But adaptations have consequences. When the fully crewed middle disappears, the sport does not merely lose some larger IRC entries. It loses the place where people were trained. By doing by doing the middle watch being the young bowman or the nervous first-time offshore trimmer, the navigator learning to brief a deck team in the dark. Nobody meant to remove those opportunities. But removed they are.

The offshore racing world keeps talking about double-handed racing as if it were perhaps fully crewed racing with a smaller lunch order. It is not, and the difference matters.

Here’s why

The autopilot is almost part of the crew. On a modern two-handed boat, the pilot steers a majority of the miles. That changes everything downstream: the boat must be designed to sail fast under pilot, the humans become trimmers, navigators, systems managers and strategists as much as helms, and the racing becomes a contest of preparation, calibration, power management, stamina and judgement as much as boat handling.

You are alone half the time. With your co-skipper asleep, every decision is yours: the sail change, the shipping, the squall, the reef, the routing call, the food, and the tired voice saying you might have got this wrong. It is closer to solo racing with relief than to team racing with a seasick crew.

Far fewer sailors are being developed. Two capable sailors sail the boat. There is no full bow team learning the pole gybe, no young trimmer being coached through a night watch, no pit person moving forward over a season, no deputy watch leader being quietly tested with more responsibility. Some two-handed crews do develop each other, of course they do. But the arithmetic is brutal. The berths where offshore sailors used to be made simply do not exist on board.

A friend of mine, formerly a senior executive at the RYA, put it in one sentence: he sails his boat faster double-handed than fully crewed. Think about what that actually conveys. It is not that crews are less able. It is that when a good sailor races fully crewed, a large part of his capacity goes into other people, briefing them, correcting them, bringing them up to the standard the boat needs. Two-handed, all of that capacity goes into the boat.

Which is exactly why double-handed is so satisfying to sail, and exactly why it develops so few new sailors.

Fully crewed is the harder game to lead, and that is the point

The lazy view is that fully crewed racing is easier: more hands, more sleep, more redundancy. Anyone who has actually run a crewed offshore campaign knows better.

With six, eight or ten people on board, the performance problem stops being pure sailing and becomes management as I mentioned at the beginning:

1. Selection. Finding people with the skill, the fitness and the diary to commit to a season, not a weekend.

2. Training. Getting a mixed-ability crew to a standard where the boat sails to its numbers at 0300, when the skipper is asleep.

3. Communication. Ensuring decisions taken at the nav station are translated into correct action on a wet foredeck, in the dark, by tired people.

4. Cohesion. Keeping ten personalities functioning as one system through fatigue, setbacks and the fifth sail change before dawn.

I have written before about command at sea and the watch system, so I will not repeat the argument here. The short version is that a fully crewed offshore boat is the most honest management school there is, and it has been running since the RORC’s founding in 1925. For a hundred years the sport has quietly turned out people who know how to select, train, brief, delegate and lead under real consequence. It did this as a by-product. Nobody designed it. And nobody noticed it was valuable until it started disappearing.

Every double-handed boat on the entry list removes four to eight of those learning berths. I made that point in April in Is Offshore Racing in Crisis, or Just Evolving?, and it has been following me around ever since, because nothing about this season or others has contradicted it.

The conversation that sharpened my pen!

A while ago I was talking to a senior person involved with the RNLI, and she said something that stuck. Her observation was that modern culture, men in particular but certainly not only men, seems less willing than today to take on an outdoor sport that is cold, wet, difficult and slow to reward and even the RNLI was suffering. Marine activity offshore such as sailing and fishing were the places you could see it. People want their enjoyment immediately. Offshore racing offers what you might call second-order enjoyment, it feels very tough while you are doing it and then magnificent afterwards, and perhaps the satisfaction is in direct proportion to the discomfort.

Her suggestion was that the sport, along with sail training ships and outward bound sailing generally, might be one of the better instruments we still have for teaching people, young men included, to put themselves under pressure and come out the other side better for it. I think we all agree with her.

Her views where supported many years ago. Kurt Hahn, the educator who founded Outward Bound, diagnosed exactly this in 1960, listing among his six declines of modern youth the decline of initiative and enterprise due to what he called the disease of “spectatoritis”. In a speech to the Outward Bound Trust that year he said:

“I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an indefatigable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all, compassion.” — Kurt Hahn, address to the Outward Bound Trust, 1960

So nothing has changed almost sixty-five years on, so why worry? An offshore race is an enterprising curiosity, tenacity in pursuit and sensible self-denial by the watch, and compassion is what you learn at 0400 when the newest crew member is seasick and frightened and someone has to hand them a hot drink and put them in a bunk.

Two things need saying alongside this. First, this is not exclusively a male problem, and the answer is certainly not exclusively male. Some of the best offshore sailors coming through now are women. When the RORC relaunched its Griffin programme in 2024, 300 sailors applied, and of the 40 invited to selection, around half were women. Second, the appetite is demonstrably there in both sexes. The problem is not desire. It is berths. So can we solve it and make it finacially viable?

France is a warning, not a template

The instinctive answer is to point at France, and I have made the argument myself. France built a pathway: Mini to Figaro to Class40 to IMOCA, and it works magnificently. It produces some of the most complete offshore sailors in the world.

But look at what it is primarily designed to produce. Solo sailors and double-handed pairs. Out of La Trinité or Lorient, the racing is short-handed almost by definition, brilliant, professional, sponsored and individualistic. The French system is the best in the world at making single-handed and short-handed offshore racers. It is not designed to solve the British fully crewed IRC training problem.

It does not make watch leaders, crew bosses or the kind of amateur-professional hybrid sailor who can take eight mixed-ability people offshore and bring them back better. If Britain simply copies France, we import the same gap.

There is good news, and it matters, and the RORC made it happen

This is not a simple story of decline. That would be too easy, and it would also be wrong.

RORC has brought back the Admiral’s Cup, and that matters. The 2025 revival, after a 22-year hiatus, reminded everyone what fully crewed offshore team racing can still look like when owners, clubs, sailors and organisers decide it is worth doing properly. The 2027 edition is already scheduled for July, framed around two-boat teams, Solent racing, a short offshore race and the Rolex Fastnet Race.

The Sardinia Cup is back as well, and not as a promise but as a result. It ran this June in Porto Cervo after a 14-year absence, with two-boat yacht-club teams and crew requirements that included at least one female sailor and one athlete under 25 on every boat. The RORC team of Ino Veritas and Garm won it, and the event now alternates with the Admiral’s Cup, with the next edition set for 2028. That is not decline. That is renewal, and renewal with development berths written into the rules.

The TP52 fleet remains fully crewed, professional and ferociously competitive. The big Atlantic and ocean races still tend to reward proper crews, proper watch systems and proper offshore teams. The top of the sport is not empty. In places it is healthier, sharper and more international than it has been for years.

So the point is not that fully crewed racing has vanished completely. It has not.

The point is that fully crewed racing is becoming polarised. At the top, it survives as elite, expensive, professionally managed campaign racing. At the other end, clubs and programmes like Griffin can create precious entry points for young sailors. What has thinned is the middle: the privately owned, season-long, fully crewed IRC boat where a mixed crew could learn its trade over years. That was the quiet school. That was where the young bowman became the watch leader, the trimmer became the tactician, and the owner learned that running a boat was really running people.

What is actually being done, and what is missing

This is not a counsel of despair. The most encouraging development in British offshore racing is that the RORC has recognised the problem and restarted the Griffin programme, giving sailors aged 18 to 30 a structured route into offshore racing: a club boat, proper coaching, navigation training on real software, and a season of RORC races to apply it in. The boat is out most weekends. It works. It is one boat.

Beyond Griffin, the commercial race-training sector barely exists. I should declare an interest here. I am involved with Unity Sailing, a yacht race training company running a small fleet out of the Solent, and the pattern we see is instructive. The boats fill at weekends with people who want to race, properly race, not just gain qualifications. Midweek they sit idle. The demand is for racing and race training, and the supply, nationally, is a handful of boats. That is the gap. Britain has a mature industry for teaching people to pass Yachtmaster exams and almost no industry for teaching people to race offshore in crews and use those skills at the leading edge.

Perhaps there is no quick answer

This is the uncomfortable part, and perhaps the part where I owe the reader an apology. There is no quick answer. No rule change, youth scheme, rating tweak or inspirational speech will suddenly rebuild the fully crewed middle of offshore racing.

The reasons it has thinned are real: money, time, family pressure, work, logistics, ownership cost and the sheer difficulty of getting eight or ten people to commit to a season. Double-handed racing did not cause all of that. It simply offered a brilliant escape route.

So this is not a call for a ban, a grievance or a nostalgic return to some imaginary golden age. It is a call for a debate about what we still need fully crewed racing to do, if its relevant and who are the people prepared to help pay for it, organise it and open the berths.

Perhaps the future is something else entirely

The even more uncomfortable possibility is that there may be no clean restoration of the old model because the model itself is changing.

The direction of travel is obvious enough. Pilots steer better for longer. Instruments think faster than tired humans. Routing software sees options no watch leader could hold in his head at 0300. Sail-handling systems improve. Batteries, hydraulics, sensors, load cells and software are becoming part of the crew.

In the America’s Cup the trend is already brutally clear. The protocol for the next Cup cuts crews to five, requires at least one woman aboard, bans manual power outright and replaces the grinders with supplied battery packs: all energy stored, no human engine at all. Offshore racing will not become the America’s Cup, but some of the logic will travel offshore. It always does.

The future may well be two highly skilled sailors managing an increasingly intelligent platform, not eight people dragging a conventional boat round the Channel by muscle, habit and shouted instruction. The skipper of the future may look less like a traditional watch captain and more like a systems operator, pilot manager, strategist, engineer, meteorologist and human risk controller. AI may not replace seamanship, but it will almost certainly change where seamanship is applied.

If that is where the sport is going, then perhaps the question is not how we reverse it. Perhaps the question is what we choose to preserve.

Do we still value the fully crewed offshore boat as a school for leadership, seamanship and human development? Do we still believe there is something irreplaceable about a watch system, a bow team, a cold handover in the dark, a tired crew becoming competent together? Or do we accept that offshore racing is moving toward smaller, smarter, more automated boats sailed by fewer, better-trained people?

I do not pretend to have the answer. In fact, I think pretending there is a quick answer is part of the problem. The forces pushing the sport this way are real: cost, time, technology, logistics and the simple attraction of going faster with fewer people. But if fully crewed offshore racing still matters, and I think it does, then the debate has to be had openly, before the middle of the sport becomes too thin to rebuild.

So what do we do?

The practical agenda is not complicated to describe. It is just difficult to make happen.

• More Griffin-type programmes, at more clubs, with club-owned or chartered boats.

• A real race-training charter sector: boats that ambitious sailors can book, with race-qualified skippers, doing actual RORC and JOG races rather than just simulated exercises to get RYA qualifications.

• Owners treating berths as development seats. The fully crewed boats that remain are the sport’s classrooms. Fill one berth a season with someone under 30 who has never been offshore, and train them properly.

• Sponsor-backed and club-backed development berths, not just elite pathways. A young sailor should not need to know the right owner already to get offshore.

• Formats that fit modern time budgets: shorter offshore races, destination races, series that a working crew can actually commit to. The demand for destination racing is already visible; the calendar should follow it.

• Selling the second-order enjoyment honestly. Stop marketing offshore racing as total fun. It is not always fun in the moment; it is hard, cold and occasionally very challenging, and that is precisely the product. Hahn understood this. So does every crew in the bar at Cherbourg.

• Commercial sponsorship by outdoor brands similar to the French model with dare I say it prize money for races.

Two versions of the same sport can coexist perhaps even three.

There is fully crewed offshore racing it is human, messy, managerial, educational, expensive, difficult to organise and still unmatched as a school for leadership.

There is double-handed offshore racing, demanding, modern, efficient, accessible to owners who no longer want to run a small human resources department before every start.

And there is the future now perhaps arriving which pilot-led, data-heavy, system-managed sailing, where the human beings on board may become less like traditional crew and more like operators of a complex machine.

All three can be magnificent. But only one of them creates crews in number.

That is the point I keep coming back to. The sport does not need to choose between double-handed and fully crewed racing. It needs to stop pretending they do the same job. If the future is fewer people on smarter boats, then the fully crewed berth becomes more valuable, not less. It becomes the place where the team building part of offshore racing preserved.

The sea will keep teaching. The question is whether we keep enough seats in the classroom.

Please let me know your views.

I’ve just completed the 2026 Round the Island race as skipper and took a crew of 6 novices on a Sunfast 3300 around in a messy, windy at times, fabulous race. The 3300 can be sailed two handed and fully crewed but even with all the spills it was a great challenge - and we were joined by 750 other yachts mostly fully crewed.

Stuart Greenfield is an offshore racing coach ,artist and writer based in Cowes, Isle of Wight. RYA Yachtmaster, Rear Commodore RORC 2017 to 2020. He has raced offshore for fifty years, fully crewed and short-handed, and writes FirstBeat: Offshore Racing Intelligence.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

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Transcript:

Good afternoon. This is Stuart Greenfield speaking from Cowes, and this is my race briefing for the Round the Island Race, which starts early on Saturday morning.

My main thought at this stage is that, although it may not feel like it right now, the wind may well rule the tide this year. Let’s get into the detail, and as we go through it I hope you will pick up some useful information for what should be a very interesting and challenging race — and, hopefully, a great day out for everyone.

First, a quick look at the history of the race. The Round the Island Race started in 1931, when just 25 boats took part. The winner was Peter Brett, sailing a small Cornish fishing boat, which I believe was around 22 to 24 feet long. Over the years the race has grown enormously, at its peak attracting more than 1,200 boats and around 10,000 sailors.

This year, for various reasons in the racing and sailing world, the fleet is down to around 750 to 770 boats, but it remains a great race around the Isle of Wight. The challenges are familiar: lots of boats, an early morning start, and a tide just beginning to turn to take you down towards the Needles. The start, the Needles, St Catherine’s, Dunnose Point, Bembridge Ledge and Ryde Sands are all the key corners you need to think about carefully.

So, who has been winning the race recently?

In the most recent editions — 2025, 2024 and 2023 — it has largely been the big boats: the most modern, technology-driven yachts, including TP52s and Volvo 70s. Dark ’n’ Stormy, a very well-sailed GP42, won in 2022. The smallest recent winner was Eeyore, an Alacrity 18-foot bilge-keel boat built by Jo Richards, who has always been brilliant at creating incredibly quick small boats and has a long love affair with the Round the Island Race. I am sure he will be out there again this year trying to win it.

I am not going to predict yet whether this will be a small-boat race or a big-boat race. I have a sneaky feeling that, with a neap tide and the wind forecast as it is, it is a little difficult to call. Hopefully, by the end of this briefing, you will have your own view.

This year there are 774 boats entered. The IRC fleet is around 285 boats, and the ISC fleet — the Island Sailing Club ratings for cruising boats — is close to 400, which is interesting. There are also around 20 MOCRA multihulls, about 15 classics, and then another 50 or so boats across the remaining classes, including one-design fleets and Sun Fast-type boats. So it is still a massive race, and still one of the biggest yacht races in the world.

Now, let’s look at the course.

The start is from the Royal Yacht Squadron line, with South Bramble as the outer distance mark, then down towards Hurst and round the Needles, past St Catherine’s, along past Dunnose, up towards Bembridge, then finally past No Man’s Land Fort and Ryde Sands before heading up the eastern Solent to the finish on the north and south lines. As always, it is essential to read the sailing instructions as early as you can, because there is quite a lot of detail in them and some changes from the normal racing rules.

The first major area everyone talks about is the Needles, Goose Rock and the wreck of the SS Varvassi. There are really two routes here. One route takes you very close to the Needles themselves, avoiding Goose Rock. The other route is further out, leaving the Varvassi to port and giving it some room before you come round onto a very close reach, or possibly even a beat.

The wind is likely to take you down towards the Needles with the kite up, so as you approach the corner you will probably need to get rid of the kite and prepare for a headsail. That means there will be a lot of people doing a lot of things on deck at exactly the wrong moment. Make sure the navigator is watching closely and knows exactly where you are. There is no point taking a risk here. Decide early whether you are going outside the wreck or inside it, and make sure you do not get too close to Goose Rock.

At low water you can see very clearly why the wreck matters. This year, when many boats come round the Needles, it will be close to high water, so there will be water over the wreck, but not enough for an IRC 1 race boat with a 2.2 metre keel. So be careful.

The next key area is St Catherine’s.

Once again, there are two possible routes. One takes you close in under St Catherine’s itself, after which you may well have to beat along the beach. The tide turns at about 1410, so many boats will get there with the tide against them. Remember that there can be fairly significant overfalls here. They will not be as big as they would be on springs, but there will still be overfalls, whether you go further in or further out.

I will show you the routing shortly, including what the GRIBs and the different models suggest, but depending on the wind it could be a beat all the way along towards Dunnose. You also have to be very careful of the wind shadow under the cliffs, because there is always the risk of losing the breeze completely. This is one of the main tactical parts of the race.

At around midday there may be roughly 2.5 knots of tide going west, and a lot of boats in IRC 0, 1, 2 and possibly 3 could be in that area at that time. That is a lot of tide. I am not going to make a firm prediction, but it may be better to go further south, find clearer air, and then do one proper tack back in. We will look at that in the routing.

Once you have rounded Dunnose and you are heading past Ventnor and Sandown towards Bembridge, the next decision is how you approach Ryde. Bembridge is the only buoy you have to round on the course, and once you are round it you need to decide how to get up towards Ryde.

Depending on your arrival time, the tide may already have turned against you. Around 1510 it is likely to be foul, so you need to decide where the breeze is, what the angle is, and how close you want to go towards Bembridge and Seaview. A lot of boats will go inside No Man’s Land Fort. Then you need to decide whether you can safely go inside the red beacon marking the Ryde Sands area, or whether you need to stay outside depending on your draught and the depth of water at the time.

This is another tricky tactical area. Watch your speed over the ground. If you go inshore and are not actually gaining much, you may be better staying out, especially if the tide has only just turned and is not yet strongly against you. That could be a crucial part of the race.

The final leg looks as if it will be a spinnaker reach all the way to the finish. Again, the routing varies depending on what time you get there. If you have a lot of tide against you, you will probably want to work into the shallower water on the Island side of the eastern Solent. The routing shows that, and we will come to it in a moment.

Now let’s look at the synoptic chart.

This is important because, as you know, we are in a heatwave at the moment. There is a lot of energy in the atmosphere and a lot of heat being generated. It will be a pretty warm day on land in the UK, although hopefully the 10 to 15 knots of easterly breeze will keep things cooler for those racing.

The isobars are suggesting 10 to 15 knots from the east-north-east, perhaps with a little more east in it and possibly some veering during the day. At the moment, I do not think this overall picture is going to change much between now and the race, which is why I am recording this briefing now. The broad barometric picture looks fairly settled.

What happens on the day will depend on how hot it gets, and whether we see wind shadows, sea-breeze effects, gusts and holes. That is the part no one can predict perfectly around the Isle of Wight, and it is one of the reasons everyone loves this race.

The chart on the left is for Saturday at midnight, and the other is for Saturday at noon, by which time many of you should hopefully be around the back of the Isle of Wight. You can look at those in more detail yourself.

Tide is obviously crucial in this race. Fortunately, this year we are only two days off neaps, so the tide should be less dominant than in some years. I think the Island Sailing Club usually tries to avoid running the race on big spring tides, but even on neaps the tide is still important, especially for smaller IRC boats hoping to do well. They are more likely to be racing through tide changes, whereas many of the bigger boats may get round in one tide.

At the start, around 0700, the tide is slightly against the early starters. By 1100 there is a full ebb out of the Solent, which will be against you as you head past the beaches of Compton and Atherfield before reaching St Catherine’s. At that point the foul tide may be near its maximum.

By around 1400 we are probably into a slacker condition, which may give smaller boats an opportunity to get round Dunnose without too much trouble. Later in the afternoon, by about 1540, the tide is taking you round Bembridge, but after that, as you come up the eastern Solent towards the finish, it will be strongly against you. That is where some of the smaller boats may struggle, while some of the bigger boats may already be home before the tide becomes a major problem. In many ways, that is normal Round the Island Race fare.

Now let’s look at the models.

There are plenty of wind models available: GFS, ECMWF, ICON, AROME and ARPEGE. They are all relevant and useful. I tend to focus mainly on the three highlighted here, and I also use an ensemble which takes almost all the available models for the area, runs a routing against each one, and then creates an average. That is a useful way to look at the race, but once again the Isle of Wight, the beaches, the cliffs and the Solent do not always behave exactly as the models suggest. That is another reason the Round the Island Race is such a good race.

The first routing, using GFS, gives a finish time of about 1530 for a Sun Fast 3300 with a rating around 1.025. It suggests a reach or almost a run all the way down the Solent on or near the rhumb line towards the Needles. It then shows almost a rhumb-line route towards St Catherine’s, with potentially one small tack in. That is mainly because I have put a waypoint in; without that waypoint, the model might well tell you to keep going out and tack in deeper water south of St Catherine’s.

From there it shows one major leg — perhaps a spinnaker reach, Code Zero reach or white-sail reach — all the way to Bembridge, again almost on the rhumb line. Once round Bembridge, it shows another near-rhumb-line leg towards the waypoint I have put near the end of Ryde Sands. You may decide to cut inside there for an advantage, depending on depth and tide.

Because the tide will be against you at that stage, the routing then suggests going left into the bay on the Isle of Wight side, near Fishbourne, where the ferry runs, staying in shallower water before heading up again close to Norris and into the finish. Overall, it looks fairly straightforward: not too much beating, and potentially quite a nice race. A 1530 finish would not be bad at all.

The mean wind speed in that model is about 13.5 knots, with maximum gusts around 18 knots. The average maximum true wind speed, which is a sort of blend of the conditions, may be up to about 15 knots.

The ECMWF model is not hugely different. At the start it suggests you may want to put in a couple of gybes to get closer in towards Newtown, then perhaps go out into the main stream before coming back towards Yarmouth to take the additional tidal boost round Sconce and over towards Hurst. From there it shows the rhumb line down the red buoys to the Needles.

As I said earlier, make your decision at the Needles early. Decide whether you are going inside or outside the wreck, and do not hesitate when you get there.

ECMWF then shows a complete rhumb-line route out into quite deep water off the south side of the Island, in fact due south of Ventnor, before tacking and coming back close in at Dunnose. It then takes a slightly left-hand route into Sandown before coming out close under the cliffs and round Bembridge.

After Bembridge it once again shows a fairly direct line towards the Ryde Sands red post, then inshore all the way up to the finish. With an east-north-easterly or easterly breeze, there may not be too much of a wind issue around Norris. This model gives a finish time of about 1620, which is nearly an hour later than the GFS model. That is a big difference in this race, and it shows how much the models can vary.

Now we move to the ensemble view.

Here you can see all the different models showing their different routes. The main route is the purple one, with the tidal and wind arrows on it. Once again it suggests going south after St Catherine’s, down to a tack point, then taking a long leg back towards Bembridge. After that, it is broadly similar to the other two models.

So there is a reasonable fit between the models. The big unknown remains what actually happens off St Catherine’s, Dunnose and Ventnor. That will depend on the wind under the cliffs. If the tide is against you — and it will be for most people — it is unwise to get in there, against the tide, with no breeze. That is why I said at the start that I think the breeze may be more important than the tide this year. It may be better to go south, find the breeze on port, and then tack onto starboard to come back in towards Dunnose.

That decision will depend on where you are in the fleet, what other boats are doing, and, most importantly, what you can actually see on the water with your own eyes.

The key numbers are these. Mean true wind speed is about 13.4 knots. The models seem to be broadly working together. True wind direction is between about 51 and 83 degrees — east-north-east through to east. True wind speed is generally 12 to 14 knots.

For a fast boat with an IRC rating around 1.000, the average speed over the ground for the whole race is between 5.8 and 6.4 knots, with an average of about 6.2 knots. The duration is likely to be somewhere between eight and nine hours. The standard deviation across the GRIB models is only about 15 minutes, which shows that they are all broadly saying the same thing.

That said, none of them really knows what is going to happen off Ryde in the middle of the afternoon if we have a sea breeze competing against the gradient breeze. That could be one of the most interesting parts of the whole race.

So, in summary, the models are generally in agreement. The main challenges are likely to depend on the sea breeze, the land temperature, wind holes, gusts and the local effects around the Island.

My final thoughts are really just general ones.

All of this information is freely available. I am not a magician; I am just bringing it together and adding my own interpretation. I have done this race around 25 or 30 times, and I have never won it, so I know exactly how easy it is to get it wrong — especially when it is hot, when you have been out there for a long time, and when the race becomes mentally tiring.

The routing and the GRIB files are freely available. I am using routing software, but there are many options now: Expedition, Adrena and plenty of other apps. The market is full of routing software. In essence, they all do the same thing. They take your polar diagram, the tide and the wind, then calculate how far you will get in a particular time, in which direction, and which route gets you closest to your waypoint most efficiently.

The maths is broadly the same. The differences are usually in the user interface, the data, the resolution, and how accurately the software applies it. Most routing software will give you a reasonable result. You could still do the same thing manually with a pencil, a chart and a tidal atlas, which is what I did for most of my sailing life. The software is a bonus.

I have added my own interpretation, based on having raced around the Island many times and having discussed the possible routes. But the key point is this: enjoy the race, and remember that however good your plan looks, what matters is what happens on the water.

There will be wind holes. There will be lots of boats taking your wind. There will no doubt be incidents and moments that affect the race. But I think it could be quite a fast race, with some decent breeze, and I think everyone could have a great time.

I hope this has been useful.

This is FirstBeat. I am Stuart Greenfield, and that is the race as I see it. Have a lot of fun, and thank you very much for listening.Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Leave a comment

Hi and good afternoon this is stuart greenfield firstbeat here i am in my studio in cows and looking out the window we are in another heatwave and this is this is wednesday just before the round the island race this weekend and that’s going to look like a very interesting race with an easterly breeze coming in with a massive high pressure and perhaps some really big sea breeze playing games with us all but the reason i’m doing this this video this afternoon is that as you know i launched firstbeat in april this year and i’ve been recording quite a number of articles and writing many blogs for the firstbeat Substack and it’s going pretty well and what i wanted to do was ensure that it wasn’t becoming too random and just too much information for everybody to take in so i’m going to create something called firstbeat technical which is going to talk about the technology which is changing the game and that includes you know what sort of new foiling technology there is new sail technology new rope technology new technology and basis of technology in terms of software and apps and everything else now this is sprinkled throughout everything I do on firstbeat but ultimately I want to make it easier for you to find some articles so I’ve started this process by looking at something very simple which we all love and have used probably from the day we started sailing and that is the the bowline and so i’ve looked in detail at the history of the bowline and where it’s used how it’s used and how technology is beginning to change the usage of that amazing knot that has been around for years and you know it’s very easy to tie a bowline we all know it’s just the old rabbit around the tree and back down the hole and there you have it and everybody is aware of exactly how to tie a bowline you would think but it actually comes out when you look at it in detail there are quite a lot of different types of bowline and for instance in certain instances today a bowline is not the right knot for when you’re using new fibres such as Dyneema what’s the brand name of course but other such fibres which are much more slippery and require splicing to be used almost for every activity that they’re going to be used for and that’s why soft shackles are so important now and that’s why these things are changing so i’ve written this article hopefully be quite interesting and please give me some feedback it was all on substack so let’s go from there.

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I learned the bowline before I learned the reef knot. Most of us did. It is the first knot a sailing instructor puts in your hands because it does the one thing a rope user needs more than any other, which is to make a fixed loop that holds under load and shakes free the moment you want it too. Forty-seven years later I still tie it a hundred times a season without thinking, and that unthinking familiarity is worth interrogating, because the rope running through my hands today is not the rope the knot was designed for. The question I want to put down here is simple and slightly uncomfortable. Is the king of knots still the right answer, or have we kept a medieval solution alive out of habit while the material underneath it changed completely?

Start with the name, because the name tells you where the knot comes from and what it was for.

A rope before it was a knot

The word bowline is older than the knot we now attach to it. On a square-rigged ship a bowline, sometimes written as two words, was a line that held the weather leech of a square sail forward towards the bow and into the wind, stopping the sail being taken aback when the vessel was pointing high. A ship sailing as close to the wind as she could manage was said to be on a taut bowline. The line ran from the middle of the windward edge of the sail, attached by short subdivisions called bridles, forward to the bow. The knot took its name from the tackle, not the other way around, and by the time the usage settled the two meanings had fused. The Oxford dictionary sources spellings back through the fifteenth century, bowelyne around 1450, boulene in 1590, bowling in 1594 and later. This is a knot whose vocabulary predates most written English.

The knot itself is older still, and here the record turns archaeological rather than textual. When Pharaoh Khufu’s solar ship was excavated from the Giza complex in 1954, a vessel dated to the twenty-sixth century BC, the rigging was found to contain bowline type structures. That is roughly four and a half thousand years of continuous use for a single configuration of rope, which is a claim almost no other piece of human technology can make. The first written description we have comes much later, in John Smith’s 1627 work A Sea Grammar, where he records it as the Boling knot and offers a verdict that has aged well. He said the sails would break, or split, before the knot would slip. Smith was not a man given to understatement, but on this he was close to right.

So the bowline arrives in the historical record already ancient, already trusted, already doing the job it still does. The interesting question is why it won, and won so completely that it crossed from the sea to every other trade that handles rope.

Why it conquered

A knot is, fundamentally, an exercise in applied friction. Geometry sets the shape and friction holds the shape in place, and every knot is a compromise between the two. You want security, which is resistance to slipping. You want strength, which is how much of the rope’s breaking load survives the knot. You want ease of tying, ease of untying, and often you want the whole thing compact rather than bulky. These pull against each other. A knot that never slips often jams so hard you need a spike to open it. A knot that unties in a heartbeat often works loose when you least want it to. The bowline’s grip on the imagination comes from the unusually good bargain it strikes across all of these at once.

Consider what it delivers. It gives away a meaningful part of the rope’s rated strength, as every knot does, since the sharp bends inside it load the outer fibres hardest, but in natural fibre, nylon and polyester it retains enough for ordinary working use and it does so predictably. Where it truly distances the field is everything around raw strength. It does not bind. However long and however hard you load a bowline, in natural fibre or in nylon and polyester, you can break it open afterwards by rolling the collar with your thumb, a sailors describes it as the knot that never jams. It can be tied one-handed, which is not a party trick but a survival feature. A man on a ledge holding the rope with one hand can pass the loop round his own chest with the other, and that single capability has pulled more people off cliffs and out of holes than any purpose-built rescue device. It is fast. And when tied correctly it is unmistakable, its finished form so distinctive that a wrong bowline usually looks wrong at a glance, unlike knots that hide their errors.

Clifford Ashley, whose 1944 Book of Knots remains the field’s central reference with its 3,857 numbered entries compiled over eleven years, catalogued the bowline as number 1010 and placed it among the small group of knots on which, as he put it, a man’s life is daily balanced. That is the company the bowline keeps. It became one of the four knots that every maritime apprentice was expected to know cold, alongside the reef knot, the clove hitch and the figure eight, and from the sea it spread outward by the simple logic that a good tool travels. Arborists use a running bowline that constricts round a limb as the load comes on. Firefighters are examined on it in the United Kingdom’s Qualified Firefighter assessment. The American Federal Aviation Administration recommends it for tying down light aircraft, because the loop holds through wind and weather yet releases without a fight when the aircraft has to move. Cavers, riggers, rescue crews, every trade that trusts its weight to a rope arrived independently at the same loop. That convergence is the real measure of the knot. Different worlds with different problems reached for the same answer.

Tying it, and the rabbit that has taught the world

Almost everyone who can tie a bowline learned it through the same piece of doggerel, and the fact that a single mnemonic has carried a knot across every language and trade is itself part of the story. The rabbit comes up out of the hole, runs round the tree, and goes back down the hole. The hole is a small overhand loop made in the standing part, the rabbit is the working end, the tree is the standing part above the loop. Form the loop so the standing part passes underneath, bring the tail up through it, round behind the standing part, and back down through the loop it came from. The one step that matters is the first, because a loop formed the wrong way up is what produces the cowboy bowline.

The diagram carries the mechanics. What the words should carry is the inspection, because that is the part that keeps you alive. In a correctly tied bowline the tail finishes inside the loop, lying against the standing part, and the interior forms a clean U. If the tail finishes outside the loop you have tied a cowboy or Dutch bowline, often stable but not the knot you meant. Ashley’s warning is worth keeping in the ear, that a knot is never nearly right, it is either exactly right or hopelessly wrong.

Two reinforcements turn the everyday bowline into something you can trust with consequence. The simplest is a stopper, a double overhand or strangle knot tied in the tail and snugged hard against the collar, which stops the knot working loose under cyclic load.

The more elegant is the Yosemite finish, in which the tail, instead of being left inside the loop, is led back out and traced around the outside of the loop and back under the collar, locking the knot against the weight-and-unweight cycling that opens a plain bowline. Tighten the bowline first, then dress the Yosemite tuck, then set the whole thing hard. A round turn bowline, which simply takes an extra turn in the initial hole before the tuck, is rated by experienced climbers as secure as the alpine butterfly or the rethreaded figure eight.

The flaws

None of this makes the bowline flawless, and the honest literature has never pretended otherwise. It has three well-documented weaknesses, and they matter more now than they used to.

The first is that it works loose when it is not under load. A bowline that is cyclically loaded and unloaded, shaken, flogged, left to flap, can walk itself undone. Every experienced sailor has a version of the story. That’s why when life is at stake insist that a bowline carries a stopper, a double overhand or a strangle knot snugged against the collar, or is tied in a locked variant.

The second is that it can capsize. Loaded the wrong way, particularly when the loop is pulled sideways or ring-loaded against a fixed point, the knot can roll into a different and far weaker configuration and spill. The third, related, is that it is easy to mis-tie. The commonest error produces the cowboy or Dutch bowline, with the tail emerging outside the loop rather than inside, and while that variant is often surprisingly stable it is not the knot you meant to tie, and it forecloses the option of adding a Yosemite finish.

The climbing world learned these lessons in the hardest possible way and has been arguing about them ever since. In 1989 Lynn Hill, one of the finest climbers alive, fell around seventy feet to the ground when a tie-in knot pulled free of her harness. The knot was implicated, though the deeper cause was an incomplete tie obscured mid-sequence. The episode, and later fatalities at climbing walls attributed to bowline failure, produced a durable school of opinion that the knot should be retired from life-critical use in favour of the rethreaded figure eight, which is slower to tie, harder to untie after a fall, but crucially safer to botch. A partly tied figure eight tends to hold together and even bear weight, giving a visible warning, whereas a partly tied bowline tends to fall apart in the hand. The counter-argument, made just as forcefully by knot analysts and old hands, is that in every documented failure the knot was either tied wrong or left unsecured, and that the fault lies with the user and the missing backup rather than the knot. Both sides are right, which is the uncomfortable truth of it. The bowline is less forgiving of human error than its rivals, and human error is the thing that actually kills people.

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For centuries none of this was enough to dethrone it, because in hemp, in manila, in cotton, and later in nylon and polyester, the bowline’s virtues so outran its vices that the sensible response was not to abandon the knot but to back it up. Tie it well and it holds a high proportion of the rope’s strength, exact figures depending on the rope and the test, and it stays put. That was the settled position for a very long time. Then the rope changed.

The material the knot was never built for

The modern offshore boat is rigged increasingly in HMPE, high-modulus polyethylene, sold as Dyneema, Spectra, Amsteel and others. The fibre is extraordinary. Weight for weight it outperforms steel, it barely stretches, it does not absorb water, and it has transformed everything from halyards and sheets to standing rigging and lifelines. It is also, from a knot’s point of view, close to a nightmare, and it breaks the bargain the bowline has relied on for four thousand years.

Three properties conspire against the knot. The fibre is extremely slippery, so the surface bite that a knot depends on to seat and hold is largely absent, and turns glide instead of gripping. The fibre has very low stretch, so it does not cushion a shock load the way nylon does, and a jerky or oscillating pull can skate the coils before they seat rather than tightening them. And the fibre hates a sharp radius. HMPE loaded round a tight bend concentrates the entire load on the few outermost fibres, which break and then let the failure zipper inward, which is why a knot can reduce some high-modulus lines to as little as thirty percent of their rated strength. There is a thermal trap on top of all this. HMPE has a low melt point, and under high load the friction inside a knot can warm the contact surface enough to make an already slick fibre slicker still, which is the mechanism behind several documented spinnaker and halyard failures where a bowline let go in a gust.

The numbers are sobering and they are not folklore. The most cited body of testing, Evan Starzinger’s calibrated work widely referenced across the sailing world, found that a bowline in HMPE could start to slip at roughly twenty-two percent of the line’s breaking strength. A round turn and two half hitches went at around fifteen percent. Put plainly, a knot you would trust without a second thought in polyester can crawl out of Dyneema at a quarter to a third of the load the rope itself could carry, and it can do so quietly, migrating rather than failing outright, so the first sign of trouble is the knot arriving somewhere it should not be. The sailing writer who put it most cleanly noted that the same bowline holding ninety percent in nylon or Dacron will slip at about twenty-five percent in the new fibres, and concluded that in Dyneema you either splice it or you keep the loads very low. Treat any single figure as directional rather than gospel, because Dyneema, Spectra and Amsteel are not one material. Construction, coating, diameter and cover all move the numbers, and a coated single-braid behaves differently from a bare one. The direction of travel, however, is not in dispute.

That is the heart of the matter, and it is worth saying again plainly. The knot did not get worse. The rope technology changed.

What the trades actually do now

The response of the people who work this material for a living is instructive, because it is neither panic nor denial. It is a quiet migration away from the knot towards two alternatives.

Where the load is real and the connection is more or less permanent, the professional answer is not a knot at all. It is a splice. A locked Brummel or a long bury splice in hollow-braid HMPE retains ninety to a hundred percent of the rope’s strength, because it imposes almost no kinking on the fibres and because the buried tail is gripped harder the harder you pull, a Chinese-finger-trap effect that turns load into security rather than into slippage. The received wisdom for the bury length is seventy-two times the rope diameter for Spectra and Dyneema, three and a half fid lengths, with a long gradual taper so the load transfers progressively rather than hitting a square end that acts as a stress riser. The splice is more work and it demands both ends of the rope and some skill, but it is categorically stronger and more reliable than any knot the same rope will hold, and for standing rigging, lifelines and anything mission-critical it is now the standard rather than the exception.

Note: A properly executed Locked Brummel splice creates a 0% to 10% strength reduction (retaining 90% to 100% of the line’s breaking strength), but only if it is paired with a correct long bury and taper

The lock itself does not hold the load; it merely prevents the splice from slipping when untensioned. If you omit the long bury, a “Brummel-only” lock will cause a massive ~55% strength reduction, holding only about 45% of the rope’s breaking strain.

(more to come on this subject in new Firstbeat TECHNOLOGY updates)

Where you need something quick and re-tieable, the fixed-loop solution has passed from the bowline to the figure eight and the water bowline, both of which the testing shows resisting slip in HMPE where the plain bowline fails. The water bowline, a bowline with a clove hitch worked into the standing part before the tuck, buys its security from the extra friction of that additional turn, and it is the knot US Sailing’s lifeline guidance names as acceptable in high-modulus line where a plain bowline is not.

For a compact sliding loop the purpose-built EStar knot has emerged specifically because conventional stoppers and hitches pull through single-braid Dyneema. And on racing boats the connection that used to be a bowline in a sheet is now very often a soft shackle, a button knot and spliced eye in HMPE that any crew member can learn to open and close in ninety seconds, holds far better than a knotted loop, and removes the knot from the equation entirely. Sometimes, though, you are on the water with a length of Dyneema, no fid, no time to splice, and a job that needs a loop now. The honest position is that a bowline is the weaker choice in this fibre and you should know it, but if it is the choice in front of you there are ways to make it hold far better than a plain bowline will.

None of which means I have stopped tying bowlines. On the polyester dock lines, on the older cordage, on anything where the fibre still has the friction the knot was born to grip, the bowline remains exactly what it always was, the fastest good loop a human hand can make and the easiest to break open at the end of a cold night watch. The knot has not been beaten completely but you must be aware of the new reality of modern high tech fibres.

So, is it still the correct solution?

Here is where I have arrived, and I have tried to let the evidence rather than sentiment carry me there.

For natural fibre, for nylon, for polyester, for the ropes that made up the entire working world until a generation ago and still make up most of it, the bowline remains the correct answer for a fast, strong, non-jamming loop, on the one condition that was always true and is simply more visible now. It has to be tied well and, where failure carries a cost, backed up. That is not a concession forced by modern materials. Smith knew it, Ashley knew it, and every instructor who ever made you add a stopper knew it. The bowline was never a knot you tied and forgot.

For high-modulus fibre, the honest answer is that the plain bowline is no longer the correct solution and pretending otherwise is how spinnakers end up in the water. The rope is too slippery, too unforgiving of a sharp bend, and too quick to skate a coil for a knot that relies on surface friction and gentle radii. The correct solution in Dyneema is a splice where the connection is permanent, a water bowline or figure eight where a knot is genuinely needed, and a soft shackle where you would once have tied a loop in a sheet. The four-thousand-year-old configuration has not been proven wrong. It has been overtaken by a fibre that punishes exactly the compromises the bowline was built on.

Which is, when you stand back from it, a very ordinary story about tools. The bowline conquered because it was the best compromise available in the materials of its age, and it held its throne for as long as those materials defined the trade. It has not fallen so much as been asked to share the kingdom with knots and splices better suited to a fibre nobody could have imagined even 75years ago. The king of knots is not dead. But for the first time in its very long reign, it is no longer the automatic answer, and the mark of a serious rope user now is knowing precisely where its authority ends.

I still teach the bowline first. I always will. It is too useful, too fast and too deeply embedded in seamanship to discard. But on a modern boat I now teach the splice second, and increasingly the second lesson is the one that matters. The old knot still deserves respect. It no longer deserves blind trust.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

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Some time in the summer of 1969, aged nine, I went offshore for the first time. The boat was Volunteer, a Sparkman & Stephens 34 owned by the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Yacht Club. The race was the RORC Seine Bay Race, the fixture that became today’s Cervantes Trophy. My father was skipper.

I do not remember the tide gate at the start, the shipping in mid-Channel, or any piece of wisdom delivered at the chart table. What I remember is the boat, the adults moving with purpose, and the book my father gave me: Offshore, by Captain John H. Illingworth.

At nine I did not read it, whatever he intended. I looked at the pictures, all of them, over and over. The reading came later, and kept coming. The fifth revised and enlarged edition, blue cloth boards, a dust jacket with a yacht shouldering through a seaway on the front. I still have it. The jacket is chipped and creased and taped, and it sits on my shelf in Cowes looking exactly like what it is: a working document that got worked.

This is not really an essay about an old book. It is about how offshore racing actually travels through time. The sport is not a body of information. It is a body of judgement, and judgement moves from person to person, boat to boat, edition to edition. The tools have changed beyond recognition. The transmission has not, and the crews who understand that still beat the crews who think the sport can be downloaded.

My father was not a weekend romantic about the sea. He came from the professional version of it. Commodore Gordon Greenfield, born 1926, trained for the sea aboard HMS Conway, went straight from conscription into the merchant service, then the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, then the Royal Naval Reserve, rising across four decades to become Commander in Chief of the Royal Naval Reserve in the 1980s. He held a Trinity House pilot’s licence for the North Sea and the Medway, some of the busiest and most tidally awkward water in Europe. He was a founder and flag officer of the RNVR Yacht Club, whose boat carried me on that first race. He won the RORC Morgan Cup in 1971 as skipper of the C&C 39 Thumper. And in 1982 he helped secure merchant ships for the Falklands task force, the operation that sent Atlantic Conveyor south with Harriers lashed to her deck.

He taught me to sail. More precisely, he handed me a craft that had itself been handed to him, and the man who wasso important to offshore racing was Illingworth.

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The engineer who wrote the job

John Holden Illingworth, 1903 to 1980, was a Royal Navy engineer officer who served in submarines between the wars and finished the war a captain. He was never a gentleman amateur. He was a professional engineer who happened to apply the discipline to yachts, and it showed in everything he touched.

Offshore racing is not a body of information. It is a body of judgement.

In 1945 he was in Sydney, organising repairs for the British Pacific Fleet, when a group of local cruising men invited him to join a passage to Hobart. His response created a sport on the other side of the world: he would come if they made a race of it. Nine boats started on Boxing Day 1945. A southerly gale scattered the fleet, an aircraft sent to find them could not locate his 35-footer Rani because she was too far ahead, and the press had her lost at sea until she appeared off Tasman Island, first home and first on handicap in the race she had effectively invented. The Sydney Hobart has run every year since, a tidal, tactical, brutal examination that rewards preparation over theatre. That was the first thing he handed on.

Back in Britain he became Commodore of the RORC, and in 1947 launched Myth of Malham, the Laurent Giles design built to his brief that won the Fastnet in 1947 and 1949 and rewrote what an offshore racing yacht was allowed to look like. I have covered Myth and her rating logic at length in earlier essays. What she handed on was an idea crews still resist: the rule is part of the race. Read the rule, read the course, build for the job.

But the boats were only half of it, and arguably the less important half. Ask instead what else he handed on.

1. The method. Offshore appeared under the Adlard Coles imprint in July 1949 and was reprinted within a year. It went through edition after edition for two decades, growing each time, because Illingworth treated it the way an engineer treats documentation: revise to match reality. Design, rig, sails, crewing, provisioning, watchkeeping and navigation, as a single connected system. There was nothing else like it. For a generation of British offshore sailors it was not a book about the sport. It was the sport, in printed form.

2. The ladder. In 1950 he became founding president of the Junior Offshore Group, created so that sailors in smaller and cheaper boats than the RORC then allowed could race offshore properly. He believed, against the weight of contemporary opinion, that small, light, simple boats could be raced offshore safely, and he proved it. Every sailor who has come up through JOG racing, and I have coached plenty, is standing on that decision.

3. The races themselves. The Myth of Malham Cup went to the RORC in 1958, in his lifetime, for a race he wanted sailed. The Sydney Hobart he simply left to Australia, where the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia made it one of the great races of the world. He gave the sport away as fast as he built it.

4. A warning. With Angus Primrose he drew boats by the hundred, including, in 1964, a 54-foot ketch for a single-handed circumnavigation by a man named Francis Chichester. Gipsy Moth IV was a terrible design for the job: tender, short on righting moment, dangerously keen to broach, and modified halfway round the world in Sydney, where the America’s Cup designer Warwick Hood added a piece to her keel to little effect. Chichester wrote that the boat “has no sentimental value for me at all” and called her cantankerous and difficult, reckoning she needed a crew of three: a navigator, an elephant for the tiller and a long-armed chimpanzee to work the gear below. She still went round the world with one stop, because the man sailing her had spent a lifetime accumulating exactly the kind of judgement this essay is about. Great designers can produce bad boats, and great seamen get bad boats home. Judgement covers the difference.

When Illingworth died in March 1980, The Times called him “the father of post-war offshore sailing racing” (obituary, The Times, 13 March 1980). For once an obituary undersold its subject. Fathers pass on more than existence. They pass on method, which brings me back to mine.

The generation that ran on the book

My father’s seamanship was professional before it was recreational, and the pilotage is the part to understand. A Trinity House pilot held a licence for a named district and was examined on it from memory: depths, marks, transits, and the tidal streams hour by hour either side of high water. On the Medway and in the Thames Estuary approaches that meant taking deep-draught ships between shifting sandbanks on a calculated under-keel clearance, in fog, at night, on a falling tide. A yacht navigator who gets it wrong loses places. A pilot who gets it wrong puts a ship on the Nore. Precision was not a virtue in that trade. It was the trade.

That was the culture that picked up Illingworth’s book and raced with it. The RNVR Yacht Club was formed in 1947 by reserve officers and ran a succession of club yachts named Volunteer, the S&S 34 the second of them, crewed by men whose day jobs were navigation, pilotage and command. When my father skippered Thumper to the Morgan Cup in 1971, the navigation kit was a sextant, a trailing log, an echo sounder, a radio direction finder on a good day, and the Admiralty tide tables, worked in pencil on paper charts. Decca existed by then, and ships and pilots used it daily. A racing yacht carried a man instead as a Decca was 100kg and bigger than the cockpit and needed a generator to power it.

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Five habits that I was taught - and still relevant today

1. A position is an argument, not a fact. A three-bearing fix came with a cocked hat whose size told you its quality. A dead reckoning position carried an error circle the navigator grew honestly with the distance run, a mile or more for every ten sailed in open water, more in a cross tide. You always knew which kind of position you held and how far to trust it. Compare that with a crew nine miles offshore believing a GPS position to a boat length while the antenna might feed them data but maybe minutes out of date. I wrote recently about GPS spoofing and the return of real navigation; the pre-electronic navigator’s core skill was knowing how wrong he might be. It is the single most transferable habit on this list.

2. Tide is strategy, not correction. My father’s generation did not choose a course and then correct it for stream. The stream dictated the course. A Channel race was planned backwards from its tidal gates, and the boat was positioned to take each gate at the right hour or to anchor and hold ground until it opened. Kedging out of a foul tide was standard practice, not a curiosity, and it still wins races; I wrote in May about winning the Myth of Malham by stopping. The software now does the arithmetic in milliseconds, and mid-fleet crews still lose because they treat the output as an answer rather than an argument about tide.

3. The log is the record. Log reading, course steered, wind, barometer, sea state, sail carried, every hour, in ink, whatever the weather. The entries fed the dead reckoning, and they kept the navigator honest against hindsight. My debriefs start from recorded data rather than anyone’s memory of the race for the same reason.

4. Navigate ahead of the boat. A professonal pilot has to board with the whole passage already planned with the tide. So racing offshore the question is never where you are; it is where you will be in one hour and in three, and what needs to be set, trimmed and rested when you get there. Illingworth’s watchkeeping and crewing chapters are built on the same premise. It is the discipline that separates a navigator from a person who reads a plotter.

5. The navigator serves the race, not the plot. A chart solved nothing unless it produced a decision: tack now, hold on, change down, take the inshore gate. a course alteration that arrived after the moment it was needed was worthless, however tidy, and my father said so without softening it. Every good tactician holds the same rule - plan ahead.

What remains once the romance is stripped away is a working method: honest uncertainty, tide-first planning, disciplined records, thinking ahead of the boat, decisions over good ideas. There is not one item on that list that a modern IRC crew even with a full B&G set up, and a routing subscription can afford to skip. The instruments have improved out of all recognition. The habits have not changed, because the sea has not.

The pre-electronic navigator’s core skill was knowing how wrong he might be.

The conversation at Earls Court in 1967

One more story, because it gathers every thread of this article into a single hull.

At the London Boat Show at Earls Court, at the end of the sixties, Edward Heath wanted a new boat and fell for the S&S 34. The first British boat was already spoken for, ordered by a man named Rodney Hill. Heath wanted an early delivery to get south for that December’s Sydney Hobart, Illingworth’s race, and the builder Michael Winfield brokered a swap. Hill agreed to take the later boat, and on hearing that Heath’s would be called Morning Cloud, named his own Morning After. Peter Goldthorp, who sailed with Hill, records a detail I refuse to leave out: the name was chosen partly because it “allowed them just to change 5 letters” on the transom. Exactly which physical hull each man ended up with is still argued inside the class association, which strikes me as the right amount of mystery for a good story. What is not argued is the result. Morning Cloud went to Australia and won the 1969 Sydney Hobart outright, the race Illingworth had conjured out of a cruise twenty-four years earlier. Morning After went south too, and finished the race soundly, though without Morning Cloud‘s silverware.

Morning Cloud broke her mooring off Jersey in September 1974 and was lost. The other half of that Earls Court conversation survived. Fifty years after I stood on Volunteer‘s deck as a nine-year-old, I found Morning After wrecked on the Isle of Wight, bought her from an owner who had always meant to rebuild her, and moved her to a barn in the middle of the Island. Then Covid arrived, the team I had assembled evaporated, and I learned, at speed and alone, how to rebuild a boat: new cabin, new engine, new mast, everything.

And here is the detail Illingworth would have enjoyed. His masthead rig made the vast overlapping genoa the defining sail of the post-war offshore yacht, because the RORC rule of his day measured headsail area cheaply and he was never a man to leave free sail area on the table. Rebuilding Morning After for IRC, I took the overlap off her: non-overlapping headsails, taller rig, lower boom, new rating. The same class of hull, optimised twice, sixty years apart, each time by reading the rating rule of the day and building for the job.

She repaid it. RORC Classic Yacht of the Year in 2021 and 2022, tenth in class in the 2021 Fastnet, and in 2022 the Class 4 win overall in the RORC seasons championship. In that year’s Round Britain and Ireland Race she won her class, and the bare result undersells it: she held the overall lead of the entire race for twelve days, a fifty-year-old boat ahead of the modern fleet on corrected time, until the wind shut down off Muckle Flugga at the most northerly point of the United Kingdom and the calm handed the race back. Tide-first strategy and honest numbers took her that far. Nothing in the toolkit has an answer to no wind, which is itself a lesson Illingworth’s generation would have recognised without complaint. She races out of Cork now, with a friend, which is how it should be. Boats, like the craft itself, are only ever held in trust.

The methods remain the same, only the rules change.

Still on the shelf in Cowes

Illingworth’s genius was not just the Myth of Malham, or the Hobart, or even the other hundreds of boats he designed. It was that he treated offshore racing as a craft that could be written down, revised and handed on, and then spent thirty years doing exactly that: the book, JOG, the trophies given away, the designs. My father’s generation received it, added a professional navigator’s discipline, and handed it on again, sometimes as instruction, sometimes as a club boat with room for a nine-year-old, sometimes as a battered blue book.

That transmission is still the sport. When I coach a crew today, the polars, the GRIBs and the routing are all present and all useful, but not one of them contains the thing that wins races: the judgement to know what the numbers are worth, learned from people who learned it from people. The fifth revised and enlarged edition of Illingworth’ book on my shelf is holding together with tape and stubbornness, which after fifty-seven years of service seems fitting. I am not sure the craft it contains has aged a day.

So yes, teach them Expedition. Teach them polars. Teach them to read a GRIB, question a forecast, check the tide file and distrust a perfect-looking track. Then teach them what your own mistakes cost, when the number is useful, and when the boat is telling you something better. That is the part no subscription can supply.

Find the young sailor in your crew. Hand something on.

Preparation. Decisions. Execution. From first beat to first place.

Quote of the day: “The father of post-war offshore sailing racing.” The Times on Captain John H. Illingworth, obituary, 13 March 1980.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

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Sources for the checkable record: The Times obituary, 13 March 1980; the 1945 Sydney Hobart account per the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia and contemporary reports; Offshore publication history per Adlard Coles editions; RNVR Yacht Club history per the club’s published record; the Morning Cloud / Morning After account per the S&S 34 Association, including Peter Goldthorp’s first-hand comment; Atlantic Conveyor per the public Falklands record. Family details are from the Greenfield family record.

It came out of a conversation with an excellent dinghy sailor who was moving into keelboats. During a long, slow night offshore, we got onto the subject of what actually makes a yacht work, and I explained that one of the quiet miracles of sailing is a symmetrical foil underwater, working at an angle, creating lift.

Once you see that, a lot of sailing begins to make more sense.

The article is deliberately written in bullet-point form — fast, practical and easy to absorb. At the time, FirstBeat only had a few hundred subscribers, so I’m reposting it now for those who missed it first time round.

Foils Masterclass: Keel & Rudder Design in Modern IRC Race Boats

Or why leeway is misunderstood and if you read this you will helm better!

STUART GREENFIELD

APR, 2026

By Stuart Greenfield — RYA Yachtmaster, RORC racer, FirstBeat Coach

Most crews talk endlessly about sails, routing, and tactics. Very few truly understand the only parts of the boat that convert all that effort into forward motion: the underwater foils.

Your keel and rudder are not just “appendages.” They are highly loaded, asymmetric lifting surfaces operating in a turbulent, moving fluid—often at Reynolds numbers that punish poor setup brutally.

If you misunderstand how they work, you will sail further, slower, and less efficiently—every single mile.

The Physics: Foils Are Wings (But Harder)

A keel generates lift exactly like an aircraft wing—but sideways.

• The boat sails at a leeway angle (typically 3–6° upwind)

• Water flow meets the keel at an angle of attack

• This creates lift to windward, opposing sideways drift

• The forward component of that force = your actual VMG

Key Insight:

Without leeway, there is no lift. Without lift, there is no upwind performance.

Poor sailors try to eliminate leeway. Good sailors control it precisely.

3. Leeway: The Most Misunderstood Performance Variable

Leeway is not inefficiency—it is the mechanism of efficiency.

• Too little → stalled foil → no lift → slipping sideways

• Too much → excessive drag → slow boat

• Correct → maximum lift-to-drag ratio → fastest VMG

What top helmsmen understand:

• They “load” the keel progressively

• They feel when the foil is just below stall

• They steer to maintain attached flow

What poor sailors do:

• Oversteer → flow separation → drag spike

• Pinch → stall → lose speed and height

• Ignore feedback → blame sails or tide

4. Keel Design: The Primary Lifting Surface

4.1 Aspect Ratio (Depth vs Chord)

High Aspect Ratio (deep, narrow keel):

• Higher lift efficiency

• Better upwind pointing

• – Structurally demanding

• – Draft limitations (IRC compromise)

Low Aspect Ratio (shallower, wider keel):

• Lower draft

• More forgiving

• Higher induced drag

• Less efficient lift

IRC reality: Designers are constantly trading rating vs efficiency

4.2 Chord Length

Chord = front-to-back length of the foil

• Long chord → forgiving, stable, more drag

• Short chord → efficient, but stalls more abruptly

Practical takeaway:

A short-chord keel demands precision helming and trim. A long-chord keel tolerates amateur input.

4.3 Bulb Design

The bulb is not just ballast—it is a hydrodynamic body:

• Reduces tip vortices

• Lowers centre of gravity (COG)

• Influences flow onto the keel fin

Poor bulb shaping = massive drag penalty

4.4 Foil Section (NACA Profiles)

Most modern keels use modified NACA airfoil sections

Key characteristics:

• Thickness distribution → structural + hydrodynamic balance

• Camber → lift characteristics

• Leading edge radius → stall behaviour

Critical point:

A keel is rarely symmetric in practice—loading and heel create effective asymmetry

5. Rudder Design: Control Surface or Second Wing?

5.1 Single Rudder

Advantages:

• Lower drag in flat sailing

• Simpler flow field

• Better in light air

Disadvantages:

• Loses effectiveness at high heel

• Prone to ventilation

• Requires active trimming to stay immersed

5.2 Twin Rudders (Modern Offshore Standard)

Advantages:

• One rudder always vertical → optimal lift

• Control at high heel angles

• Reduced ventilation

Disadvantages:

• Increased wetted surface drag

• Slightly less efficient in light air

• More complex alignment/setup

5.3 Rudder as a Lifting Foil

A rudder is not just steering—it contributes to side force balance:

• Balances the keel’s lift

• Controls yaw moment

• Influences drag dramatically

Poor sailing:

Dragging the rudder = brake on permanently

Elite sailing:

Minimal rudder angle = maximum efficiency

6. Interaction: Keel + Rudder + Hull

This is where naval architecture becomes decisive.

Centre of Gravity (COG)

• Determined by keel weight and placement

• Drives righting moment

Centre of Effort (COE)

• From sails

• Moves with trim and sail plan

Balance:

• If COE too far aft → heavy helm → drag

• If too far forward → unstable steering

The system:

Keel generates lift → rudder balances it → hull connects flow

7. Why So Many Shapes Exist (Especially Under IRC)

IRC does not reward absolute speed—it rewards measured efficiency within constraints.

Designers juggle:

• Draft limits

• Stability vs rating

• Wetted surface

• Righting moment

• Construction cost

Result: No “perfect keel”—only optimised compromises

8. Limitations of Foils in the Real World

Even perfect design fails if conditions change:

• Waves distort flow → dynamic stall

• Heel alters effective foil geometry

• Speed changes Reynolds number → different behaviour

• Fouling destroys performance instantly

9. Foil Care: Where Races Are Quietly Won

9.1 Surface Finish

• Mirror smooth = lower skin friction

• Any roughness = drag increase

Even light slime = measurable performance loss

9.2 Leading & Trailing Edges

• Leading edge must be fair and true

• Trailing edge must be sharp but not fragile

Blunt trailing edge = turbulence Over-sharp = damage risk

9.3 Alignment

• Rudders must be perfectly aligned

• Keel symmetry must be exact

A few millimetres error = constant drag + helm load

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9.4 Pre-Race Checklist (Non-Negotiable)

• Clean to racing standard (not “looks fine”)

• Check for nicks, chips, delamination

• Verify rudder bearings and play

• Confirm autopilot calibration (critical offshore)

10. What Elite Helmsmen Actually Feel

Top sailors don’t “guess”—they interpret:

• Pressure on helm = foil loading

• Acceleration = attached flow

• Sudden lightness = stall onset

• Noise/vibration = separation

They steer to:

• Maintain laminar flow

• Minimise rudder angle

• Keep keel at optimal AoA

11. The Brutal Truth

Most IRC boats are not slow because of:

• Sails

• Routing

• Crew

They are slow because:

The foils are not being sailed correctly.

12. Final Principle

Your keel and rudders are the only parts of the boat that turn physics into performance. Everything else is input.

Master them—and everything else starts to work.

Ignore them—and nothing else will save you.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

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GPS is probably the most useful navigation tool ever put on a race boat, and that is not the problem. The problem is that it is so good, so cheap, so accurate and so invisible in the background that it has quietly removed something every serious navigator used to have drilled into them, which is the habit of mistrust. Not paranoia, not nostalgia, and not the idea that we should all throw away the chartplotter and start crossing the Channel with a sextant, a pipe and a woolly hat. Just mistrust. The old navigator’s question was never simply what the instrument says. It was why it says that, what it is using, what else agrees with it, and what you would do if it stopped being true.

That question matters again, and not because GPS has become useless, because it has not. On most days, in most places, it is brilliant. It matters because GPS, or more properly GNSS, the Global Navigation Satellite Systems including GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou, is no longer just a navigation aid. It has become the quiet source of position and time for almost everything on the modern boat. The chartplotter drinks from it, and so do the AIS, the tablet, the phone and the race tracker. The DSC radio may use it, the MOB beacon may use it, the routing laptop may use it, and some autopilot modes may depend on it. The boat can look as if it carries seven independent electronic systems when in truth it carries one position source repeated seven times. That is a very different problem. It is not the failure of one box. It could be the corruption of a whole way of thinking… and all using one power source.

“The boat can look as if it carries seven independent electronic systems, when in truth it carries one position source repeated seven times.”

The same failure, on land

You can watch the same dependence play out on dry land any weekend. Mountain Rescue England and Wales and the Ordnance Survey now run a joint campaign pleading with walkers not to navigate by smartphone alone, because the callouts have a depressingly familiar shape. Cumbria Police have reported people dialling 999 with as little as one per cent of battery left, so the phone dies moments after the call and the very device meant to save them can no longer be used to find them. The Cairngorm team has had walkers spend an entire winter night out with no map and no compass because a phone ran flat. None of those phones lied in the spoofing sense. They simply ran out, lost signal, or ran a free app whose mapping was never good enough for the ground underneath it, and there was nothing behind them. That is the same hole, dug on land.

Afloat it is worse, because position is only the beginning of what depends on the box. A phone makes a perfectly good backup GPS on a boat, provided the right charts are downloaded for offline use, but it is a hungry one, and battery is currency offshore. The free tiers of the popular charting apps will also happily draw your boat sailing across dry land in a narrow channel, which is the same picture the spoofed tankers paint in the Strait of Hormuz, arrived at by accident rather than malice, and a useful reminder that a position is only ever as good as the chart beneath it.

The bridge and the race boat

My own view of this is shaped by two very different worlds. As a naval officer at Dartmouth I did my naval training, and after my degree in Naval Engineering I specialised as a Weapons Engineer, which in the ships I served in during the 1980s also meant being responsible for the maintenance and running of the mechanical and electronic navigation devices as they then existed and not just the weapons. I did my time as a deck watch officer as well, so I saw navigation from both the bridge and from the machinery and systems side.

A naval ship had space, order and redundancy. There was a proper chart table, there were books and procedures and trained people, and there were logs, compasses, gyros, radars, chronometers, repeaters, power supplies, backups and people whose job was to keep the whole system honest. The bridge was dry, comparatively steady, properly lit and properly manned, and even when things went wrong the ship was not normally reduced to one small screen and a hopeful glance at the heavens. A racing yacht was another world entirely. My yacht navigation was learned from my father, from racing, from making mistakes, and from wanting to become not just someone who could follow a course but a competent offshore racing navigator. Before affordable yacht GPS, and before small-boat electronic navigation became something you could simply trust, the job was serious in a very physical way. You were often cold, wet, tired and wedged below in a rolling boat with a damp chart, a pencil, a plotter, a compass course, a log reading that might or might not be telling the whole truth, a depth sounder, tidal notes, and a crew who wanted answers. Where are we, how far to go, how long, what is the tide doing, what is the weather doing, and are we going the right way.

On a warship, uncertainty could be absorbed by the system. On a race boat it moved through the crew like cold water. If the navigator sounded hesitant the whole boat felt it, the trimmers felt it, the helm felt it and the owner felt it, and people stopped racing and started worrying. The navigator was not just finding position. He was holding the boat’s confidence together, which is why I have always held that the most important tool of any offshore racing navigator was, and probably still might be, the poker face. You can be wedged below with a damp chart and a fix you only half believe, but the moment that doubt reaches your voice the boat slows down. The plot is private and the confidence is public. That is one of the things modern electronic navigation has hidden from view, because navigation is not just knowing where the boat is, it is maintaining earned confidence in where she is, where she is going, and what you will do when the first answer no longer deserves to be believed.

“The most important tool of any offshore racing navigator was, and probably still might be, his poker face!

A new dilemma - electronic jamming and spoofing

The old longitude problem was about fog, cloud, time and uncertainty. You could not see the sky, you could not trust the clock, and you could not know your east-west position with the accuracy needed to avoid disaster. In 1714 a coalition of merchants and captains pushed Parliament into the Longitude Act and the £20,000 reward it offered, a fortune, for a method that could fix longitude to within half a degree, and John Harrison spent the rest of his life answering it with a machine. The modern version is stranger, because the sky is clear, the screen is bright, the numbers are precise, and the boat may still be wrong. The old fog hid the world from you. The new fog is worse, because it does not hide anything at all. It forges a world and hands it to you with the confidence of a clear day, and that is the part the word does not quite capture, so it is worth holding onto: this is a fog you can see straight through, and it is could still be wrong.

Jamming is the blunt version, in which a jammer simply overwhelms the very weak satellite signal so that the receiver loses lock, the position drops out, the alarms appear, and everyone knows there is a problem. Spoofing is the cleverer and more dangerous version, in which a transmitter broadcasts counterfeit satellite signals plausible enough for the receiver to accept, so that instead of admitting it has no position the receiver hands you a false one, and may hand you false time with it. GNSS spoofing is specifically designed to deceive the receiver into calculating a position, navigation or timing answer that is not true, and that distinction matters offshore, because a dead GPS is merely irritating while a lying GPS is dangerous.

The public examples are no longer theoretical. In the Strait of Hormuz, a passage that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil through a gap 21 miles wide at its narrowest, Scientific American reported ships appearing to circle over dry land, cross airports and drift through places they plainly were not, with Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas describing the result on an electronic chart display as “chaos”. Humphreys, who built the first acknowledged civilian GPS spoofer back in 2008, makes the deeper point too, which is that if the ship’s GPS is spoofed its AIS may broadcast that false position to everyone else. That is the step change. A spoofed ship is not merely confused about herself, she becomes a source of confusion to everyone around her. In a narrow commercial choke point that is obvious, and in a yacht race the scale is smaller but the principle is identical: if the truth source is corrupted, all the clever downstream displays become beautiful ways of repeating a lie.

This is not a fringe worry dressed up as a crisis. The Royal Institute of Navigation’s report Impacts of GNSS interference on maritime safety, published in January 2026 and drawn from more than 100 sector experts and 300 vessel captains, logged 20 incidents of physical harm to personnel in interference regions, 19 of property damage and 10 of environmental damage, and more than one in ten respondents said they had been led into an unsafe or unlawful situation. Three quarters said the problem is not improving.

“A dead GPS is irritating. A lying GPS is dangerous.”

The offshore problem

Most offshore sailors do not race through the Strait of Hormuz, and most are not being deliberately targeted by state-level electronic warfare, which is the easy reason to ignore the subject. The harder truth is that spoofing exposes a weakness that already exists on a great many offshore boats, because we have become very good at operating electronic navigation when the system is healthy and much less good at knowing what remains when it is not. A lot of modern race boats no longer have a real chart table at all, just a folding shelf, a laptop, a tablet bracket and a charging lead, and the boat is lighter, wetter, faster and less forgiving for it. Everything is networked, everything is repeated, and everything is clean until it is not. The navigator can now run weather routing, AIS overlays, tidal models, polar percentages, laylines, tracker comparisons, Expedition or Adrena outputs, GRIBs, performance numbers and several screens of tactical information that would have seemed like science fiction to a 1980s yacht navigator, and that is progress. But progress is not the same thing as resilience.

The old yacht navigator was not romantic, he was practical because he had no choice. A sight from the sextant on a small offshore race boat was never as clean as the textbook made it sound, because the boat rolled, the horizon disappeared, the sky closed in, the watch was busy, and there was no yeoman standing by to call the time, so on many races a useful celestial fix was a rare luxury rather than a daily certainty. You used what you had, which meant dead reckoning from a known position, a compass course, log distance, a leeway estimate, the tide, the depth and the soundings, headland and buoy bearings, three-point fixes when you could get them, transits, clearing bearings, radar ranges if fitted, and a feel for whether the plot made sense. Some of those methods would have been frowned upon in a formal naval context if used carelessly, but on a yacht they were sometimes the only available truth, not perfect truth, but independent truth, drawn from the physical world rather than from a distant signal. That is the part we need to recover, not because old navigation was better, because it was often worse, but because it was independent.

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The dangerous word: agreement

One of the most misleading things on a modern boat is agreement. The chartplotter says one thing, the tablet says the same, the phone agrees, the AIS target display agrees and the routing laptop agrees, so it must be right. Not necessarily, because if every one of those systems is ultimately taking its position and time from GNSS, then agreement between them may prove nothing more than that the same bad data has reached every display. That is why the basic navigator’s instinct has to change, so that the question is no longer whether the screens agree but whether any of them are actually independent. A phone is not independent if it is using satellite position, a tablet is not independent if it is using its internal GNSS chip, a second GPS receiver is not truly independent in a spoofing area because it is listening to the same poisoned sky, and a second plotter is often just a second witness repeating the same false evidence.

Independent means something else. It means a magnetic compass, a log and a depth sounder, a radar range and bearing, a paper chart, a hand-bearing compass and a visual transit. It means the contour of the seabed, the loom of a lighthouse and the shape of the land, and it means time kept by a watch that has not asked a satellite for permission to exist. It means something that still works when the network goes quiet or starts lying.

“Agreement between your screens may prove nothing more than that the same bad data has reached every display.”

Safety, not just navigation

There is another reason this matters. The first reaction to any discussion of GPS failure is usually that you can navigate without it, and many experienced sailors genuinely can. But the modern GNSS problem is not only about the navigator’s position, it is about the other equipment that has quietly become dependent on position and time. AIS needs both, DSC distress calling may include position, MOB devices may use GNSS or AIS, EPIRBs increasingly include GNSS-derived positions, plotters and tablets use GNSS, and some autopilot functions steer to a waypoint, route or ground track derived from satellite position.

A 406 MHz EPIRB is not simply made useless by the loss of GPS, because the Cospas-Sarsat system can detect and locate 406 MHz distress beacons, and modern search-and-rescue satellites can use methods other than a beacon’s own GNSS position to find it. But built-in GNSS gives a much faster and more precise position when it is healthy, while local AIS-style MOB devices are far more directly dependent on the correctness of their position source. So the right conclusion is not that distress systems are hopeless, it is that the skipper needs to know what each one is actually using. Does it transmit a GNSS position, does it still alert without one, does it carry a 121.5 MHz homing signal, does it have AIS, does the crew know what appears on the plotter when an AIS MOB beacon activates, and does anyone know what to do if the displayed MOB position is obviously wrong. The problem is not that modern equipment is bad. The problem is that we often do not understand its dependencies until the moment we need it.

What the industry will fix, slowly

The technical answer is coming, but not evenly and not quickly enough for every yacht. Galileo now carries OSNMA, Open Service Navigation Message Authentication, which lets suitably equipped receivers check that the Galileo navigation message comes from the system itself and has not been modified, and the European GNSS Service Centre declared the OSNMA Initial Service operational on 24 July 2025. That matters because authentication changes the receiver’s relationship with the signal, so that instead of merely hearing a plausible message it can begin to ask whether the message proves where it came from. But it is not a magic shield for every sailor, because the receiver has to support it, the installation has to use it properly, and it helps with spoofing of the navigation message rather than with every form of jamming, denial, antenna failure, poor installation, power loss, network fault or human overtrust.

Other answers are developing alongside it: multi-constellation and multi-frequency receivers, better antennas, inertial systems and terrestrial backups. The UK has just committed £155 million to position, navigation and timing resilience, including £71 million toward a national eLoran system, a high-powered, low-frequency signal from the ground that is inherently far harder to jam or spoof than a faint satellite and accurate to around ten metres. Researchers are even navigating off what one of them calls signals of opportunity, cellular masts and Starlink among them, on the principle that the more sources you listen to, the harder you are to deceive, and Zak Kassas of Ohio State calls it security by diversification. It is the old navigator’s instinct restated in radio frequency, and it is welcome, but none of it removes the skipper’s responsibility. A better receiver is useful. A better habit of mind is essential.

The fallback order

For most offshore racers and cruisers the answer is not to make celestial navigation the first fallback, because that is another romantic trap. If you are racing in the Channel, around Ireland, across Biscay, around the Fastnet, through the Solent or along a coastline, the immediate independent layers are far more ordinary: the compass, the log, the depth, the tide, the paper chart, the radar, visual bearings, clearing lines, transits, the last known good fix and a running dead reckoning. Celestial navigation belongs in the box, particularly for ocean passages, but it is not the first thing you reach for when the plotter looks odd off Portland Bill. The first thing you reach for is the physical world around the boat. What depth should we have here, what does the compass say, what was our last believable fix, what course have we actually steered, what has the tide done, what does the radar range say, does the coastline fit, are the lights where they should be, and is the buoy where the screen says it is or where the world says it is. That is not nostalgia, that is navigation.

The sextant still has a place

The sextant still matters, but it should be put back in its proper place. It is not a magic wand, it is not a substitute for coastal pilotage, and it is not much use if nobody aboard has practised with it since passing an exam years ago. But it remains the only position-fixing instrument on the boat that cannot be jammed, spoofed, hacked, switched off by a satellite outage or corrupted by a network fault, because it transmits nothing and receives nothing artificial, and instead puts a question to the sky, the horizon, your eye and your timekeeper. For ocean sailing that is still powerful, and the modern version need not involve pages of sight reduction table misery. A sextant, an almanac, a calculator, a plotting sheet and someone who has actually practised can produce a perfectly useful independent check, because the whole sight reduction now collapses into two lines a basic scientific calculator handles in seconds, well maybe a bit longer!

THE TWO FORMULAS

Calculated altitude: Hc = sin⁻¹ [ sin(D)·sin(L) + cos(L)·cos(D)·cos(LHA) ]

Azimuth: Z = cos⁻¹ [ ( sin(D) − sin(L)·sin(Hc) ) / ( cos(L)·cos(Hc) ) ]

D is the body’s declination, L your assumed latitude, LHA the local hour angle. Measure the body’s real altitude Ho with the sextant. The difference between Ho and Hc, in minutes of arc, is your intercept, one minute of arc being one nautical mile, toward the body if Ho is the greater and away if it is less. Cross two such lines and the crossing is your latitude and your longitude. The only electronic thing in your hand is a calculator that listens to no one.

What the calculator cannot give you is the declination and hour angle of the body at the instant of the sight, and the annual Nautical Almanac supplies that on paper. Better still for a self-sufficient boat is Geoffrey Kolbe’s Long Term Almanac 2000 to 2050, a single book of the sun and the navigational stars valid for a generation rather than a year, paired with Mary Blewitt’s Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen, the slim classic that has taught more cruisers astro than any other book. None of this will give you the precision of GPS, and it does not need to, because its value is not centimetric accuracy but the fact that it belongs to a completely different family of truth. That is what resilience means in the end, not one perfect answer but several imperfect answers whose errors are unlikely to be the same.

“Resilience is not one perfect answer. It is several imperfect answers whose errors are unlikely to be the same.”

The watch question

Every celestial fix depends on time, and if you get the time wrong your longitude walks away, because four seconds of time is roughly one nautical mile of longitude at the equator, reducing with latitude. The sextant is only half the system, the other half is the timekeeper, and this is where the old chronometer habit still matters. Not necessarily the box chronometer of the naval bridge, but the principle behind it, which is to know the rate, (the number of seconds it is wrong every day)

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A GPS watch is wonderfully convenient right up until the thing you are worried about is GNSS corruption, at which point it fails in precisely the conditions you bought it for. A radio-controlled watch is useful near the right shore stations, but it is still dependent on a broadcast, and there are only a handful of those stations on Earth, none of them reaching mid-ocean. A smartwatch leans on its own ecosystem of phone, network and satellite assumptions. For a small boat the practical answer is simple. Carry two independent quartz watches that do not set themselves by GPS, phone or radio, set them before departure against a reliable source, note their error, check their rate, keep one in the grab bag or nav dry box, and carry spare batteries. A good mechanical watch can be a useful third layer, especially if its rate is known, and a COSC-certified mechanical chronometer is tested to a daily rate between minus four and plus six seconds per day. But the important point is not perfection, it is regularity, because a watch that gains steadily can be corrected while a watch whose behaviour you do not know is just another opinion. Again this is not romance, it is the old navigator’s discipline translated into modern amateur terms: do not worship the instrument, rate it, question it and cross-check it.

The “GNSS suspect” routine

Every offshore boat should have a simple routine for the moment GNSS becomes suspect, not a twenty-page manual and not a committee meeting, just a routine.

The first step is to stop trusting agreement between the screens, because if the plotter, phone, tablet and laptop all use GNSS they are not four fixes, they are one fix repeated.

The second is to mark the last believable position, with its time, log, course, depth and conditions, because that becomes the start of the recovery.

The third is to start or restart a proper dead reckoning, with course steered, speed through the water, leeway estimate and tide, updated at sensible intervals.

The fourth is to shift the autopilot into a mode that does not depend on the suspect data, which means knowing in advance whether you are steering to compass, wind, waypoint, route or course over ground, because those are not the same failure case.

The fifth is to use the physical world, the radar ranges, visual bearings, depth contours, transits, clearing bearings, lights, soundings and land shape, and the buoyage, with appropriate caution.

The sixth is to isolate the bad data if the system allows it, because some instrument networks let you select, deselect or prioritise GNSS sources and some do not, and the skipper and navigator should know which before the race rather than during the failure.

The seventh is to tell the crew calmly what is happening, because confidence matters, and the message is not that we are lost but that the satellite position is suspect, so we are navigating from dead reckoning, compass, depth and radar until it proves itself again. That sentence alone can change the mood of a boat.

What to carry

The resilient amateur offshore boat does not need to become a museum. It needs a few independent basics that are maintained, accessible and practised:

• A paper chart for the sailing area, not buried under wet kit.

• A plotting tool, pencil and rubber.

• A hand-bearing compass, and a known-good steering compass with a written note of deviation if known.

• A working log and depth sounder.

• A simple tidal reference, and a way to take and plot bearings.

• Radar, if fitted, practised as a navigation tool rather than just a collision-avoidance screen.

• Two independent non-GNSS timekeepers.

• For longer offshore and ocean passages, a sextant, an almanac or long-term almanac, a calculator, plotting sheets and someone aboard who can actually use them.

Most important of all is a culture in which the navigator keeps a rough dead reckoning alive before the panic begins, because a DR started after the electronics fail is already late.

The navigator’s real job

Offshore navigation has always had a psychological component. On a race boat the navigator is not simply the person below with the screen, but part tactician, part meteorologist, part systems engineer, part pilotage officer and part calming influence. The crew may not understand the routing model, the tide gate or why the boat is being taken offshore when the mark is over there, but they absolutely understand uncertainty in the navigator’s voice. That was true before GPS and it is true now. The difference is that today the navigator can sound extremely certain because the screen looks extremely certain, with its decimals, its sharp boat icon, its clean layline, its authoritative ETA, its tracker confirming the fleet and its routing software making the decision look mathematical. But certainty is not the same as truth. The best modern navigator is not the one who rejects electronics, which would be absurd, but the one who uses them hard while always knowing what they depend on, who keeps asking where this position comes from, where this time comes from, what happens if the GNSS feed disappears, what happens if it is wrong, and what can still be proven without it. That is the difference between screen operation and navigation.

Not anti-GPS. Anti single-source thinking.

This is not an argument against GPS, which has saved more yachts from bad navigation than any other invention I can think of, and has made landfalls safer, pilotage easier, racing smarter, weather routing better and small-boat seamanship more accessible. But we have let it become too central and too invisible. The risk is not that every amateur offshore boat is about to be spoofed tomorrow, it is that we have built boats and habits that assume the satellite answer is the first truth, the second truth and the final truth, so that we have confused repetition with confirmation and mistaken convenience for resilience. The old navigators were not better because they were old, they were better at one thing because they had to be, in that they expected uncertainty. They knew that position was an argument, not a decree: the compass argued with the tide, the log with the leeway, the depth with the chart, the bearing with the dead reckoning and the sky with the clock, and the navigator’s job was to listen to the arguments and decide what was most likely true. That habit needs to come back, not instead of modern navigation but alongside it.

The sea has not changed

The sea has not changed. The rocks are still hard, the tide still runs, the fog still comes down, the crew still want to know where they are, and the owner still looks at the navigator when the boat is slow, late, lost, cold, overpressed, underpowered, becalmed or going the wrong way. Only the fog has changed, and some of it is still made of water while some of it is now electronic. The cure is much the same as it always was: do not depend on one source of truth, do not believe an instrument simply because it speaks with confidence, and never let the boat reach the point where the failure of one system leaves you with no idea what to do.

*End*

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place

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Sources

• Royal Institute of Navigation, Impacts of GNSS interference on maritime safety, January 2026: https://rin.org.uk/page/RIN_Maritime_Report

• Deni Ellis Béchard, “GPS spoofing is scrambling ships in the Strait of Hormuz,” Scientific American, 12 March 2026 (Humphreys and Kassas quotes): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-spoofing-is-scrambling-ships-in-the-strait-of-hormuz/

• Tim Bartlett, “Navigating blind: the urgent threat of GPS spoofing to sailors,” Yachting Monthly, June 2026 (Faragher interview): https://www.yachtingmonthly.com/cruising/navigating-blind-the-urgent-threat-of-gps-spoofing-to-sailors-105646

• Ordnance Survey and Mountain Rescue England and Wales, navigation safety campaign (smartphone over-reliance, battery and signal failures): https://www.mountain.rescue.org.uk/news/ordnance-survey-and-mountain-rescue-england-and-wales-join-forces-to-promote-responsible-walking-and-safe-navigation/

• Galileo OSNMA Initial Service declared operational 24 July 2025, European GNSS Service Centre: https://www.gsc-europa.eu/

• “UK commits £155 million to eLoran, timing and GNSS monitoring,” Inside GNSS, 2026: https://insidegnss.com/uk-commits-155-million-to-eloran-timing-and-gnss-monitoring-in-major-pnt-resilience-push/

• Sight reduction formulas: Sight reduction, Wikipedia, and “Two equations for celestial navigation,” Pier du Sud: https://pierdusud.com/en/two-equations-for-celestial-navigation/

• Geoffrey Kolbe, Long Term Almanac 2000 to 2050 for the Sun and Selected Stars; Mary Blewitt, Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen.

• COSC chronometer standard (ISO 3159, minus four to plus six seconds per day): https://www.cosc.swiss/cosc-faq

The last time I took Morning After to St Malo, she was the oldest boat in her class by a clear margin and we sailed her two-handed, myself and Louise Clayton, a very talented sailor. A 1968 S&S 34 against forty-five teams in IRC Two-Handed, close to half the fleet. A boat of her age and rating is not supposed to trouble the corrected-time podium of a race this size. We won the class and finished third overall.

That was 2022, and the reason it happened is the reason this race is worth writing about at all. It was a slow, soft edition. The breeze never settled, the quick boats could not convert their rating into elapsed-time advantage, and the race compressed back down the fleet to where patience and a clean read of the tide count for more than horsepower. We did not beat anyone on the water in absolute terms. We beat them on corrected time, by sailing close to our rating when the conditions stopped others sailing to theirs. The course handed us that chance. Reading it correctly is the whole craft of this race, and it is why I would tell any crew stepping aboard for Friday’s start to stop watching the rating band above them and start studying the soft spots.

Prizes for everyone!

The thing a newcomer to RORC offshore handicap racing might need to know first is that there are always a number of winners in any race. Line honours goes to the fastest boat across the water, which in a breeze normally means the longest, highest-rated machine in the fleet. In the St Malo race The King Edward VII Challenge Cup, however, goes to the best corrected time under IRC, the winner of the handicap race.

The trophy is older than the club that now awards it. The St Malo race dates back to 1906, and the King Edward VII Challenge Cup was originally donated by King Edward VII, long before the RORC became the force it is today. RORC’s own history records the Cowes-Dinard race being revived in 1935, so the modern race sits in that lovely Anglo-French seam between Edwardian silver, inter-war offshore racing and the present IRC season.

The handicap point is the one that matters on Friday. Because the cup is decided on corrected time, it has gone clean across the rating spectrum depending on the weather.

The last five editions, and what they prove

You do not have to look far back to see the handicap logic at work. The last five runnings have gone to five completely different boats overall, and a parallel story has been building in the two-handed column alongside them.

Read down that table and the spread is the point. In 2021 the cup went to Ino XXX, a 42-footer sailed by the serving RORC Commodore. In 2022 it went to Arabel, an Illingworth 33 from 1966. In 2023 it went to a Volvo 70. St Malo does not simply reward horsepower. It rewards the boat that converts its rating into reality when the course starts asking awkward questions, and which boat that is depends almost entirely on the conditions and the navigation.

The two-handed story is the one to watch, though, because that is where the race is heading. The division is now the largest and arguably the most competitive class in the fleet. Thirty-nine boats contested it in 2025, and in 2024 the two-handed winner, the Sun Fast 3300 Zephyr, finished second overall in the entire race, ahead of nearly every fully crewed boat behind the maxi. In 2026 the race is the opening round of the RORC Double Handed National Championship, with the decider at the Cherbourg Race on 4 September. Even over 150 miles it is a brutal little test for two people: Solent exit, shipping lanes, Casquets, sleep, tide, and then the final approach to St Malo when the race is quite capable of starting again. Achille Nebout, who won the class in 2025 on the Pogo RC Amarris, put the trend plainly: “It’s a format that’s growing fast, with more and more boats at every start line, and the competition is getting stronger.”

And the size of the fleet is the point, not just the backdrop. The RORC Season’s Points Championship, the largest offshore series in the world, scores on a high-points system weighted to fleet size, so a win or a podium in a big-entry race counts for more than the same result in a thin one, with bonus points on top for the major races. With well over a hundred boats on the line most years, St Malo is one of the richest scoring opportunities of the domestic summer, and it sits inside the seven-race RORC Cowes Offshore Series as well. More boats, more points. That is why the race matters out of all proportion to its 150 miles, and why anyone chasing the season title cannot treat it as a delivery with a party at the end. Everyone loves this race. The serious crews love it twice.

The gates down the course

The race breaks into a sequence of gates. Each one is a place where you either hold your corrected-time position or leak it, and where preparation pays directly into the result. Run through them in order.

1. The Solent exit. Clean air and a clean lane to the Needles. For the high-raters the early work is converting pace into a lead before the Channel opens up. For everyone else it is about not losing time to dirty air and foul tide before the race has properly begun, because time lost here is time you will never claw back on handicap.

2. The Needles and the shipping lanes. Commit to the cross-Channel leg with the traffic separation scheme to manage. Routine seamanship, but it is where tired navigation quietly starts costing you minutes against your rating.

   

3. The Casquets. The tidal gate off Alderney, and the first place local knowledge converts straight into corrected time. There is a back-eddy here that the canny exploit. Ross Applebey, who has won his class in this race more than once on the Oyster 48 Scarlet Oyster, put it plainly after the 2023 edition: “We know about a useful back-eddy at The Casquets and we could see the boats offshore really struggling.” That is the handicap race in one sentence. The gain is local, repeatable, and invisible to anyone who has not done the homework, and it lands on the clock regardless of how you rate.

4. The Channel Islands and the run to St Malo. Big tidal range, strong streams, and the place where the cup is most often decided. Tide and wind changes here compress the fleet on elapsed time, which is exactly what lets a well-sailed lower-rated boat stay inside its handicap window all the way to the finish. And it is here, on the final approach, that we meet the ghost.

The ghost off the Minkies

South of Jersey lie Les Minquiers, “the Minkies” to anyone who races here, a reef of rock and drying sand the fleet must respect on the way into St Malo. The wind here has a habit of going soft and fickle without warning, dying in patches while the tide keeps working, and crews have found themselves drifting, becalmed, watching a rival a mile off carry a private slant of breeze clean past them. It can make you look like a ghost ship, which brings me to the one that supposedly haunts these waters.

Ask around and someone will tell you the Marie Celeste, the ship found sailing crewless, met her end somewhere off here. Wrong on every count, and the way it is wrong is the fun of it. The real ship was the Mary Celeste, no second “e”, found abandoned in the Atlantic about four hundred miles east of the Azores in 1872. The “Marie Celeste” spelling is Arthur Conan Doyle’s, from an 1884 story that outsold the facts. The crewless wreck that genuinely belongs to the Minkies is fiction too: Hammond Innes set his 1956 thriller The Wreck of the Mary Deare right here, a derelict found drifting off the Minquiers during a yacht race, the name a deliberate wink at the Mary Celeste. The legend you hear in the bar is two novelists stitched together.

The useful part for Friday is that the Minkies earned the reputation honestly. This is exactly the kind of water where a boat ends up looking crewless, sails slatting, helm doing nothing, while the tide takes it where it pleases. That is where corrected-time races are won and lost. A boat parked here is not just losing distance, it is losing its rating, bleeding the handicap margin it built all the way across the Channel. The difference between you and the ghost is preparation: knowing the tidal window before you arrive, and having a plan for the light patch rather than meeting it cold and tired.

Why it is a lucky race, and why luck is earned

People call Cowes Dinard St Malo a lucky race, and they are half right. The wind is changeable, the tidal gates are unforgiving, and a shift near the Channel Islands can hand the cup to a boat that had no claim to it on pace. Morning After was the beneficiary of exactly that in 2022. But luck in a handicap race is not random. It falls on the crew who put themselves in the water where the luck lives, who read the Casquets eddy and the Minkies light patch in advance, who keep the boat sailing to its rating when the easy thing is to give up. Your rating is fixed before the gun. Everything that decides the cup after it is navigation and nerve.

That is the case for taking this race seriously whatever you are sailing. A modestly rated cruiser-racer can win the oldest cup in the Channel, and a Volvo 70 can win it too, and the difference between them in any given year is the weather and who sailed closest to their rating through the soft spots. Not the fastest boat. The best-sailed one.

The welcome at St Malo

There is a reason crews keep coming back. The finish under the ramparts of St Malo is one of the great arrivals in the domestic RORC season: tide under you, lights ahead, old stone above you, and the feeling that the Channel has made you earn the beer. In the years when the race falls close to Bastille Day the whole thing takes on a festival edge, the Société Nautique de la Baie de St Malo laying on a band and the 14 July fireworks going up over the bay. Even when the calendar moves, as it has this year with a 3 July start, St Malo still pays you back for finishing.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Leave a comment

This week, off the Antrim coast in the small hours, a 33-foot boat with a blunt nose came within three hours of beating a yacht nearly twice her length all the way round Ireland. Following the tracker it looked like a very tough race with wind holes and critical decisions at every moment but played out in slow motion. Plenty of the boats took flyers like Venomous out into the deeper Atlantic, which nearly paid off. Some ran out of time with work deadlines to meet. Some of the best teams like Sunrise obviusly had a deadline and retired. Bellino, with Deb Fish the RORC Commodore and Rob Craigie, kept the faith and won IRC 2 handed.

The stand out boat was Courrier Pogo, a brand-new Pogo RC, newly acquired by the veteran French skipper Géry Trentesaux. While eleven good boats sat becalmed for four hours at the Rathlin tidal gate, his scow slipped through the North Channel in the night and kept moving. In a 2026 Round Ireland Race decided almost entirely by light air and tide, Courrier Pogo, sailed by a Franco-Irish crew that included the Figaro winner Tom Dolan, produced the standout performance of the fleet, finishing second overall on the published results. She did not quite win. The 56-foot Botín Khumbu took line honours and the overall, beating her on corrected time by a little under three hours over the 704-mile course. But on the run home to Wicklow this 33-footer reeled in and passed a Sydney 43 and a Lombard 46, boats half as big again, and beat everything else afloat. A 56-footer won. A boat you could lose in its cockpit came second. That is not supposed to happen. It is happening, and the man who did it is the same Frenchman who won the 2015 Fastnet on a JPK. The dynasty simply changed boats.

That is the state of modern offshore racing in a single night’s sailing, and it is worth being precise about what it means, because it is not the story we are usually sold.

I first met this future a decade ago, tied up in a marina, looking slightly wrong.

I have been at this a long time, and from most seats on the boat. I went up the mast in the America’s Cup as a young man, then spent the 1980s in the thick of the Admiral’s Cup, where I picked up the nickname Barking Mad: a loud tactician with a weakness for calling flyers off the side of the course. They did not all come off. Enough did, often with an older boat beating a newer one, that the name stuck, and when I later bought a Swan 40 there was really only one thing to call her. A state-of-the-art Farr 40 followed, named 2XL, which reads as “too excel”, with “excellence at speed” stitched across the crew kit. We were not, as you can tell, much troubled by modesty in those years. Then came the time out that a young family and a business demand. When I finally came back, I did something deliberately contrary: I took a classic, a 1969 S&S 34, and optimised her under IRC to see whether a well-sailed old boat could still win against the modern fleet. She could. I mention all this not to wave a CV about, but because the thread of my whole racing life, a stubborn bet that preparation and a good call can still beat the newest hull in the park, is exactly what this piece is about.

Which is partly why I noticed the JPKs early. It was the middle of the last decade, and I was navigating and calling tactics on the J/109 JeVante through the RORC season, when a new kind of French boat started turning up in the results. The 10.80s first, then the 11.80s. To my eye they did not look like much beside a properly turned-out 40-footer with a deep crew and a good wardrobe of sails: slab-sided, a little agricultural below, often two aboard where we had eight. We did not take them seriously, in the way you never take seriously the thing that is about to beat you.

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Then the corrected-time sheets came out, race after race, and there they were. Not winning by trickery, but by being exactly the right boat, sailed by exactly enough people, prepared to a standard that made our amateur enthusiasm look like what it was. I remember the particular irritation of being beaten by a boat we had out-crewed three to one.

So I did the only sensible thing. I joined them. I was tactician aboard the JPK 10.80 Sunrise in the Rolex Middle Sea Race, and later skippered the JPK 11.80 Sunrise to second in a RORC Channel Race. That same boat, under her owner Tom Kneen, went on to win the 2021 Fastnet overall. I was not aboard for that one, but I had felt at first hand exactly why she would. I know these boats from the inside, which is precisely why I am uneasy about what they are doing to the sport. This is not the grumble of a man they left on the dock. It is the worry of one who climbed aboard, won with them, and then looked up and saw where the road was heading.

In July 2025, at the centenary Rolex Fastnet Race, a JPK 1050 called Léon won the whole thing. Overall. Out of 380 boats in the IRC overall standings, and more than 400 across the wider centenary fleet, the best corrected time, at a rating of 1.067, belonged to a 10.45-metre production boat sailed double-handed by Jean-Pierre Kelbert and Alexis Loison. It beat Maxis, TP52s and grand-prix forties alike. It was the second time in history a two-handed crew had won the Fastnet outright. The first was also a JPK, Night and Day, the Loisons again, in 2013.

That is not a fluke. That is a trend with a long enough run now to call it a takeover.

The quiet grand slam

Before we talk about where this goes, look at where it already is. The JPK record under IRC at the Fastnet reads like a dynasty: Night and Day (a JPK 10.10) overall in 2013, double-handed; Géry Trentesaux’s Courrier du Léon (a 10.80) overall in 2015, fully crewed; Tom Kneen’s Sunrise (an 11.80) overall in 2021; and Léon (the 1050) overall in 2025. Every one came out of the same JPK design lineage, led by Jacques Valer, and built in the same shed on the Brittany coast.

Set the recent overalls side by side and the pattern is hard to argue with.

The Round Ireland line matters precisely because it is the exception: a big, fully-crewed Botín still took the overall. The story is not that the scow wins everything. It is that a 33-foot production boat is now a credible favourite in races it had no business contending a decade ago, and that French production yards have owned four of the last Fastnet overalls outright.

Note the detail that should make us think hardest. In 2021 the winner was British-owned. The boat was still French. When a Briton wins the most important offshore race in the world, he does it in a French hull, built by a French yard. That is not a French failing. It is a British one.

And the boats are getting smaller, not bigger. The cutting edge of IRC offshore racing is no longer a 45-foot cruiser-racer with a cabin you would happily cross an ocean in. It is a 33-to-35-foot planing machine optimised within an inch of its life, and make no mistake, these are brilliant boats. Light, fast, beautifully resolved, electrifying to sail. Every one of their so-called compromises, the spartan interior, the heel-it-hard-to-go-upwind manners, the crew of two, is a deliberate trade made in the pursuit of speed per pound of rating, and the trades are clever ones. The catch is not that the boats are bad. The boats are superb. The catch is that as the winning size shrinks, the centre of gravity of the whole sport shrinks with it.

What actually changed under the waterline

For forty years the conventional wisdom for a small offshore boat was simple: to rate well under IRC you had to be relatively heavy. Light, planing hulls were fun for an afternoon and hopeless in the light airs that decide most Channel races. So we all bought sensible, moderate boats and accepted the compromise.

That compromise is dead. Three things killed it.

First, the scow bow. Borrowed wholesale from the Mini 6.50 and Class40 worlds, the blunt, beamy nose gives enormous form stability and a flat run aft that lets the boat plane early and stay balanced when heeled. Sam Manuard, the designer who did more than anyone to prove the shape offshore, describes his big scow Palanad 4 without embarrassment as “basically a 50ft Mini Transat prototype.” The counter-intuitive part is that these boats go upwind well, provided you heel them. “The boat needs to sail above a minimum heel angle of around 18-20° in order to improve its hull drag as well as reducing the slamming impact through the waves,” Manuard says. Sail it flat and it is a barge; sail it on its ear and the chine becomes a waterline.

Second, light displacement that finally rates. The Sun Fast 30 OD weighs 2,700kg, which is 800kg, or 22%, lighter than the Sun Fast 3300 it effectively replaces, yet carries almost the same upwind sail area. The Pogo RC comes in around 3.3 tonnes. Antoine Le Provost of VPLP, who drew the Sun Fast 30 OD, is blunt about the priority: “Most of the polar chart shows minimising frictional resistance is the priority, so we needed to keep the wetted surface area down.” Less boat in the water, less wetted surface, more speed where the racing is actually decided, in under ten knots, which is what you get for half of a typical British July.

Third, the hardware honesty: twin transom-hung rudders on a single tiller, kick-up in the Class40 style; a single-spreader or simple two-spreader carbon rig set well aft with a big square-top main; running backstays kept for trim, not survival; constrictors instead of clutches. Everything led for one or two pairs of hands. As the Yachting World tester Rupert Holmes, no romantic, put it after sailing the Pogo RC, these are “the first production-built competitive planing boats of a size that’s very popular with double-handed and solo sailors, yet also suitable for racing fully crewed.”

Here is the current state of the art, in numbers:

The one-off in that list, Didier Gaudoux’s Lann Ael 3, matters more than its single hull suggests. Two years before the production boats arrived, it won both offshore races of the IRC double-handed European Championship, 500 miles, and proved a light planing boat could sail to its rating across the whole wind range. The yards watched, and copied.

Two designers and a rule

This is the part the British industry should pin to the wall.

The Pogo RC is drawn by two men. Pogo’s own brochure describes them perfectly: Bernard Nivelt, “véritable sorcier de la jauge IRC”, a true wizard of the IRC rule, and Sam Manuard, “surdoué des jauges OPEN”, the prodigy of the open classes, Mini, Class40, IMOCA. That pairing is the entire story of modern offshore design in one credit line. You take the speed merchant who learned his trade where there are no rating penalties, and you marry him to the man who knows exactly how to make that speed cheap on the certificate. Open-class performance, domesticated for IRC.

And it is French, because France built the laboratory and we did not. The pathway, Mini, Figaro, Class40, IMOCA, is a complete industrial and sporting system: designers, builders, sponsors, training centres, all feeding one another. Britain has produced superb IRC optimisers in Rob Humphreys and Jason Ker, and the grand-prix forty end still belongs to a wider international design group: Botín, Carkeek, Mills, Ker, Humphreys and others. But the production revolution, the boats that ordinary clubs actually buy and race, has been driven almost entirely from France, and Britain has not built an equivalent.

I will say plainly what I think this means, because it is the thread running through everything below. The sport is not broadening. It is narrowing, and it is increasingly shaped by the French offshore system. And let me be clear about the target of that sentence. This is not a complaint that France got good. France has been brilliant. It is a complaint that Britain stopped building the ladder.

The death of the spinnaker, and the foiling endgame

Notice what has already vanished. In this newest shorthanded scow corner of IRC, symmetric spinnakers and the pole that flew them are effectively dead. Plenty of pole boats still race competitively elsewhere, in club fleets, classics and the wider IRC handicap; this is about where the sharp end has gone. Everything there now is an asymmetric off a bowsprit, sheeted from the quarter, because the scow’s natural angle is not a dead run but a fast, heated reach. The boats make so much of their own apparent wind that “downwind” has quietly become “tight reaching at speed.”

Follow that line to its conclusion and you arrive at the question that should keep designers up at night: how long until the boats go so fast that they do not need downwind sails at all? Foiling already points the way. The Figaro 3’s foils were never meant to lift the boat clear; they reduce displacement by up to 30% and stand in for water ballast. Scale that thinking up and add real lift, and the apparent wind swings so far forward that a single flat-reaching wardrobe does the whole racecourse. The A-sail follows the symmetric kite into the museum.

And then what? That is the real question, and it is not a happy one. If everyone is reaching at twenty-five knots in a straight line, offshore racing risks collapsing into a drag race with no passing lanes. The navigator’s art, the patient hunt for the favoured side, the tide gate played at three in the morning, depends on boats being slow enough for the racecourse to still be a puzzle. Make them fast enough and the puzzle disappears. You do not out-think a boat that is already there. Preparation. Decisions. Execution. Take away the decisions and you are left with a procession.

The 1979 question

There is a harder problem, and it has a date attached: 1979.

These boats are optimised for the light half of the wind range, and they get their stability from form, from being wide and flat, rather than from a deep, heavy, self-righting shape. A wide flat hull is wonderfully stable the right way up and far less forgiving once it is the wrong way up. Add a crew of two, tired, leaning on an autopilot to do the actual steering, and ask them to manage a 3.3-tonne boat in a building gale and a bad sea state, and you have a machine that is brilliant for the 80% of a Fastnet that is manageable and far less proven in the 20% that is not.

We have run a version of this experiment before. In 1979, 303 boats started the Fastnet and only 86 finished. Twenty-four were abandoned, five sank, and fifteen sailors died. The design fashion of the day, light, beamy, IOR-driven hulls with low ultimate stability, was part of the post-race reckoning, but it was far from the only lesson: forecasting, communications, rescue coordination, liferaft decisions and plain seamanship all came under hard scrutiny too. The cruellest finding was that most of the boats stayed afloat. It was the people who left them for liferafts who were lost.

Let me be fair, because this is not 1979 and it would be lazy to pretend it is. The safety world is transformed: the Offshore Special Regulations, ISO stability standards and angle-of-vanishing-stability limits, watertight crash boxes, properly rated liferafts, AIS, EPIRBs and personal PLBs, satellite weather, far better autopilots, and rescue coordination that did not exist half a century ago. A modern scow is built and equipped to a standard the 1979 fleet could only dream of.

But I am pointing at the rhyme, not the repeat. When a rule rewards one narrow type, the whole fleet converges on it, and the fleet’s weaknesses converge too. We are optimising, very cleverly, for the average July. The sea does not sail the average.

Wide and flat is wonderfully stable the right way up, and less forgiving the wrong way up.

Is handicap racing dead? They said that in 1982

The rule may need to change. When a 33-footer can win the Fastnet outright, IRC has found a sweet spot it never set out to reward, and the owner of a perfectly good 2015 cruiser-racer can feel his boat sliding down the rankings through no fault of his own. That is corrosive, because it can tell the cruising-minded owner, the backbone of any club fleet, that there is no point turning up.

But before anyone holds a funeral, a little history. They buried handicap racing once before, around 1982, when IOR ate itself in the Admiral’s Cup arms race. It did not die. Robin Aisher and Jean-Louis Fabry quietly started Channel Handicap in 1983, it became IRC, and it has run the amateur offshore world ever since. Handicap racing does not die. It mutates. The threat now is not extinction; it is monoculture: a rule that rewards one shorthanded planing type so efficiently, across so many common race profiles, that owners feel they must buy that exact boat or stop bothering. A fleet converging on a single shape is not a healthy handicap class. It is a one-design that has not admitted it yet.

What it actually costs to win the 2027 Fastnet

Let us be concrete, because this is where “democratisation” meets the invoice.

A new front-running scow, a JPK 1050 or a Pogo RC, starts around €220,000 to €285,000 before tax for the hull, and lands closer to €260,000 to €300,000 ready to race with electronics and pilot. Add a competitive two-handed sail wardrobe in 3Di or equivalent at €30,000 to €50,000, then prep, delivery, measurement, safety gear and a full season’s training, and a credible new-boat campaign to actually win the Fastnet overall sits somewhere around £350,000 to £450,000 by the time you cross the line first.

That sounds damning, but it deserves an honest comparison, because a fully-crewed programme is not cheap either once you count the people. These are indicative 2026 figures, not quotes:

Route to a competitive Fastnet Indicative all-in The catch New scow, double-handed (JPK 1050 / Pogo RC) £350k to £450k Newest, dearest, narrowest Used JPK 10.10 / 10.80, double-handed £150k to £250k Older, but still wins on preparation Fully-crewed 40 to 45 footer £400k+ over a season Crew logistics, bigger sail inventory, berths, food, depreciation Well-prepared older IRC cruiser-racer under £150k Won’t win overall, can still win a class

But here is the twist, and it is the most hopeful thing in this essay. The cost to win is not the cost of the newest boat. Night and Day, which won overall in 2013, was a JPK 10.10, a design you can now buy used for around €100,000 to €130,000. A well-prepared older JPK, a good set of sails and a brilliant short-handed pair will still beat a poorly-sailed new one every single time. The boat has never been the expensive part. Preparation and the right two people are the expensive part, and always have been. Mid-fleet to podium offshore was never bought. It was prepared.

The 2027 question

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where the next eighteen months actually matter. The next Fastnet, and the next Admiral’s Cup with it, is not until 2027, based at Cowes, with measurement and inspection from mid-July and the Rolex Fastnet Race starting on Saturday 24 July as the decider. The prizes that count are a season and a half away. Which means right now, through 2026, the French production boats are quietly cleaning up much of the IRC silverware, Round Ireland was just the latest, while everyone else works out what to build for the regatta that matters.

And the Admiral’s Cup is the one arena the French production wave has not reached.

Look at what is actually being drawn for 2027. The Cup is fought in grand-prix forties and fifties, fully crewed, two boats to a team, one big (AC1, roughly 13.4 to 17m), one small (AC2, roughly 11 to 13.4m), and that zone belongs to a different set of pens entirely. Botín Partners, Spanish, are building a new small-boat all-rounder with McConaghy, “inshore pedigree with offshore durability”; Karl Kwok’s Botín 40 Beau Ideal is already afloat. Shaun Carkeek has the new Neo 620 muscling into the mini-maxi arena. And the British and Irish design office is emphatically still in business here: Mark Mills, Jason Ker and Rob Humphreys are not museum names, they are live, winning grand-prix designers.

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Now notice who is largely absent from that list. Manuard, Nivelt, Valer and VPLP, the names that own the 33-foot scow world, are not the names drawing the Admiral’s Cup forty. France built the clearest shorthanded production pathway in the world. The fully-crewed, grand-prix IRC space is still far more open.

That is the jeopardy, and it is also the opportunity. The 2027 Admiral’s Cup is a fully-crewed, national-team contest sailed in home water off Cowes, the exact format in which British sailing was once the best in the world, and the exact kind of boat British and Irish designers still draw as well as anyone alive. The question is not whether France will win it. The question is whether Britain turns up with British and Irish boats, the right pens and a proper team, or whether we admire the problem again and charter someone else’s answer.

The apex: more watched, less inhabitable

Climb to the very top of the sport and a related thing is happening, just dressed in carbon and television money.

The America’s Cup has always been a technology-and-money game; it was ever thus, from the J-Class to the wing-sailed cats. But foiling has taken it somewhere new. The boats are sensational and the visible human content is thinning. The AC75 is sailed by a handful of people, most of them tucked out of sight, and for Naples in 2027 the rule-makers have leaned further onto stored battery power for the boat’s systems, taking over much of the work the pedalling “cyclors” used to do, and trimmed the crew to five, at least one of them a woman. The skill aboard is still immense. It is just less available, less visible, and much harder for an ordinary sailor to imagine ever entering.

So where is the intrigue? A good deal of it has migrated off the water. The drama of the modern Cup is as much the design espionage, the recruitment war and the budget as the cross on the startline. We are watching engineering departments out-think and out-spend each other, with a brilliant light show on top. That can be thrilling. It is just a different thing from the sport that taught most of us how to race.

SailGP is the cleverer answer, and the more honest one. Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison built a professional league of one-design F50 foiling cats, nationally branded, deliberately made for the camera, and the camera has rewarded it. SailGP says more than 215 million viewers tuned in across the 2025 season, with a single event topping 23 million and a US broadcast that, by its own figures, outdrew the 1992 America’s Cup to become the most-watched sailing race in American history. As a televised product, it may be the best thing sailing has ever made, and the sailing itself is genuinely world class.

But here is the question that runs through this whole essay: huge reach is not the same as a way in. Two hundred million people watch the F50s. How many of them will ever stand on a startline? People watch Formula 1 by the hundred million and do not drive racing cars. Spectacle creates an audience, not a fleet. Unless there is a staircase from the sofa to the start line, affordable boats, club berths, a reason for a nineteen-year-old to turn up on a wet Tuesday, the glamour at the top is just broadcast, beautiful and self-contained. It answers “who wants to watch?” It does not, on its own, answer “who wants to play?”

The Olympic own goal

Which is exactly why the next part stings. There was, very recently, a mechanism that could have widened the sport and made offshore racing genuinely international: the Olympics.

A Mixed Two Person Offshore Keelboat event was voted onto the Paris 2024 programme in 2018, the first offshore event in Olympic history, two-handed, one man and one woman, in a strict one-design. It was a serious idea. The Sun Fast 30 OD itself was born in that moment, the product of a “Class 30” tender run by the Yacht Club de France, the RORC and the Storm Trysail Club explicitly to broaden participation, “especially among young sailors.” For one short window, the rule-makers, the builders and the Olympic movement were pulling in the same direction: a single, affordable, international platform any nation could campaign.

Then the IOC dropped it. In 2021, citing field-of-play security, broadcast cost and complexity, and the awkward fact that World Sailing had never even run an offshore world championship, the event was removed from Paris 2024. It is not on the LA 2028 slate either. The one force that might have built an international pathway, national federations, youth funding, a genuine one-design ladder, was switched off before it ever ran a single Games.

And here is the part worth sitting with, because it cuts against my own argument. The Sun Fast 30 OD is arguably the closest thing we have to the staircase this piece keeps demanding: one-design, recyclable, relatively affordable at around €200,000 ready to race, already past forty hulls sold, and seeding charter fleets in the Solent, Lorient and Marseille so that a sailor can hire rather than buy. It could still be part of the answer. The waste is that, without the Olympic pull behind it, a boat built to prise the sport open is at risk of being quietly absorbed into the system it was meant to widen.

So the honest conclusion is not that anyone is the villain. It is that the rule, the industry and the governance all need to look again at the same time, because each is currently pulling the same way. IRC may need to examine whether one type has become too efficient across too many race profiles. The industry outside France needs to actually build a competing production answer. And World Sailing needs to remember that a governing body’s job is to keep the door open, not to manage decline with better press releases.

A hundred years old, and leaning on one race

There is a deeper reason not to write Britain off, and it has just had a birthday. The RORC turned 100 last year, founded in 1925 on the back of that first amateur scramble to the Fastnet Rock and home to Plymouth. A century is not something to be sentimental about; it is a long time to have survived, and the RORC has survived precisely by reinventing itself, again and again. It created Channel Handicap when IOR was killing the club racer. It built the Caribbean 600 from nothing into a flagship. It took double-handed racing seriously while the establishment sniffed. And it dug the Admiral’s Cup out of its grave. Reinvention is the one thing this institution is genuinely world-class at.

It also holds a card the “narrow and French” story tends to skate over. IRC, the rule those French boats use so well, is not French. It is Anglo-French, owned and run jointly by the RORC Rating Office in Britain and the UNCL in Paris, the only two bodies on earth that can issue an IRC certificate. Britain is not the rule’s victim. It is its co-author. If a 33-foot scow rates too sweetly, the people who could look at it again sit in Lymington as much as in Paris. That is a conversation to have around a table, in good faith, not a grievance to nurse.

Which brings us to the most uncomfortable structural fact of all. The Fastnet has become so dominant that it is, in effect, the sport’s one truly big race. The 2025 centenary edition drew more than 450 entries and sold its 400-boat limit inside an hour; nothing else in offshore racing is remotely that size. That is a triumph and a fragility in the same breath. A sport with one genuine flagship has a single point of failure: one race carrying the prestige, the sponsors and the entire shop window, run only every other year, with the Admiral’s Cup alongside. The strength is real. So is the exposure.

So the forward question is not really about scows at all. It is whether the RORC uses its centenary momentum, and the rule it half-owns, to build more than one mountain worth climbing: a calendar with depth, a rating that rewards more than one narrow type, and a bottom rung a nineteen-year-old can actually reach. The club has reinvented itself repeatedly in a hundred years. It can do it once more.

Where is this going, and who wants to play?

Two ends, and a thinning middle.

At the bottom, the winning formula is now two people and a pilot. That is thrilling, and for many owners it is a genuine lifeline: shorthanded racing keeps people in the game who could never reliably assemble eight good crew for a weekend offshore. It is not the enemy. But it is a different route in, and it does not carry the old apprenticeship. The fully-crewed boat with eight aboard was how people learned, the berth where a newcomer did three seasons of rail meat and tactics and tea-making until they could be trusted on their own. The mistake would be to pretend the two are interchangeable. As the winning boats shed those seats, the sport sheds some of the places it used to grow its next generation.

At the top, the professional end is not really a career ladder. It is closer to patronage. Owners with deep pockets hire the best sailors in the world for a regatta, and many of those sailors reach the end with no pension and no structure beneath them. There is little in between the narrow door at the bottom and the chequebook at the top. The winning middle, the thing that once turned beginners into offshore sailors, is thinning fast.

And to be clear, the middle has not vanished. J/109s, J/112Es, Sun Fast 3200s and 3300s, the older JPKs, plenty of cruiser-racers and a healthy club IRC fleet still race hard every weekend. What is thinning is the winning middle, the boats that take the overall silverware. That is the part being optimised away.

So: where is this going? Faster, cleverer, lighter, and narrower. Fewer winning shapes, more of them flowing from one country’s production system. The scow did not exactly close the door to offshore racing. But it changed the lock, and not everyone has the new key.

I say all this, you should know, as a man who won his class in a 1967 design, Morning After, and loved every cold minute of it. I am not against fast boats. I am against a sport that quietly decides it only has room for one kind of them, sailed by two kinds of people. The boats are magnificent. It is the direction of travel I want to help to change.

The shape of the boat changes. The argument never does: a sport is only as healthy as the route it leaves open for the next person to get good. Right now that route is getting narrower, beautifully, at twenty-five knots.

But here is the FirstBeat heresy, and I believe every word of it: none of this is fixed. The lock can be changed back.

France won the bottom of the sport because it built a system, Mini, Figaro, Class40, and we did not. So copy it. Not the boats; the ladder. And notice where the door is still wide open. The fully-crewed, grand-prix, national-team game lands on our own water in 2027, off Cowes, in the shape of the Admiral’s Cup. Britain and Ireland still have the design office, Carkeek, Mills, Ker, Humphreys and others, capable of drawing a boat to beat anything afloat. We still have the RORC, one of the deepest offshore clubs in the world, and the Solent on the doorstep. What we have lacked is not talent. It is the will to commission our own, build a team, and back the route in for the next generation rather than chartering someone else’s boat and grumbling on the dock.

So this is not a funeral, and it is not a complaint that France got good. It is a challenge to ourselves. British offshore racing is not being out-sailed. It is being out-organised, and that is a far more fixable problem, if we care enough to fix it. Preparation. Decisions. Execution. The same three beats that win a race, applied for once to the sport itself.

Where is this going? Wherever we decide. The boats are French today because France decided it years ago, patiently, while we admired the view. The next decade is still unwritten, and there is no rule of physics or handicap that says the pen has to stay in Lorient.

And the sea, as ever, still gets the final vote.

Stuart Greenfield

FirstBeat: Offshore Racing Intelligence

From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

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Sources

• Round Ireland 26: Khumbu may have won, but Courrier’s performance is sensational, 2nd overall (Afloat)

• France’s Courrier Pogo flies through the night in Round Ireland (Afloat)

• JPK 1050 wins Rolex Fastnet Race 2025 overall, ahead of 380 boats (JPK Composites)

• Fastnet Race: Loison/Kelbert overall winner on the JPK 10.50 (Boatnews)

• Pogo RC Review: Planing performance for shorthanded sailors (Yachting World)

• Sun Fast 30OD review: breaking the mould (Yachting World)

• How Sam Manuard is reimagining the 50ft offshore racer (Yachting World)

• Pogo RC, Pogo Structures (designers Nivelt and Manuard)

• Sun Fast 30 One Design (VPLP Design)

• IRC Rating classes announced uniting 2027 Admiral’s Cup and 2026 Sardinia Cup (RORC)

• Admiral’s Cup AC2: Offshore legends, small boats, big test (RORC)

• RORC announces dates for 2027 Admiral’s Cup

• New Botín and Carkeek designs for the small-boat class (The Daily Sail)

• The radical return of the Admiral’s Cup (Sailing World)

• British JPK 1180 Sunrise wins Rolex Fastnet Race overall, 2021 (Yachting World)

• Sunrise wins RORC season; second in the Channel Race (Afloat)

• 1979 Fastnet Race (Wikipedia)

• IRC owned and managed jointly by RORC (UK) and UNCL (France), IRC Rating Authority

• RORC Centenary 1925 to 2025 (Royal Ocean Racing Club)

• Rolex Fastnet Race entry numbers smash all records, 450+ entries, world’s largest offshore race

• Mixed Offshore event added to Paris 2024 and subsequent IOC review (World Sailing)

• AC75 rules and crew set for the Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup, Naples 2027 (Boatnews)

• Record viewing and attendance figures for SailGP in 2025

• The foils of the Figaro Bénéteau 3 (Bénéteau)

I was up forward on the mast, which on that boat meant you met every sea before anyone aft had finished deciding it was coming. The first night came in wet and lumpy, the kind that has you on the rail for hours doing the cold arithmetic of a long race: too far in to be comfortable, too far out to be warm.

I was wearing Line 7, white, two coloured lines down the front, the New Zealand kit half the fleet coveted and the best money could then buy. Within two seasons it would dress the Australian crew that finally prised the America’s Cup out of American hands; in 1981 it was simply what you wanted on your back. It kept the green water out, which was the whole of its ambition. What it did not do was let anything out the other way. By the small hours I was sealed inside it, stewing in my own sweat, wrists and boot-tops taped against a sea that kept finding its way in regardless. Waterproof, yes. Comfortable, never. The fabric had exactly one trick and it performed it relentlessly in both directions.

“Waterproof, yes. Comfortable, never. The fabric had exactly one trick and it performed it relentlessly in both directions.”

Then the breeze went soft, and the race that had tried to beat us up spent its last day refusing to let us finish it. We came into Plymouth wrung out wet through sweat, salt-stung, and too tired to be pleased about it.

Then it all moved on and although I can’t actually remember when I realised. What changed everything was a membrane, and what made the membrane work was a class of chemistry we are now in the process of banning. That chemistry is PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the fluorine-based compounds nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they do not break down in nature. For half a century they were the quiet miracle inside your foulies, the thing that made fabric shrug off water and oil alike.

This is the story worth telling, because the kit you buy in the next three years is going to be the most interesting it has been since Bob Gore stretched a length of PTFE in 1969 and accidentally invented the modern foulie.

The trick, and the catch

Strip a modern offshore jacket back to first principles and there are two jobs being done by two different things, and most sailors conflate them. The membrane is the waterproof-breathable layer bonded inside the shell, riddled with pores too small for a water droplet to barge through but large enough for water vapour to escape. This is what today would have stopped us all boiling alive in our Line 7s. The second job belongs to the DWR, the durable water repellent, a microscopically thin treatment painted onto the outer face fabric. Its only purpose is to make the surface bead water so the face fabric does not soak through and “wet out”. When your jacket goes dark and heavy across the shoulders in a long beat to windward, that is not the membrane failing. That is the DWR giving up, the face fabric saturating, and your breathability collapsing because vapour cannot cross a waterlogged outer.

Both of those things, the original membrane and the DWR, were built on and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS. The forever chemicals. And they were used because, frankly, nothing else came close. The physics is unsentimental about it: DWR works by lowering the surface energy of the fabric so water cannot spread, and fluorinated chemistry was exceptionally good at lowering surface energy. It also, crucially, repelled oil. A fluorinated finish shrugged off sunblock, diesel film, winch grease and the general filth of a working deck. That oil resistance is the bit everyone is about to miss, and we will come back to it because it is the crux of the whole offshore problem.

Why it is ending, and the dates that actually bite

The case for removing PFAS from non-essential consumer use is now overwhelming. They persist, they move, they accumulate, and the health literature has become too large for regulators to ignore. But for a sailor the immediate question is not toxicology. It is what happens to the kit when the chemistry changes, and the calendar has finally got specific.

There is no single ban day. Instead a wall of deadlines is converging from several directions at once. The EU’s PFHxA restriction under REACH, a specific sub-group of PFAS, starts applying from October 2026 with transitional periods running between eighteen months and five years, and it reaches textile water-repellent treatments directly. Sitting behind it is the much larger universal PFAS restriction proposed by Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. That one is still being fought over, not yet settled: the European Chemicals Agency published its socio-economic committee’s draft opinion in March 2026 and ran a public consultation on it into May, with final opinions due to the Commission by the end of 2026 before any legal text is drafted. So be clear about the distinction.

The direction of travel is settled. The exact legal landing point is still being argued, sector by sector, with derogations and transition periods very much in play.

The practical message is simpler than the chemistry. Old fluorinated fabrics can test in the hundreds or thousands of parts per million for fluorine markers, and the new rules increasingly treat that as evidence of a substance class the industry is being forced to remove. The exact thresholds and test methods vary by jurisdiction and by whether a regulator is measuring intentionally added PFAS, a named compound, or total organic fluorine. The numbers move. The direction does not.

Denmark has already gone first, with a national ban on PFAS in consumer clothing and footwear taking effect July 2026 and a sell-through grace period into the following January. The UK published its first national PFAS plan in February 2026 with retail squarely in the crosshairs. And in the United States, California and New York have done the heavy lifting for everyone, because those two markets are large enough that a brand which loses them loses the argument. By the end of 2026, nearly every major outdoor brand selling into America had phased the chemicals out. The industry is not waiting to be told twice.

The membrane problem is solved. The DWR problem is not.

Here is the technical point that most of the coverage misses, and it is the one that matters if you are spending your own money. The two jobs did not turn out to be equally hard to fix.

The membrane was the easier one, and it is far closer to solved than the face-fabric problem. Gore replaced its fluorinated ePTFE with expanded polyethylene, ePE, and by its own account the hard part was never the membrane. Gore describes ePE as lighter, thinner, strong, made without intentionally added PFAS, and lower in carbon footprint through the laminate, though it qualifies that with the usual language about trace amounts and laminate choice. The point for a sailor is that it tests to the same waterproof-breathable standard as the stuff it replaced, which is why your next Musto, your next Cup-team replica, your next anything-with-a-membrane is quietly switching over without much drama. Musto’s new LPX inshore line for 2026, for instance, is built on Gore-Tex ePE. The membrane is not where you will feel the change.

The DWR is where the bodies are buried. Strip the fluorine out of the surface treatment and two things degrade at once. First, durability. A fluorinated finish penetrated and bound deep into the fibre and lasted through abrasion and repeated washing. The fluorine-free replacements sit more shallowly, give up their water repellency sooner, and need reactivating and reproofing far more often to keep working. Second, and this is the offshore killer, they have no meaningful oil repellency at all. There is no oleophobic barrier without fluorine. Nobody has cracked that yet at production scale.

Now think about what actually lands on a racing crew across a Fastnet. Sunblock smeared up the forearms. The oily sheen off a wet non-slip deck. Diesel film from the day’s motoring. Grease flicked off a loaded winch. Every one of those contaminants now soaks straight into the face fabric, raises its surface energy, and kills the water beading in exactly the spots that take the most spray. Your shoulders and forearms wet out first, your breathability dies locally, and you are back, in a small but real way, towards the clammy misery of that 1981 night on the rail. Gore now says it plainly in its own care guidance: the PFAS-free DWR is less resistant to oils and needs more regular maintenance.

There is no oleophobic barrier without fluorine. The buy-it-once-and-forget-it foulie is finished.

So the new norm comes with a behavioural change that the marketing departments are very quiet about. The buy-it-once-and-forget-it foulie is finished. Reproofing moves from something you did once a season to routine kit husbandry. Technical wash, heat reactivation in a tumble dryer or under an iron, periodic re-energising with a spray-on or wash-in product. The chemistry got cleaner and the maintenance burden moved onto your shoulders, literally.

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What is coming to close the gap

This is a transitional moment, not a dead end, and the replacement chemistries are worth knowing by name because this is where the brands will fight for differentiation.

The near-term answers are silicone and wax. Schoeller’s ecorepel, for instance, is a biodegradable paraffin-wax finish that spirals a thin film around each individual fibre, inspired by the waxy cuticle on a leaf and the natural oils in animal fur. It beads water well in light to moderate conditions, reactivates with heat, and is breathability-neutral. Its honest limitation is the same as all of them: lower abrasion durability than fluorine, and no oil barrier. Maybe the British company Barbour still has a role?

The interesting horizon is silicone in cleverer forms. There is credible talk of a genuine PFAS-free oil-repellent finish based on hyperbranched polysiloxanes reaching commercial reality as early as 2026, and the Swiss federal lab EMPA has demonstrated a plasma-deposited siloxane coating, a silicone-like film just thirty nanometres thick, that makes fabric extremely hydrophobic. Whoever gets a durable, oil-shedding, fluorine-free finish to work at ocean grade wins the offshore segment outright, because right now the honest truth is that nobody has, and the better brands are admitting it.

What the sharp end is actually wearing

And this is where it gets genuinely interesting, because the foiling generation has quietly solved the problem by refusing to play the same game.

Watch an AC75 or an F50 and ask how much green water actually lands on the crew. Far less than you would think, and what does land arrives as high-speed spray, not as a boarding sea. That single fact rewrites the brief. The old offshore foulie existed to shelter the sailor from the ocean for days at a time. On a foiler the sailor barely meets the ocean, so the clothing stops being a survival shell and becomes something closer to a race suit, cut for speed, movement and impact rather than absolute waterproofing. The direction is visible right across the top of the sport. Cup teams, SailGP crews and the brands that supply them have all moved toward tighter, lower-drag, impact-protected kit, because at forty knots through a tack the sailor’s own body is a control surface and a flapping jacket is a penalty. Helly Hansen’s Foil X range, developed with an America’s Cup programme, is one public example of exactly that thinking reaching the rest of us. Head and chest impact protection and aerodynamic cleanliness now matter more than the ability to sit in a waterfall for a week.

The IMOCA and Ultim solo fleet has split the same way, for a different reason, and it makes the underlying idea explicit: on these boats the vessel has become part of the clothing system. The modern Vendée Globe boat has an enclosed cockpit. The skipper spends most of the Southern Ocean inside it, not standing in it taking the full weight of the sea. The boat now does the sheltering the jacket used to do.

That changed the design priorities so completely that when Musto built the MPX Impact for the likes of Armel Le Cléac’h and Will Harris, they abandoned the traditional tight rubber neck seal of an ocean smock in favour of a quick-fasten collar. Marginally less waterproof if a wave catches you wrong, far quicker to throw on for a dash on deck. They even stripped the Cordura reinforcing out of the matching trousers to save weight and bulk, a decision that would have been heresy in the era when you expected to be sitting in a waterfall for a week. The protection that matters now is D3O impact padding on elbows, hips and knees, because the thing most likely to hurt you on a foiling IMOCA doing thirty knots into a wave is the boat, not the cold.

Then look at the crewed round-the-world and high-latitude end, the people who are still genuinely exposed for weeks, and the priorities flip straight back. Rubicon 3’s skippers in Iceland and the high south talk about durability above all, kit that survives months of being dragged across abrasive non-slip and snagged on deck gear without developing the leaks that finish cheaper gear in a few months. That is the segment where the PFAS exemptions for severe-wet-condition gear were specifically written, and it is no accident. It is the hardest place to remove fluorine and the slowest to give it up. Helly Hansen, the most transparent of the sailing brands, admits openly that a small number of its offshore and buoyancy products still carry intentionally added PFAS under regulatory exemption, and where they do, they will wear a “Made with PFAS chemicals” label. That label is the most honest sentence in the entire industry right now, and it tells you exactly where the technical frontier sits: at the very top of the ocean range, where the chemistry still cannot be beaten.

That label is the most honest sentence in the entire industry right now. It tells you exactly where the chemistry still cannot be beaten.

Where this leaves the rest of us

For inshore and coastal kit, the sub-£200 jacket most of us actually buy, PFAS-free is already the default and it works perfectly well. The demands are lower, the oil exposure is manageable, and the only thing you really need to absorb is that you now own the maintenance. Wash it properly with a technical cleaner, never ordinary detergent, reactivate the DWR with heat, and reproof it when the water stops beading instead of pretending it will last forever.

For genuine offshore racing kit, the honest picture for the next few years is a compromise you should buy with your eyes open. Equivalent waterproofing, a real step down in oil repellency and finish longevity, the longest regulatory runway of any apparel category, and disclosure labels on the handful of fluorinated holdouts at the very top. It is not as good as the old chemistry yet, in the specific ways that matter on a working deck. But it is getting there, and the boat you sail will increasingly decide which compromise you even have to make. The foilers have engineered their way around the problem by keeping the sea off the crew in the first place. The rest of us are still out in it, reproofing our shoulders, waiting for someone to teach silicone the one trick fluorine made look easy.

My old Line 7 kept the sea out and made me miserable. The membrane fixed the misery. The forever chemicals made the membrane practical. We are now unpicking the third of those without losing the first two, and for the first time in half a century the answer is not settled. That is precisely what makes it worth watching.

The deck-level answer

Strip all of it back to what you actually do on Monday, and it comes down to five rules.

1. Buy for the sailing you actually do, not the marketing photograph. A thousand-pound ocean shell is the wrong tool for a crew that races coastal and offshore in summer.

2. Expect PFAS-free DWR to need more maintenance than the kit it replaced. This is not a fault to complain about. It is the new normal, and it is designed in.

3. Keep oil, sunblock and diesel off the shoulders and forearms wherever you can. That is exactly where the new finishes are weakest and exactly where the spray lands hardest.

4. Wash technical kit more, not less. Salt, sweat and oil are not badges of honour, they are the things actively killing your water repellency. Technical wash, never household detergent, then heat to reactivate.

5. Carry one properly dry below-decks layer and guard it. That is seamanship, not comfort-seeking, and it has not changed in fifty years.

The chemistry is changing. The sea is not. So the sailor has to get smarter.

Appendix: The 600-Mile Kit List

A 600-mile race is long enough to give you everything. You will start in a building breeze and rain, get a cold front through on the second night that has you shaking on the rail, and then sail into a windless, humid high where the deck is an oven and the only enemy is sunburn and your own boredom. Pack for one of those conditions and you will suffer in the other two. The art is layering, not bulk, and ruthless discipline about keeping one set of dry clothes that never, under any circumstances, gets worn on deck.

What follows is how I’d kit out for it, from skin out, with brands worth considering at three budget levels. Everything is post-PFAS where it sensibly can be, which after the article above you’ll understand why.

The layering principle

Three jobs, three layers, and they must work as a system. Next-to-skin wicks the sweat off you. The mid-layer traps warm air and keeps wicking. The shell stops the wind and the sea. Cotton appears nowhere on this list above the waist, because wet cotton kills warmth and never dries at sea. Synthetic or merino throughout. The trick for a 600-miler is carrying enough range that you can run shell-over-baselayer in the heat and shell-over-baselayer-over-midlayer-over-heavy-baselayer on the cold night, without ever needing a fourth bulky thing you can’t move in.

The 600-mile kit system, from skin out

A note on budget tiers throughout: Smart is the sensible-money choice that does the job. Serious is what a committed offshore crew member buys. Sharp end is what you’d spend if budget were no object and you were doing this for a living. Prices are ballpark mid-2026 UK retail and move around, so treat them as proportions, not quotes. Model names and prices drift every season, so check current catalogues before you commit.

Skin layer (the bit that matters most, spend here)

• Synthetic or merino underwear, two to three pairs. Merino resists stink on day three when synthetic is unbearable. Smart: Decathlon Tribord merino. Serious: Icebreaker / Finisterre. Sharp end: merino from Zhik or Helly Hansen LIFA Merino.

• A technical wicking sports bra where needed, two. Often overlooked and worth real money; a non-wicking cotton bra is three days of misery. Serious: Finisterre, Patagonia, dedicated active brands.

• Long-sleeve base layer, one lightweight for the heat and one mid-weight for the cold. LIFA is the benchmark here for a reason: Helly Hansen’s LIFA fibre moves moisture and dries fast. Smart: Decathlon Tribord. Serious: Helly Hansen LIFA Active. Sharp end: Helly Hansen LIFA Merino, Zhik base layers.

• Lightweight long johns, one pair, for the cold night watch. Same brands.

Mid layer

• Technical fleece or grid-fleece midlayer, one. Polartec grid fleece is the gold standard for warmth-to-weight and breathability. Smart: Decathlon. Serious: Helly Hansen / Gill OS fleece. Sharp end: Musto or Zhik high-loft technical midlayer.

• Lightweight synthetic insulated gilet or “active” jacket, one, for the genuinely cold pre-dawn hours. A PrimaLoft-filled vest that packs to nothing. Serious: Gill / Helly Hansen. Sharp end: Musto Primaloft.

Shell (the foul-weather gear from the article)

• Offshore jacket and salopettes. For a varied 600-miler, ocean-grade is overkill weight; a strong coastal-offshore set is the sweet spot. Smart: Gill OS2/OS3, or Decathlon Tribord 900 if budget is tight. Serious: Helly Hansen Aegir or Musto BR2. Sharp end: Musto MPX or LPX, North Sails Performance, Zhik OFS900.

• Salopettes, not trousers, always offshore. The high back is what keeps the sea out of your kidneys when you sit in a wave. A drop-seat design is worth hunting for; the alternative is a genuine ordeal on a heeled boat in full kit.

Extremities (where races are won and lost on morale)

• Sailing boots, one pair, properly fitted over one thick sock. Smart: Gill Tall Yachting boot. Serious: Dubarry Ultima (leather, warm, expensive, last for years). Sharp end: Dubarry or Zhik ZKG.

• Sailing socks, three pairs minimum, merino. Wet feet are inevitable; cold wet feet are a choice.

• Gloves, two types. A pair of short-finger sailing gloves for grip and rope work in the warm (Gill / Zhik / Musto all fine), and crucially a pair of waterproof winter sailing gloves for the cold wet night, where most people get this wrong and freeze. Serious: Zhik or Gill three-season. Sharp end: a neoprene or Gore-Tex offshore glove. Carry a spare dry pair sealed in a bag.

• A merino or fleece beanie that fits under a hood, one. Cheap, vital.

• A brimmed sun hat with a retaining cord for the windless oven day, one. Heatstroke is a genuine offshore risk and unglamorous.

• Buff or neck tube, two. Sun protection by day, draught-stopper by night. The single best value item on this entire list.

• Sunglasses with a leash, polarised, plus a cheap backup pair.

Safety: lifejacket and harness (do not cheap out here)

• Start with the race, not the catalogue. Check the race category and the Notice of Race, which point you at the World Sailing Offshore Special Regulations and any RORC prescriptions, and let those set your minimum specification rather than guessing. Then buy a properly fitted inflatable lifejacket with integral harness, crotch strap, light, sprayhood where required, and space for AIS and PLB fitment.

• The market leader for serious offshore crew is Spinlock. The Deckvest 6D (Pro Sensor) and the VITO (Hammar hydrostatic, developed off the Volvo Ocean Race jacket) are the two to look at, roughly £380–430. The older 5D is still excellent and often discounted. The Deckvest LITE+ sits below at around £240–275 if budget is tight. Smart alternative: Crewsaver Ergofit, which notably has room inside the cover for a PLB.

• Fit matters as much as the model. The shoulder-fit system should put the weight on your shoulders, not your neck, and the crotch strap is non-negotiable, because without one the jacket rides up over your face in the water. An uncomfortable lifejacket is one you are tempted to take off, which makes comfort a safety feature, not a luxury.

• Consider the Spinlock HRS (Harness Release System) if your boat uses side-deck jacklines, so you can release from a dragging situation.

• Add a personal AIS beacon (Ocean Signal MOB1 is the standard) and ideally a separate PLB. Check your chosen jacket has room for both around the inflation tube before you buy, a real-world gotcha.

• Personal tether with a quick-release at the chest end, two clips. Plus a serviceable knife, a whistle, and a light on the jacket.

Below decks

• Sleeping bag rated to the conditions but never bulky. For a summer 600-miler a lightweight synthetic bag beats down, because down is useless once damp and everything below is damp. A two-season synthetic mummy bag, or a dedicated marine bag with a water-resistant shell. Many crews run a liner alone on the warm legs and the full bag when it turns cold.

• Inflatable pillow, or a stuff sack of dry clothes.

• One sacred set of dry below-decks kit: leggings, long-sleeve top, dry socks, sealed in a dry bag and worn only off-watch. This set is the difference between a recoverable night and a miserable one. Guard it with your life.

• Microfibre travel towel, packs small, dries fast,

• Tooth brush and paste, anti-persperant, deodarant, seasick remedy, spare glasses, sunscreen.

Fit notes that matter

The list above is the system. This is where real bodies and real budgets change the answer, and getting it wrong is not a comfort issue, it is a safety one. If the gear does not fit, people stop wearing it properly, and a lifejacket left unclipped or a hood that won’t seal is a hazard, not a preference.

Women’s fit. Offshore kit cut on a man’s frame and shrunk puts the reinforced knee and seat patches in the wrong place and hides the pockets behind the lifejacket. Buy a women’s-specific cut, not a small men’s. Helly Hansen has long made proper women’s salopettes; Zhik’s OFS700 is well regarded; Gill and Musto both now do real women’s offshore lines. Look hard for a drop-seat salopette.

Smaller-frame sailors. The enemy is gear that drowns you: sleeves over the hands ruin glove grip, an oversized hood won’t seal, and a loose lifejacket rides up. Prioritise adjustment range and the smallest competent size over buying big “to be safe.”

Larger-frame sailors. Demand real sizing, not an “XXL” that just means slightly longer arms. Check the lifejacket buoyancy and strap range genuinely fit; a 275N jacket can be the better call for larger users or anyone carrying tools, and check the harness webbing actually closes comfortably over full layers.

Older sailors. Warmth, dexterity and ease of movement are safety features at this end, not vanities. Favour kit that is easy to don and doff in the dark, lifejackets with simple clear fastenings, and gloves that keep dexterity rather than maximum bulk. I write this as a man who has done a few Fastnets and feels the cold night watch more than he used to.

Sensory-sensitive crew. A scratchy neck seal, a tight hood, or a badly fitting lifejacket that someone quietly cannot stand to wear is a genuine safety problem, because the kit only works when it is actually on. Trying gear on properly and at length, rather than buying blind online, solves most of this.

Crew on a budget. Safety kit first, expensive logo later. A sound lifejacket, good base layers and dry feet beat a thousand-pound shell worn over cold cotton every single time.

The buyer’s decision box

If you mostly sail inshore or coastal: buy PFAS-free, maintain it properly, and spend the saved money on layers and boots.

If you race offshore regularly: buy better construction, not just a better badge. Look at hood and collar design, cuff seals, seat and knee reinforcement, salopette back height, pocket access under a lifejacket, and whether the thing can be repaired.

If you do 600-mile races: carry one sacred dry set below, waterproof gloves, spare socks, and a reproofing routine done before the race, not after it fails.

If you do serious cold-water or high-latitude work: do not let environmental branding talk you into under-specced kit. Durability and exposure protection still matter most, and this is exactly the segment where the regulations still allow the hardest-wearing chemistry.

The honest priority order, if money is finite

Spend in this order and you’ll never regret it. First, the lifejacket and its beacons, because it’s the one piece whose failure mode is fatal. Second, base layers, because they do more for your comfort across a 600-mile range than anything else and they’re cheap relative to the shell. Third, boots and socks, because cold wet feet wreck morale and footing. Only then the shell, where, as the article above explains, the clever move in 2026 is to buy a strong PFAS-free coastal-offshore set, learn to reproof it properly, and put the saved money into the layers and safety kit that actually keep you racing. A thousand-pound Gore-Tex Pro jacket over a cotton T-shirt and cold feet is a fool’s kit list. Get the system right and the cheapest competent shell in the world will see you round.

The forever chemicals are leaving the deck. The seamanship of staying warm, dry and alive is not going anywhere.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

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On Saturday 11 July 2026, the Island Sailing Club’s Round the Island Race will send hundreds of boats west from Cowes, out through the Solent, round The Needles, down the back of the Isle of Wight, round St Catherine’s Point, past Bembridge Ledge and back into the Solent to finish off Cowes.

The first Round the Island Race was held on 11 July 1931. The 2026 race starts on 11 July, to the date, ninety-five years on, the fleet crosses the same line on the same morning of the year. The boat that won that first race was one of the smallest in it. Hold that thought, because the Island has been quietly repeating the trick ever since.

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To anyone who measures offshore racing in night watches, Fastnets and long cold beats past Portland, the Round the Island Race can look like a giant inshore spectacle. It is certainly that, one of the great days in British sailing, with family boats, charter boats, classics, multihulls, professional crews and people who race once a year and would not miss this one for anything. But do not mistake the crowds for simplicity.

This is a 50-mile tactical course compressed into a single day and wrapped around some of the most tide-sensitive water in the country: headlands, compression zones, overfalls, wind shadows, tidal gates, layline traps, a wreck that eats keels for breakfast, and a finish that can still ruin a perfect day. It is one of the few races where the best boat, the biggest boat and the most expensive boat all routinely lose, and the fastest hull on the water can finish the day a long way down on corrected time.

That is why it belongs on FirstBeat. Almost everything that decides it is an offshore skill: preparation, route planning, tidal strategy over a long course, sail handling under pressure, crew management, and knowing when the chart, the model and the water in front of the bow are telling three different stories. Which is also why, the day before the race, I will publish a FirstBeat routing and tactical brief for the IRC fleet, because this is exactly the kind of race where a small decision made early becomes a large result six hours later. Or a large hole in the side when you are T boned on the start line - yes it has happened many time!

In the beginning it was a race built for smaller boats

The history is part of the charm, but it is also part of the tactics.

The race was the idea of Major Cyril Windeler, an Island Sailing Club member who in 1930 proposed a handicap race round the Island for smaller boats — five to twenty-five tons. He found his trophy before he had his race, spotting a Roman-style drinking bowl dredged from the Thames in a London goldsmith’s window and having it copied. That copy became the Gold Roman Bowl, and it is still the prize every serious crew in the fleet is chasing.

The first race, in 1931, drew 25 entries and was won by Peter Brett in Merry Conceit, a 22-foot Cornish fishing boat he had bought for £45, one of the smallest boats on the line. The precedent could not have been set more cleanly on day one, and the thread has never gone away.

The Bowl has gone to some very serious boats and some very small ones. Sir Edward Heath’s Morning Cloud won four times, three of them consecutively in the 1970s — though the Folkboat fraternity will cheerfully remind you that Heath was not aboard for the first two, which is a useful reminder that boats do not win this race; crews do. Against the TP52s and the modern grand-prix machines stand the Folkboats, the Contessa 26s, the quarter- and half-tonners, the JPKs — and, most famously, Jo Richards’ Eeyore: a modified 1964 Alacrity 18 bilge-keeler, 18ft 6in overall and the smallest boat in the fleet, sailed three-handed to the Bowl in 2019 and again in 2021.

Eeyore was no novelty act. Richards is an Olympic Flying Dutchman bronze medallist and the designer of half the dinghies in your club compound; he and two crew simply sailed a tiny boat round the Island in 13 hours 36 minutes without making the mistakes everyone else made. And the small boats keep their names on the Bowl. The Nordic Folkboat, a 25-footer, is the most successful design in the race’s history, four wins in sixteen years and seven seconds in the same span. The Donald family took it four times across two Folkboats: Malcolm in the war-built Celia Mary in 1994, his son Ed in 1999, and Ed again in his Nordic Madelaine, which won outright in 2007 and 2014 and made the top five in ten of sixteen years before losing her mast off St Catherine’s under spinnaker. The Rogers family Contessa 26 Rosina of Beaulieu won three times, 2002, 2003 and 2006. Mrs H. Tobin became the first woman to win, on Barbar in 1954; Julia Dane took it on Glass Onion in 1982.

The economics make the point another way. The overall winner almost always emerges from one of two places, the top of IRC Division 0, or the bottom of the fleet in a division like 3D. A second-hand TP52 in Division 0 costs the wrong side of £500,000. A genuinely competitive small boat in 3D can be found for under £20,000. The Bowl does not ask for your receipts.

A race for all, decided by the fairest rule

The quiet genius of the event is structural. A gaff cutter, a chartered Bénéteau, a Folkboat and a TP52 can all start off Cowes on the same morning and every one of them has a real race, because the fleet is split across more than one handicap and dozens of classes. Most of the cruising entry races under the Island Sailing Club’s own ISC Rating System, free, self-measured, no certificate and no measurer, just the boat’s basic details on the entry form. That open door is what makes “race for all” more than a slogan and lets the once-a-year sailor line up alongside the professionals. Add the multihulls under MOCRA and the one-designs racing among themselves and the entry can top 1,000 boats chasing the better part of 200 trophies. Nearly everyone can find a class to win and a reason to come back.

The major silverware, though, the Gold Roman Bowl and the overall prizes, is settled under IRC. You know the rule; the point worth making is why it suits this race so well. Because the formula is unpublished, no designer can draw a boat to beat it, so a 1960s classic, a rebuilt IOR warhorse and a new carbon flyer can all win under the same certificate. On a course that throws every type of boat at every type of condition, that era-blind fairness is exactly what you want deciding the overall. Enter under ISCRS and you are racing for the joy of it and a fistful of class prizes. Enter under IRC and you are playing for the Bowl.

Why the smallest boat can win

On most courses the handicap roughly evens things out. Round the Island it does not, because the water is not neutral, and the fleet is not racing in the same conditions at the same time.

A 50-mile loop round the Isle of Wight is a chain of traps that catch different boats at different moments. The quick boats reach The Needles in one tide window; the small boats arrive in another. A maxi may get round St Catherine’s before the breeze softens, or be first into the hole. A Folkboat may be pinned by foul tide, or arrive after a gate has swung fair. A slow boat ghosting along at three knots while a fast boat sits parked at zero is not losing, she is destroying the fast boat on corrected time.

There is a hard reason; the foul tide actually favours the small boat, if she is sailed well. As the Solent pilotage authority Peter Bruce puts it: “Cheating the foul tide is essential in smaller/slower boats, where the adverse tide is relatively a greater negative percentage of your forward speed vector.” A 25-footer punching two knots of ebb is losing a far greater share of her boatspeed than a maxi is, so she has far more to gain by tucking inshore where the stream is weakest. The boat that knows the inshore ladder past St Catherine’s and the Chale Bay eddy that runs fair eight hours out of twelve turns a structural disadvantage into the decisive edge.

So the giant-killing result needs three things. The big boats must fail to convert their rating into distance, too little breeze, too tactical, too tidal. The small boat must keep moving, treating every half-knot as currency while the fleet stops and starts. And the tide must compress everyone, so the lead the class 1 built all morning evaporates in twenty minutes of foul stream and dirty air. When those line up, it is not romance. It is arithmetic, timing and seamanship.

Springs, neaps and the 2026 tide

The smallest boat does not win every year, and the biggest reason is the tide. The race is always set for a fair morning ebb to flush the fleet west to The Needles, so the question is never whether the tide matters but how hard it bites and that turns on where in the springs–neaps cycle race day falls. A big spring runs close to four knots through the Needles Channel and off St Catherine’s; a slack neap gives you less than half of that. Same marks, completely different race.

So read 2026. The new moon falls on 14 July, the previous neaps on the 7th; the race, on the 11th, sits three days ahead of the new moon. The streams will be building towards springs but 5 days short of the top, a making tide, moderate and increasing, with a genuine west-going push down the western Solent in the morning but not the savage four-knot gates of a full spring. Hard enough that the timing of The Needles and St Catherine’s will absolutely matter; forgiving enough that a well-sailed small boat that keeps moving need not be gated out entirely. The shape is already set: a live, tactical tide, neither benign nor brutal.

What the tide really controls is not so much who wins as how cruelly the day punishes a mistake. On a big spring the gates slam, the fleet concertinas, and one mistimed corner costs twenty minutes you never recover; on a neap the same error costs loose change. There is one combination where the tide decides the winner outright, light wind landing on a big spring, when the parked class 1,2 and 3 are pinned in foul stream while a Folkboat creeps up the beach in the back eddy. But that is the exception. For 2026 the gates will bite; whether that helps the small boats or the big ones depends on the one thing the committee cannot set, the wind. And there the record is unusually clear.

What the record actually shows:

It is easy to assert that small boats win in the light and big boats win in the breeze. It is more useful to line the recent Bowl winners up against the conditions on the day, where the pattern is almost embarrassingly clean.

When it has blown, the big boats have won almost every time. In 2022 the race started in a south-westerly around 15 knots and built strongly round the back of the Island; the Bowl went to Ian Atkins’ GP42 Dark’N’Stormy, which took monohull line honours, IRC Zero and the overall win. In 2024, the wet and wild edition with gusts into the fifties, it went to Peter Morton’s TP52 Notorious. In 2025, with 35-knot-plus gusts, to the Botin 52 Jolt 3. Go back and the breezy years keep landing on the big machines — the TP52s 5 West (2012), Manroland Sheetfed (2015) and Gladiator (2016). When the wind is up, the rating-burdened boats convert: they hold their polars, the reaching legs reward sail area and stability, and they sail away far enough to beat the handicap.

Morton’s win is worth dwelling on, because the winner made the argument for me. A lifelong Cowes sailor with fifty years of this race behind him, he stepped off a state-of-the-art 52-footer and said: “It’s 40 years ago since I won it on a little 25ft boat called ‘Odd Job’, so today was very special for me.” Forty years and a 25-footer between his two Bowls. Even the maxi owners learned this race in small boats.

When it has been light, the giant-killers have walked. Eeyore in 2019 and 2021. Ed Donald’s Folkboat Madelaine in 2014. And 2010 gives the whole thesis in one line from the race reporters that year — “a Round the Island race where the wind picks up halfway through always favours the smaller boats” — the day the Folkboat Nordic Bear took the Bowl. In light or building air the big boats cannot make their rating pay, the fleet parks at the gates, and the small boat cheating the foul tide inshore corrects out in front.

So the most reliable predictor of the size of the winner is not the tide and certainly not the budget. It is the wind strength, and the hinge sits at roughly 15 knots:

• 0–15 knots, light early. Advantage small. Below about 12 knots the giant-killers come alive; a low-rated boat that keeps moving and works the inshore tide beats anything. Folkboat, Contessa and Eeyore country.

• Around 15 knots. The pivot — enough for the mid-sized boats to get going without burying the smallest. 2022’s 15-knot GP42 win sits exactly here.

• 15–30 knots. Advantage big. The waterline pays, the reaches light up, the TP52s convert rating into distance faster than the handicap can claw it back.

• Above 30 knots. Still the big boats — but now survival, seamanship and damage-avoidance decide it, and the back of the Island turns genuinely dangerous.

Two things keep this honest. The fast boats only win when they are nearly perfectly sailed, because they carry the rating burden: one bad lane off the start, one poor sail choice at The Needles, twenty minutes stuck in dirty air off Ryde, and a lower-rated boat is banking corrected time behind them. And wind direction sets the shape of the race more than the size of the winner. The prevailing south-westerly gives the classic course, a beat or fetch to The Needles, sheets cracked with kites down the back of the Isaland, a tactical leg home up the eastern Solent. An easterly, rarer, turns it inside out: a reach out and a beat home, slower and more tactical, different cliffs stealing the wind at different moments. Direction tells you where the race is won; wind strength tells you what kind of boat holds the Bowl at the end of it.

I have sailed both ends of this argument

I have raced this island across the whole range, and my own results sheet makes the point better than any theory. Below are results from boats I have actually owned, however, from around 1976 I have raced almost every year in many different yachts either as bowman, mastman, trimmer or tatician as I got older and slower and moved further back. Many boats focused on offshore racing still find the time to compete and this is another reason it is relavant for FirstBeat subscribers. I still have never really ever got close to winning this race, maybe I have time left!

2XL, the Farr 40, finished 5th overall in class in 2003, the grand-prix one-design of its era, light and powered-up and built to reward hard crew work. Fifth in a fleet of around 100 is serious for a 40-footer, and the company tells the story: 2003 was a Contessa 26 year, the Bowl going to Rosina of Beaulieu. Barking Mad, my Swan 40, finished 32nd in Class 3 in 2002, a heavier, sea-kindly Nautor cruiser-racer, the all-rounder that does not need a gale to be in the race. And 2002 was the other half of the same story: another Rosina of Beaulieu year, another day for the small and the nimble, and a mid-class result for the bigger, heavier boat. Same skipper, different weather, a very different answer.

Morning After, the S&S 34, took 4th in the Classic Yacht Division in 2022, thirty-four feet of heavy, sea-kindly Sparkman & Stephens, the boat that won RORC Class 4 overall and her class in the Round Britain and Ireland in 2022. Round the Island she raced among the classics rather than for the Bowl, and on a light or building day she is precisely the boat this whole article is about: keep her moving, cheat the tide inshore, let the giants park.

Three boats across the full width of the wind scale, the same fifty miles of water each time. Which one you would rather be on has nothing to do with which is “better” and everything to do with what the forecast says the night before and as my results show its very difficult to do well!

Reading the 2026 race

If the race is breezy, open and fast, the advantage runs to the high-end IRC machines. If it is a medium, shifty, look hard at the best-sailed 35- to 45-footers, a JPK, J/112, J/122, Sun Fast, Ker, Corby or First 40. This is the most dangerous place to be under IRC: fast enough to stay connected with the race, not so highly rated that they must vanish over the horizon, and manageable enough for an amateur or semi-pro crew to hold close to target speed for hours. In a mixed breeze, that consistency is lethal. These boats win by doing ordinary things extremely well, clean start, stay in pressure, don’t overstand The Needles, don’t get greedy under the cliffs, manage St Catherine’s, change early not late, come back into the Solent with a plan rather than a prayer. It sounds simple. Most boats will not do it.

And if it is light, unstable and full of holes, the small boats stop being sentimental outsiders. A low-rated boat that keeps moving becomes almost impossible to beat once the quick boats park and the ghosts of Merry Conceit, Rosina of Beaulieu, the Folkboats and Eeyore walk round the Island again. The honest early answer: the fastest-looking boat is rarely the most dangerous one. The most dangerous boat is the one whose rating, crew, sail plan and timing best fit the weather on the day.

The graveyard at the corners

Here is the part nobody puts on the entry form. The Isle of Wight is ringed with rock, ledge and wreck, and every year the race feeds it.

Start at the worst of them. Rounding The Needles, the tightest hairpin on the course, the whole fleet converging, the tide ripping, the wind bending round the chalk, there is a tempting inside passage between Goose Rock and the lighthouse. Lying across it are the boilers of the SS Varvassi, a Greek steamer that piled onto the Needles in 1947 and never left. They stand about 2.5 metres proud of the seabed, roughly thirty centimetres below the surface at low water springs, close enough that on the lowest tides you can watch them break the surface. The gap to thread between wreck and rock is two and a half to three metres of water, and the short cut has cost real boats real races. In 1990 the French Admiral’s Cupper Xeryus, sailed by the America’s Cup helmsman Bruno Troublé, hit the Varvassi hard enough to be abandoned and sink. In 2016 Alchemist struck the same boilers, took on water and went down off the Needles despite the Mudeford lifeboat’s tow; her crew were lifted off. The experts’ rule is brutally simple: if in doubt go outside, and never change your mind mid-rounding because you have just watched someone else get away with it. As Peter Bruce notes, that is exactly how “you attract the wreck to your keel.”

The Needles keep punishing you once you are round. A third of a mile south-east, in Scratchell’s Bay, Irex Rock waits awash at chart datum for the boat that cuts the corner too fine while staring back at the lighthouse for the photograph. Then the long beat down the back of the Island brings the most seductive trap of all, the inshore tide-cheat past Atherfield. The gains are real; so are the bricks.

Brook Ledges and the Atherfield ledges ,Typet Ledge, The Mexon, The Bench, reach as much as five hundred metres offshore and stand vertically out of the seabed. Bruce tells it best: trading tacks with a Farr 40 in a twelve-knot south-easterly, the boat closest to the shore kept gaining until “there was a huge bang” the Farr 40 caught on her exit from a tack, keel onto Typet Ledge, rudder lifting clean out of the water as she stopped dead from seven knots. One greedy tack and a podium boat became a recovery job.

Carry east and the rocks keep coming, Church Rocks and Cat Rock off Ventnor, then Bembridge Ledge where tide, depth and traffic conspire at once. The only buoy on the course to pass to port is Bembridge ledge, so dangerous is this corner of the the course.

Even within sight of the finish the eastern Solent has a sting: Ryde Sands shelving from thirteen metres to two in a couple of boat lengths, Norris Rocks off Old Castle Point, the Shrape guarding the run home. None of it is new.

In 1933 the leader, Isaac Bell’s Rosemary IV, lost her mainsail just short of the line, set a trysail and still scraped across 46 seconds ahead — while Dr Cooke’s 32-year-old cutter Enid sprang a leak and sank off Alum Bay. Triumph and disaster in the same hour, on the same course. The cast changes; the script does not. The lesson for the IRC sailor is not to fear the corners but to treat them as offshore problems — brief them, plan the escape before you commit, and decide in cold blood whether the half-knot inshore is worth the keel.

How to win it: six problems, not one lap

You do not win this race by going round the Island. You win it by breaking the course into problems and solving each in the right order.

The start. Not necessarily a dinghy-style port-end flier, in fact almost impossible! A start that lets you sail full speed in clear air toward the first strategic objective maybe but unlikely so in a fleet this size a clean second row can beat a heroic front row that leaves you trapped.

The western Solent. Balance tide, wind angle, shoreline effects and fleet position. The fastest line on the routing screen rarely survives contact with 200 boats and a dirty-air lane. The question is not “where is the tide strongest” but “where can we sail our boat properly while using the tide.”

The Needles transition. Sail handling decides it. Late preparing the next sail and you have lost; crew still debating the change as you round and you have lost; bow team surprised, with the wreck right there, and you have definitely lost.

The south side. Settle the boat and sail percentages. Trim for the sea state, not the brochure polar; steer the waves; change mode early; keep checking that the wind you are in matches the wind you expected. Hours of it, not minutes.

St Catherine’s to Bembridge. Routing, tide and judgement together. The software’s answer is only as good as its inputs, if the wind has shifted, the tide line is visible and the boats around you are behaving differently from the model, the navigator updates the race in real time.

The finish. A beautiful race can still die in the eastern Solent, cruel tide, fleet in the way, the breeze going patchy, the temptation to relax. Good IRC boats don’t relax until they have crossed the line and lodged the declaration.

Why FirstBeat is producing a routing

The routing the day before will not be a magic line to follow blindly, that would be the wrong lesson. Routing software is only useful when you understand its assumptions. It models a forecast, a tide and a set of polars; it cannot see the dirty air from 200 boats, the helm who has not practised the kite drop, the crew already tired before The Needles, the boilers of the Varvassi, or the cloud line building over the Island unless someone is looking out of the boat.

The point is to give IRC crews a better framework for judgement. Where are the gates? Where does the forecast create opportunity? Where might the big boats stretch, and where might the small boats come back? Which legs reward waterline and which reward patience? Where is the obvious route and where does the obvious route become a trap? That is offshore racing intelligence applied to a one-day race.

The Round the Island Race starts and finishes in Cowes, but it is not a Cowes day out. It is a serious tactical race around headlands, tide and weather, where seamanship still matters and a small boat with a good crew can still beat a grand-prix machine when the day opens the door. So if you are racing IRC on 11 July, do not just ask how fast your boat is. Ask what kind of race the Island is going to give you.

Stuart Greenfield

FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Leave a comment

Sources

• Island Sailing Club, Race History — roundtheisland.org.uk/the-race/race-history

• Notorious Wins the Gold Roman Bowl (Peter Morton quotation) — Round the Island Race race log, 13 January 2025

• 2025 result (Jolt 3, Matt Adams; Zoulou line honours) — All At Sea / Round the Island Race

• Nordic Folkboat: the most successful design in the Round the Island Race (Donald family, Rosina of Beaulieu, Madelaine, Heath crewing detail, Merry Conceit, Division 3D vs 0 economics) — All At Sea, April 2022

• Eeyore wins (Jo Richards, Alacrity 18, 2019/2021) — Yachting Monthly; Classic Sailor; Practical Boat Owner

• Peter Bruce, Round the Island Race tactics and strategy (foul-tide, Needles wreck, Atherfield/Typet Ledge anecdote, Irex Rock) — Yachting World, 21 June 2019

• SS Varvassi (1947 wreck; boiler depths; Xeryus 1990 and Alchemist 2016 losses) — Wikipedia; Yachting World; Berthon

• Round the Island Race (course, records, handicap history, 1933 Rosemary IV/Enid) — Wikipedia; Island Sailing Club

• Round the Island Race 2026 (11 July, 0730 start) — Island Sailing Club / race previews

• Rating structure (ISCRS free self-measurement; IRC for major trophies; MOCRA; ~1,500 boats, up to ~200 trophies; unpublished IRC formula) — Round the Island Race / ISC; ircrating.org / RORC Rating Office

• Tide and date selection (morning west-going ebb; spring/neap stream rates) — Wikipedia; B&G, Tides for the Round the Island Race; Peter Bruce

• July 2026 moon phases (new moon 14 July; last quarter 7 July; Solent springs lag the new moon ~1.5–2 days) — moon-phase calendars (SpaceWeatherLive / Moongiant); exact 11 July streams to be confirmed for the routing

• Winner-by-year and conditions: Dark’N’Stormy GP42, 2022 (~15kt SW, “foam up”) — Yachts & Yachting / Sailweb; Notorious TP52, 2024 and Jolt 3 Botin 52, 2025 (35kt+ gusts) — RTIR / Sailweb; Nordic Bear Folkboat, 2010 (12–18kt, “wind picks up halfway… favours the smaller boats”) — OnTheWight / The Daily Sail; Madelaine 2014; TP52s 5 West 2012, Manroland Sheetfed 2015, Gladiator 2016 — race reports

• RTIR results archive: official digital results from 2001 only (Next Generation 2001–2024; Nautical Cloud from 2025) — per-year PDFs at rirtrophies.isccollections.org.uk/archive-results; Gold Roman Bowl winners list and statistics on the same site. 1999/2000 predate the online archive.

After the Morgan Cup, one of the crew asked me a very good question about why I normally want TWA, True Wind Angle, as one of the core numbers on the mast instruments offshore, when many sailors, especially those who race inshore, are more used to looking at AWA, Apparent Wind Angle.

His logic was perfectly sound. The sails are trimmed to the wind they actually feel, and that wind is apparent wind. The telltales, leech, twist, sheet load, helm balance and the general feel of the boat all respond to apparent wind, so it is completely understandable that someone coming from a lot of inshore racing would expect AWA to be the main number in front of the helm.

But offshore, the job of the instruments is slightly different.

The answer is not that AWA is wrong, or that TWA is somehow a better number in every situation. The answer is that AWA and TWA do different jobs, and if you confuse those jobs you can end up sailing the boat in a way that feels right moment by moment, but is not necessarily right for the leg, the target, the routing or the race.

AWA tells you what the sails are feeling now. TWA tells you what the boat is doing in relation to the actual wind system around it. That distinction matters offshore because the boat is no longer just being trimmed for the next few seconds. It is being managed over hours.

Inshore, AWA can be a perfectly sensible primary number. The legs are short, the crew are close together, the trimmers are constantly working, and many of the decisions are immediate. You are trying to hold a lane, accelerate out of a tack, defend a position, squeeze over a boat to leeward, or judge whether you can cross. In that world, apparent wind is a very useful language because the boat is being sailed through short, intense, highly reactive phases where trim, feel and acceleration dominate the conversation.

Offshore is different because you are not just trying to make the boat feel right in the next gust or wave. You are trying to keep the boat in the correct mode for long periods, compare actual performance against target performance, manage fatigue, choose the right sail, understand the sea state, make VMG and VMC decisions, and keep the helm, navigator, tactician and trimmers working from the same reference.

That is where TWA earns its place.

Polars are written in true wind. Routing software works from true wind. Target speeds and target angles are normally expressed in true wind. VMG and VMC decisions make more sense in true wind because they are about the boat’s performance against the real wind field, not just the air the sails are feeling as the boat moves through it. If the navigator is thinking in TWA, the polars are built around TWA, the routing is using TWA, but the helm is sailing mainly to AWA, the boat is not quite speaking one language.

That may sound like a small issue, but offshore, over hours, in the dark, wet and tired, small errors in language become small errors in judgement, and small errors in judgement eventually become performance losses.

The other problem with apparent wind is that it is reactive. It changes every time the boat speed changes because apparent wind is made from the true wind plus the boat’s own movement through the air. When an upwind boat accelerates, the apparent wind moves forward and the AWA becomes smaller than the TWA. For example, if the true wind speed is 12 knots, the boat is making 6 knots, and the boat is sailing at 42 degrees true, the apparent wind may be around 16.9 knots at about 28 degrees apparent. The sails feel the 28-degree apparent wind, but the race decision is still being made against the 42-degree true wind angle.

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That is why this can become confusing if you do not separate the two ideas clearly. Apparent wind is what powers and trims the sails, but it is also being altered by the boat’s own speed. The faster the boat goes, the more the apparent wind is affected by that forward motion. On a reach or downwind in waves, apparent wind can also move around significantly as the boat accelerates, checks, surfs or slows. If the helm or pilot starts chasing every movement in AWA, the boat can end up responding to changes that are partly self-created rather than changes in the actual wind.

That is one of the quiet traps of offshore sailing. You think you are steering to the wind, but you may partly be steering to the boat’s own acceleration and deceleration.

TWA gives the helm a more stable frame of reference because it allows you to ask a better offshore question: are we sailing the right relationship to the true wind for this sail, this sea state, this leg, this tide and this tactical problem?

That is why, offshore, I like the core mast display to remain brutally simple. For me, the helm needs heading, boatspeed and true wind angle. Heading tells us where we are pointing, boatspeed tells us whether the boat is alive, and TWA tells us whether we are sailing the right mode. Those three numbers do not tell you everything, but they tell you enough to keep the boat disciplined, and they are simple enough to read at a glance in spray, darkness, fatigue and bad weather.

That matters more than people think. A mast display should not be a Christmas tree. If every available number is thrown at the helm, the useful information gets diluted, and the tired brain starts looking rather than sailing. Offshore, the display should simplify the job, not decorate it.

None of this means AWA disappears. Far from it. AWA remains vital for trimming because it is what the sails are actually feeling. A trimmer looking at jib telltales, leech tension, twist, sheet load and helm balance is working in the apparent wind. The boat’s feel is apparent. The sail’s reaction is apparent. The immediate trim conversation is apparent.

So the split is simple, but important. AWA is for trim and feel, while TWA is for mode, performance and strategy. If you are trimming the jib, AWA matters. If you are deciding whether the boat is sailing the right angle for the next three hours, TWA matters more.

The Morgan Cup question also raised another important point, which is what happens when the instruments are wrong. This is where blind faith in TWA becomes dangerous, because true wind is not directly measured. It is calculated. The instrument system takes apparent wind, boatspeed, heading and calibration data, then produces a true wind number. If those inputs are poor, the true wind number can be poor as well.

If the log is dirty, the masthead unit is misaligned, the compass is wrong, the wind angle calibration is poor from tack to tack, or the boat speed is suspect, TWA can look beautifully precise while being quietly wrong. That is worse than useless because it gives confidence where caution is required.

On a well-calibrated offshore boat, TWA should be a core mast number. On a badly calibrated or unverified boat, TWA should be treated with suspicion, and that is where AWA becomes more than just a trim number. It becomes a reality check.

If the true wind numbers do not make sense from tack to tack, look at AWA. Look at the telltales, boatspeed, heading, heel, sea state, other boats, wake and the feel of the helm. Ask whether the boat actually feels right, because the screen is there to support judgement, not replace it.

Before a serious race, the instrument system deserves proper attention. Boatspeed should be checked, wind angle should be checked on both tacks, compass behaviour should be checked, and true wind direction should not jump wildly every time you tack. The numbers should make sense as a system. If they do, TWA becomes extremely powerful. If they do not, the display may be lying to you in a very expensive-looking font.

One of the crew produced some tables after the Morgan Cup showing how much extra boatspeed would be needed to justify bearing away by different amounts. That is exactly the sort of thinking good offshore crews should be doing, because it turns a vague feeling into a performance question. What angle are we sailing? What speed should we be making? What VMG or VMC are we gaining or losing? Does sailing lower actually pay, or does it just feel faster?

That calculation is much cleaner in true wind because true wind gives you the performance framework. An AWA-based version of the same exercise quickly becomes messy because every change in boatspeed changes the apparent angle. The table starts chasing its own tail.

This is the distinction I think many sailors miss. Apparent wind is what the boat feels, but true wind is what the race is being sailed in. The best offshore crews use both. They trim to apparent wind, feel and telltales, but they make mode, routing and performance decisions in true wind, while constantly checking the numbers against reality.

That is the whole point.

The instruments should not turn sailors into passengers staring at screens. They should help good sailors make better decisions. They should simplify the boat, not complicate it. They should give the helm, navigator and trimmers a common language, especially when tired brains are trying to make decent decisions at three in the morning.

So, after the Morgan Cup, and for 18 hours (2026) it was tought upwind race, my answer is this. If you are sailing short inshore legs with active trimming and constant tactical reactions, AWA may be the most natural number to show. If you are racing offshore, managing performance over time, comparing the boat against polars, working with routing, judging mode and trying to keep the helm and navigator aligned, TWA should be one of the core numbers.

But only if it is calibrated.

If it is not calibrated, AWA, telltales, heading, boatspeed and the feel of the boat may tell you more truth than a calculated true wind number. That is not a contradiction. That is seamanship.

Read the original full instruments article here:Full article

How I Set Up Race Instruments Offshore

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Share FirstBeat - Offshore racing intelligence

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FirstBeat Essential — this is one of the most-read pieces in my archive, first published in spring 2026. If you joined recently, you won’t have seen it.

If you read it first time round, the story at the start is worth a second visit.

— First published April 2026, read by over 1.5k offshore crews and skippers —

Why everything you thought you knew about sail trim has changed, and how it used to be

It was the summer of 1987. I was the tactician on Giant Panda, a Two Ton Admiral’s Cup boat designed by Hugh Welbourn.

This was the start of the RORC Fastnet Race.

We had a midday start off the Squadron Line in the Solent, just off Cowes. The wind was a light south-westerly, around 8 knots. We started with our No.1 genoa , a large 150% overlapping sail, very much the fashion at the time, alongside a full mainsail. With the hydraulic backstay fully wound on, we were set up for a tight beat towards Cowes Green, staying in the shallower water where the last of the flood tide was weakest so gave a slight advantage over those in deeper water or starting at the North end of the line.

This was typical Fastnet start geometry in those days, boats pushing into the inshore shallows just before the tide turned favourable.

As we approached the Green on starboard tack, the depth dropped away quickly. We called for water and prepared to tack out into slightly deeper water. With 30 or 40 other Class 2 boats doing exactly the same thing, it was hectic.

We had 12 people onboard, with five fully engaged in every tack. By the time we reached Gurnard Ledge, we’d already completed over 20 tacks, rotating grinders, trimmers, and tailers just to keep the manoeuvres clean. The team looked strong, but already working hard. Those big overlapping genoas demanded real physical effort.

But as tactician, I had to call something far more demanding.

In the 20 minutes since the start, the wind had built to over 16 knots. With the tide now turning and increasing apparent wind and load on the rig, Giant Panda was seriously over-canvassed, heeling too much, loading the helm, and no longer pointing effectively.

We needed an immediate headsail change.

We were still in the deeper water heading down towards Hurst Narrows, where the tide and wind both funnel and increase. With a twin-groove Harken headstay (a Tuff Luff system), we could pre-load the No.2 genoa, already rigged with sheets and ready to hoist. This sail had a shorter foot and heavier cloth, better suited to the building conditions.

The plan was precise: hoist the new sail in the second groove while on port tack, tack onto starboard, and immediately drop the old genoa inside the new one, never losing drive, never leaving the boat underpowered.

This wasn’t a small job but the ‘tack set’ was a well practise routine on all race boats of the time

It took the bowman, the mastman, and at least three others to set up, manage, and execute, all while sailing at over 8 knots through the water, with 3 knots of tide underneath us, surrounded by 30 other boats doing exactly the same thing.

You don’t get that wrong.

We had practised it extensively. But after the relentless tacking duel from the start, and an earlier sail change in a Solent sea state already putting water on deck , the crew were beginning to fatigue a little.

This is exactly why I talk about the Seven Stages of Offshore Racing.

The start is only Stage 2 , after preparation,and I always emphasise: conserve energy early, start conservatively, preserve the team. You can read this in another post on Substack.

Back then, it wasn’t always that simple.

But the final part of the story is worth telling.

On board Giant Panda, we carried four genoas, three jibs, and storm sails. As we pushed west towards Hurst Castle spit, now beating into a building ebb tide with a strengthening south-westerly sea breeze, solid Force 4, building 5, it became clear we needed to go again.

The call was for the No.3 , a blade jib.

This was a full-height, non-overlapping sail, cut higher on the foot to allow water to pass underneath rather than crashing directly into it. It gave control, and at that point, control mattered more than power.

Looking ahead, the beat down the Shingles Bank towards the Needles was going to be brutal: steep seas, breaking waves, multiple tacks, and very little margin for error.

Despite the groans from the crew, I made the call.

We set up for the change.

As we executed the manoeuvre, one of the crew, positioned near the leeward shrouds to gather the leech of the old genoa, was struck on the side of the head by the J-lock fitting on the clew as the sail unloaded.

With no load on it, the clew whipped violently across the deck.

He went down immediately, out cold for a few seconds.

Looking back, we were lucky, it could easily have been far worse.

When he came round, he grabbed the leeward shroud. The grinder and trimmer were already moving forward to secure him. There was some blood and a very sore head, but he was conscious and coherent.

We got him below, gave him a couple of aspirin, and carried on racing.

It was one of those moments where performance and risk sat uncomfortably close together.

Why tell this story?

Because it shows just how far things have come.

Yacht design, sail handling systems, and sail technology have evolved massively over the last 40 years. What was once physically brutal, high-risk, and manpower-heavy is now faster, safer, and far more efficient.

And that’s exactly what this article explores — how modern sail technology has transformed offshore racing performance.

So the last 20 years, if not 30, have seen sailmaking evolve from a skilled craft into a data-driven, materials-engineering discipline. What was once about “shape and feel” is now about load paths, fibre alignment, laminate chemistry, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD)—with the best sailmakers operating closer to aerospace engineers than traditional lofts.

This matters profoundly for IRC racing. Under IRC, you are not simply chasing outright speed—you are chasing efficient, repeatable performance across a wide range of conditions, often with a sail inventory that must work harder than a fully optimised grand prix programme.

FirstBeat - Offshore racing intelligence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work please subscribe… it keeps me motivated!

1. The Modern Sail: From Cloth to Engineered Structure

A modern race sail is no longer “cloth”—it is a composite structure.

Key Concept:

A sail today is designed around primary load paths:

• Head → clew (leech load)

• Head → tack (luff load)

• Clew → tack (foot load)

Instead of woven fibres distributing load inefficiently, modern sails align fibres exactly along these load vectors.

Core Technologies:

• Membrane sails (e.g. North Sails 3Di, Doyle Sails Stratis, Quantum Sails Fusion)

• Tape-driven structures (load path tapes laid on film or mould)

• 3D moulded composites (heat + pressure forming)

Result:

• Lower stretch

• Higher shape retention

• Greater aerodynamic efficiency over time

2. Fore & Aft Sails (Upwind): Precision Structures

Upwind sails—mains and jibs—are where modern sail tech delivers the biggest gains.

2.1 Aerodynamic Theory

Upwind sails operate as high-lift foils:

• Maximise lift-to-drag ratio

• Control attached flow

• Maintain laminar sections as long as possible

Key variables:

• Camber depth & position

• Entry angle (luff round)

• Twist profile

• Leech stability

2.2 Materials in Use

Carbon Fibre

• Extremely low stretch (high modulus)

• Excellent for primary load paths

• Weakness: brittle, UV sensitivity

Dyneema (UHMWPE)

• High strength, excellent fatigue resistance

• Slight creep under sustained load

• Superb durability → ideal for IRC longevity

Aramid (Kevlar / Twaron)

• High modulus, lighter than carbon

• Poor UV resistance → ageing issue

Hybrid Laminates

Most modern sails combine:

• Carbon (structure)

• Dyneema (durability)

• Polyester films (shape stability)

2.3 Manufacturing Evolution

Then (2000s):

• Cross-cut or tri-radial panels

• Broadseaming to create shape

Now:

• Full 3D modelling (CFD + FEA)

• Fibre placement via robotic or guided systems

• Moulded shapes with minimal distortion

Broadseaming is now:

“A secondary shaping tool, not the primary driver.”

3. Downwind Sails: Power, Stability, and Contro

Downwind sails operate in a very different regime:

• Higher drag coefficients (by design)

• Flow often partially separated

• Stability > absolute efficiency

3.1 Asymmetric Revolution

The shift from symmetric to asymmetric sails is one of the biggest changes in modern racing.

Why asymmetrics dominate:

• Easier handling (critical offshore)

• Higher average speeds (apparent wind sailing)

• Better integration with autopilot and short-handed sailing

3.2 Types:

• A1 / A2 / A3 – running to reaching kites

• Code 0 / Code sails – tight reaching, near-upwind angles

3.3 Structural Design

Unlike upwind sails:

• Load is more distributed

• Shape is more dynamic

• Fabric choice prioritises elastic recovery + tear resistance

Materials:

• Nylon (still dominant for kites)

• Polyester blends

• Emerging structured membranes for Code sails

4. The Death (and Rebirth) of Broadseaming

Traditional sailmaking relied on broadseaming:

• Panels cut with curvature

• Sewn together to induce 3D shape

Limitations:

• Shape changes under load

• Inconsistent replication

• Labour intensive

Modern Approach:

• Shape defined digitally

• Structure carries load

• Seams become structural joints—not shaping tools

However:

In IRC sails, controlled broadseaming still plays a role in durability and cost control.

5. The Big Players and Material Supply Chain

Major Sailmakers:

• North Sails – 3Di composite technology leader

• Doyle Sails – Stratis (structured fibre mapping)

• Quantum Sails – Fusion M (membrane + moulded)

• UK Sailmakers – X-Drive technology

Material Suppliers:

• DSM Dyneema – UHMWPE fibres

• Teijin – aramid fibres

• Toray Industries – carbon fibres

Insight: The real innovation often comes from materials science, not sail lofts.

6. Why IRC Boats Still Need Custom Sails

Unlike one-design classes:

• Hull shapes vary widely

• Stability curves differ

• Rig geometries are inconsistent

IRC rewards:

• All-round efficiency

• Not peak condition optimisation

Therefore:

Customisation is critical:

• Luff curves tuned to rig bend

• Sail area vs rating trade-offs

• Inventory designed for overlap between conditions

“The fastest sail is not the one with thebest shape—it’s the one that works most often.”

7. Performance Across Wind Ranges

High-Tech Sails Excel:

• Medium wind (8–18 knots)

• Stable apparent wind angles

• Flat water

Weaknesses:

• Very light air → too stiff

• Heavy air → load spikes, durability issues

Practical Reality:

• A slightly “softer” sail can outperform a perfect membrane in real offshore conditions

8. The Future of Sail Technology

Likely Directions:

• AI-driven design loops (real-time optimisation)

• Embedded sensors (load + shape monitoring)

• Adaptive sails (variable camber structures)

• Increased use of recyclable composites

Key Shift:

From:

“Design → Build → Use”

To:

“Design → Measure → Adapt → Iterate”

9. Owner’s Guide: Maximum Performance on a Real Budget

Prioritise Your Inventory

• J2 / J3 crossover is critical

• One excellent mainsail beats two average ones

Choose Material Wisely

• Carbon/Dyneema hybrid = best balance

• Avoid full carbon unless campaigning hard

Design for Your Sailing Style

• Offshore → durability bias

• Inshore → performance bias

Work with the Loft

• Provide real data: Polars (even estimated) Rig tune numbers Crew style

Accept Compromise

• IRC rewards versatility, not perfection

Maintain Relentlessly

• UV protection

• Proper flaking / storage

• Regular shape checks

Replace Strategically

• Headsails first (most critical)

• Then main

• Then downwind inventory

What Top Sailors Understand (That Others Don’t)

Top helmsmen and trimmers know:

• Sail shape is dynamic, not fixed

• Material behaviour changes with: Load Temperature Age

Poor sailors:

• Blame sails too early

• Ignore trim range

• Fail to adapt to sail characteristics

11. Industry Reflection: 20 Years of Change

20 years ago:

• Sailmaker = craftsman

• Design = experience

Today:

• Sailmaker = engineer + data scientist

• Design = simulation + iteration

Yet one truth remains:

“The best sails in the world still need a crew that understands them.”

Final Thought

Modern sail technology offers extraordinary performance—but only if:

• The sail is correctly specified

• The boat is correctly set up

• The crew understands how to use it

In IRC racing, the winners are not those with the most expensive sails—but those with the best integrated system of design, material, and execution and thank goodness for dyneema, and soft shackles they make life so much safer!

If this is the first FirstBeat piece you’ve read, there are now 30+ articles in the archive covering everything from watch systems and fatigue management to routing, navigation, and crew leadership.

Stuart Greenfield
Author of FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence

I write about offshore racing performance, and work with crews who want to improve it.

Preparation. Decisions. Execution.

From first beat to first place.

Thanks for reading FirstBeat - Offshore racing intelligence! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Start in the Solent. Head east to Bembridge Ledge. Leave St Catherine’s Point to starboard. Then west across the Channel approaches to Dartmouth, leaving the Mewstone to starboard before the finish.

About 112 miles. One night at sea. A fresh westerly start. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, actually.

This year’s Morgan Cup has all the ingredients of a proper tactical offshore race: a reducing westerly breeze, a cold front clearing through, tidal gates at Bembridge, St Catherine’s, Portland and the finish, and enough routing variation across Lyme Bay to make the fleet split, second-guess itself and probably invent several new swear words before breakfast.

The first part of the race should be fairly brisk, with a fresh W to WSW breeze at the start and some squally, unsettled conditions around the back of the Isle of Wight. But as the race progresses west, the wind is expected to veer and ease. By the time the middle of the fleet is working towards Dartmouth on Saturday morning, this may no longer be a drag race. It may be a patience test.

The big questions are not complicated, but they matter.

When do you tack off the Needles?
How hard do you commit south of the rhumb line?
How far south is too far off Portland?
Do you stay offshore across Lyme Bay, or work the northern option?
And, most importantly, can you arrive at Dartmouth before the breeze fades and the tide starts making the last few miles feel very long indeed?

The Morgan Cup has a slightly curious history, with its roots in the Royal Thames Yacht Club and the original race dating back to 1929. It later became part of the RORC programme, and over the years has been won by everything from serious big-boat campaigns to well-sailed smaller IRC boats and two-handed entries.

For the record, a Farr 40 called 2XL won it in 2000.

I may possibly remember that one.

This year, though, past glory will not help much. The race looks like it will reward crews who stay sharp after dark, understand the tide, keep questioning the routing, and avoid falling in love with one neat line on a screen.

The full FirstBeat Morgan Cup briefing looks at the course, weather models, routing options, tide gates, likely decision points and where this race may really be decided.

Because in a reducing breeze, the winner is often not the boat that looked clever at the start.

It is the one still making good decisions when everyone else is tired, cold and quietly hoping Dartmouth is closer than it looks.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

If this article helped you think a little more clearly about the next race, please consider subscribing.

Free subscribers receive regular offshore racing notes, tactical insights, safety thinking, and race-preparation ideas.

Paid subscribers help support the work and receive deeper analysis, including more detailed race briefings, tactical notes, routing thoughts, and practical offshore performance intelligence.

Thanks for reading.

Share

Leave a comment

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Our weather intelligence setup was, by modern standards, comically analogue. A satellite phone connected to a mobile phone and portable router — which had to have a clear view of the sky to work at all — pulled GRIB files down into the onboard PC running Seatrack. Old software, certainly, but the mathematics behind it was doing the same fundamental job as the routing engines in Expedition and Adrena today: take the weather, take the boat’s predicted performance, run the options, find the quickest way through the problem. Alongside the screen there was a barometer — still, in my view, the single best instrument for anticipating a weather change — the BBC Radio 4 shipping forecast on longwave, and a small black box that had started life as a fax machine and downloaded forecast data onto what amounted to a tiny green-screen display. Not exactly a professional weather routing operation. Then again, I am not exactly young. We used what we had, and we used all of it.

We were well out of AIS range of any other boat in the class. The brief windows when we had enough satellite signal to pull down the Yellow Brick tracker gave us a rough sense of where the boats in our fleet were, and not much more. For practical purposes, we were on our own.

The sea off the Outer Hebrides was telling a slightly different story from the model. The wind was not behaving quite as cleanly as the GRIB suggested, and the pressure, the feel of the boat, the sky and the water all gave that familiar offshore warning: the screen may be right in principle, but wrong enough in practice to cost you the race. There was no fleet to cross-check against, no AIS contact, nobody else’s tack to follow. It was just the boat, the weather, the software and the question of which one to believe.

So before committing north-east towards Muckle Flugga, we made the tactical decision that the routing line had not quite earned. We trusted what we were seeing over what the software was drawing. The next forty-eight hours were brutal — hard upwind in twenty-five to thirty knots, thirty degrees of heel, no relief — and then we ran into a wind hole off Muckle Flugga. A satellite phone call had told us we had been leading the race overall, yes overall on IRC, for eight days. That is the power of the classic S&S design: upwind just fast, straight downwind fast, if you can hold your nerve and stop the roll. Reaching always a nightmare. We drifted around the most northerly point of the course and set off for Fair Isle and the Scottish east coast on a punishing reach. We knew we had lost the overall lead. The GRIBs had not predicted the hole accurately — but to be honest, we could not have sailed around it regardless.

We did enough to win Class 4 in the Round Britain and Ireland Race, and a good overall finish for the oldest boat in the fleet. What that race taught me — or perhaps confirmed — is something that has been growing more relevant ever since: the technology that helps us find better answers can also persuade whole fleets to ask the same question, accept the same answer and sail into the same piece of water. Getting the weather picture wrong, or getting too many conflicting pictures and following none of them properly, is not really a technology problem. It is a thinking problem. And if you understand it properly, it is also an opportunity — which is what this article is about.

1. How We Got Here

Cast your mind back to the Admiral’s Cup era. Routing was done with paper charts, a pencil, pilot charts, hand-drawn tidal vectors, weatherfax, radio forecasts and the accumulated judgement of whoever you could persuade to sit behind the chart table at two in the morning. The competitive edge in navigation was genuinely scarce — it lived in the heads of a relatively small number of people who had enough miles, enough failures and enough weather scars to read a synoptic chart with real conviction.

The RORC (Royal Ocean Racing club), always progressive, sensibly introduced technology into the offshore rules as they became affordable for all. Offshore racing remained competitive and relevant and so it continues

Software did change things in a leap alongside reliable hardware. Expedition became the navigation package of choice for many serious offshore racing programmes. Adrena developed its own deep following. PredictWind, Squid, SailGrib, LuckGrib, qtVlm and TimeZero widened access to routing tools that would have seemed like science fiction to the navigators of the 1970s and 80s. At the same time, the weather models improved and became easier to access. GFS, the American global model, became freely available and widely used. ECMWF, called “EC” by most sailors, became the high-quality benchmark that professional navigators wanted to compare against. Higher-resolution local models, ensemble forecasts and now AI-assisted forecasts have added further layers. AI assited auto-helms are now going to start having a big impact this year as well (2026).

The result is, in many ways, extraordinary. A club IRC boat leaving Cowes for a Channel Race, a Class 40 heading across Biscay and an IMOCA 60 preparing for the Southern Ocean may all be looking at the same global model families, broadly similar routing outputs and broadly similar strategic choices. That is genuine progress. But it has a side effect that the sport has been slow to reckon with honestly: when the same information is available to everyone, the information itself stops being the edge.

The old navigator could win by knowing something the fleet did not know. The modern navigator is more likely to win by interpreting shared information better than the fleet, by recognising when the information is incomplete, and by having the courage to trust the evidence on deck when the software is pointing somewhere else. That is a very different game — and most crews have not yet adjusted their thinking to match it.

2. The Mechanics of Convergence

To understand why fleets bunch up, you need to understand what routing software is actually doing.

In simple terms, the software takes three main inputs: a weather model, a boat polar, and a start and finish point. The weather model provides forecast wind speed and direction across a grid and through time. The polar tells the software how fast the boat should sail at different wind speeds and angles. The routing engine then calculates, thousands or millions of times, the combination of headings, tacks and gybes that should get you from A to B in the shortest elapsed time. The output looks persuasive because it is precise, a line on a chart, an ETA, a sequence of manoeuvres, a neat answer to a messy offshore problem.

The difficulty is not that the algorithm is wrong. Often it is broadly right. The problem is that when most navigators in the class are using the same global models, broadly similar routing engines and broadly similar polars, their answers will tend to converge. Routes cluster, boats cluster, and thinking clusters and when thinking clusters, the fleet starts to look less like a race and more like a convoy.

That is where the danger begins, because a navigator can easily mistake a common answer for a correct answer. The fact that the fleet is going somewhere does not prove the fleet is right. It may only prove that the fleet has asked the same question of the same data and accepted the same output.

In the 2026 Myth of Malham Race, the routing was almost unanimous: take the mainland shore in the shallow water towards Yarmouth, push north into Christchurch Bay, then come south to Durlston Head off Swanage. I took the opposite view and tacked along the Island shore instead. By the time we reached Hurst Narrows and the Sconce cardinal, we were around one and a half miles behind the leaders in our class — behind the fleet, behind the routing solution, and with a crew who were beginning to wonder whether their skipper had lost the plot entirely.

The pressure came when I held my line past the Shingles bank and took a shallow track close in to Totland and Alum Bay, heading south-west. Everyone on board wanted to tack onto port and follow the fleet north. The questions were polite, the faces were not. And off the Needles fairway buoy, I gave in. We tacked north to join the convoy.

Less than a mile later, looking at the tracker, I could see the fleet to the north had slowed. We tacked back and resumed the route I had planned before the pressure got to me. From the Needles to Portland Bill we were one of the fastest boats in the fleet. Post-race analysis told the rest of the story clearly enough: roughly ninety-five per cent of the fleet had followed each other into Christchurch Bay, the routing software had pointed them all there, and most of them had been slower for it.

The moment I tacked north off the Needles is the moment I want you to remember as you read this article. Not the result — the moment of doubt. That is where the follow-the-leader problem actually lives: not in the software, but in the human being looking at the tracker and losing confidence in their own reasoning because everyone else seems to disagree.

Simon Fisher — one of the most respected professional navigators in offshore racing, winner of the Ocean Race and the Magnus Olsson Prize — described the trade-off with characteristic precision in a 2025 interview with Yachting World: “Good routing comes down in large part to good risk management. A big part of that is how much risk you place on the weather forecast or a routing option, versus what the rest of the fleet is doing. It’s a strategy versus tactics trade-off.” When the models agree, when the ensemble routes are tightly packed, when the weather pattern is stable and the fleet is compressed around a rational solution, the answer may genuinely be to stay with the fleet and execute better. But when the models disagree, when the ensembles scatter, when the deck is telling you something the GRIB is not, the game changes entirely — and that is when races open up.

3. Automation bias: The quiet enemy on the chart table

There is a name for part of this problem, and it is worth knowing: automation bias. It is not stupidity and it is not laziness, it is what happens when a system is right often enough that people stop interrogating it properly. The routing software gives you a clean line, a tidy ETA, a neat sequence of tacks and gybes and a number that looks more objective than the uncomfortable evidence building on deck: the darker patch of water under the land, the pressure trend that has not matched the last GRIB, the rival two miles away sailing a different wind angle, the cloud line developing faster than the model suggested, the sea state knocking half a knot off the speed the polar promised.

The danger is not that navigators use routing software. The danger is that they allow it to become the senior decision-maker on board. The best navigators I have sailed with do not worship the route — they interrogate it. They ask what assumption is buried inside it, what happens if the front is six hours late, whether the headland breeze fills differently than the model expects, whether the boat is actually sailing to the polar being used, and whether the fleet is making a genuine strategic choice or simply copying the same first answer from the same data.

That distinction matters more than any single piece of software. The software can calculate a route. It cannot take responsibility for the race.

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4. The Three Layers of Convergence

The follow-the-leader dynamic is not one thing. It operates on three levels simultaneously, and understanding which layer is in play at any given moment is the key to exploiting it.

Layer one: weather model convergence. Most serious offshore navigators are looking at the same major model families. GFS is global, freely available and runs out to sixteen days, though useful detail reduces with forecast horizon. ECMWF is widely respected and heavily used. Higher-resolution local models may refine the picture, but in many offshore races the strategic framework is still being shaped by the same broad model guidance. When the models agree, routing solutions stabilise — but it is not enough to look at the latest GRIB. You need to look at model behaviour over time. Has one model been drifting consistently? Has one been persistently late with a front? Are the ensembles tightly grouped or spread across half the Channel? The route is not the forecast; it is only the software’s answer to one version of it.

Layer two: software convergence. Expedition, Adrena, PredictWind, Squid, SailGrib and their various competitors do not all work identically — the interfaces, features, routing controls and underlying assumptions differ, and some are considerably deeper than others. But if you feed similar software the same weather data, similar polars and the same start and finish, you should not be surprised when the outputs begin to look similar. The weakest navigator asks what the route is. The better navigator asks why it is the route. The best navigator asks what would have to be wrong for that route to lose — and that final question is the one most sailors never get to.

Layer three: polar convergence. Boat polars have improved enormously. ORC’s VPP, manufacturer polars, sailmaker performance data, logged boat data and modern instrument calibration have all made it much easier to model how a boat should perform at different wind speeds and angles. That is useful, but it is not magic. Your polar is still a prediction, and it may not know your sail inventory, the tired leech on your old No.3, the way your boat bogs down in short chop or the fact that your crew loses ten per cent of performance after midnight. The boats that share similar rating profiles and similar real-world performance will often be routed towards similar waypoints — but the boat that has built better real-world performance data can sometimes break the pattern. Most amateur crews think of polars as something they download. Serious crews think of them as something they build.

5. AIS, trackers and the end of hiding

Here is where the follow-the-leader dynamic becomes genuinely complicated — because in most modern offshore races, the fleet is no longer sailing in the informational darkness of the old days. Back in the day the fun was the French boat with the dimming stern light on a resitor that meant you thought they were sailing away. It’s just a story but sums up what sailing at night used to be like!

AIS is now standard practice in offshore racing. In RORC races it is mandatory, with competitors expected to transmit the boat name, not just an MMSI number, and at its useful range of ten to twenty miles every boat in your vicinity is visible in real time. That changes behaviour in ways that cut both ways. If your nearest rival is two miles to leeward and their bow is lifting, that is information — and if their AIS track has shown a consistent ten-degree header over the past twenty minutes, you may be looking at better real-time wind intelligence than any model. Using AIS that way is not copying. In the right hands, it is navigation.

But the darker side is real. When every boat is watching every other boat, herd behaviour is reinforced in real time. The navigator who was considering a split may lose conviction when the tracker shows the fleet going the other way. The rational individual response, repeated across the fleet, becomes collective conservatism — and the convoy tightens further.

Satellite trackers — YB Tracking and similar systems — have added another layer. In many offshore races the whole fleet picture is now visible to competitors, shore teams and armchair tacticians, and some race tracker feeds can be pulled directly into navigation software. The tracker is no longer just entertainment for people at home. It has become part of the tactical environment, which means the fleet race has quietly split into two simultaneous contests: the race on the water, and the race to interpret shared information better than everyone else. Everyone can see the dots. Not everyone understands what the dots mean.

6. The AI Weather Layer

There is another layer arriving quickly, and it is worth understanding what it does and does not change.

ECMWF’s Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System, AIFS, is now operational, with an ensemble version running alongside the traditional physics-based model. That is a serious development. It may give sailors faster forecasts, different model behaviour and, in some situations, better guidance at shorter lead times. It will almost certainly become part of the offshore navigator’s standard toolkit within the next few years.

But it will not remove the herd problem. It may sharpen it. Once the same AI-assisted forecasts are distributed through the same routing platforms, the fleet will simply converge around a new set of answers. The names of the models will change; the human problem will not. The edge will still belong to the navigator who understands uncertainty rather than just output and the relevant question will not be “what does the AI say?” but “where is the AI likely to be blind, and what evidence do we have on deck that it has missed something?” Modern offshore racing is not moving from human judgement to machine judgement. It is moving towards a harder version of human judgement, because the machine will often look more confident than the situation warrants. And confidence, as any experienced offshore sailor knows, is particularly dangerous when it comes from a screen.

7. Where the Model Fails — and Why That Is Your Edge

Here is what routing software cannot do. It cannot see the line of dark water under the headland that tells you the land shadow extends further than the model shows. It cannot feel the pressure building on the backstay twenty minutes before the wind shift appears in the GRIB. It cannot read the tide rips off the Casquets well enough to tell you whether the west-going stream will give you half a knot or a full knot of lift on the final approach. It cannot know that your headsail, cut slightly flatter than the class norm, carries better in twenty knots than the polar suggests. It cannot tell you whether the crew on deck are sharp, cold, hungry, seasick or quietly losing concentration.

These are the gaps. And they are not small gaps — they are the gaps that separate the fleet.

Simon Fisher’s advice to keep your head out of the boat is not a throwaway line. It is the central discipline of modern offshore navigation. The screen is only one source of truth, and it may be the most organised and most seductive source, but it is not the only one.

Coastal gates. The Fastnet Rock approach, Portland Bill, the Casquets, the Lizard, Start Point, the Mull of Kintyre, St Catherine’s, the Needles, Anvil Point, the Butt of Lewis, Muckle Flugga anywhere the coastline distorts the broad-scale weather picture, you need to be careful. A global model may be resolving the atmosphere at tens of kilometres; a tidal race may punish or reward you at the scale of a boat length. No routing software bridges that gap reliably, and the navigator who has sailed those waters fifty times knows something the algorithm does not.

Transition periods. The approach of a front, the edge of a ridge, the collapse of a gradient breeze, the arrival of a thermal, the moment the tide changes but the wind has not yet decided what it wants to do, these are the moments when the fleet becomes most vulnerable to lazy routing. When the models diverge, the question to ask is not simply which model gives the best route but which model has behaved most consistently over the last three or four runs, which one has been drifting and which one best matches what you can observe now. The fleet will often chase the most attractive routing line. Good navigators ask whether it is attractive because it is likely, or because it is flattering.

Polar reality versus polar theory. Your routing is only as good as the polar you feed it. If your boat cannot sail to the numbers, the software is optimising a fiction. If it beats the numbers in a particular condition, the software may be too conservative. If the polar assumes a sail you do not carry, a crew weight you do not have or an instrument calibration you have not checked recently, the route may be clean and still wrong. The best routing input is not a pretty polar diagram, it is a brutally honest one.

8. How to Use the Herd

The follow-the-leader dynamic is not only a problem. Used deliberately, it is a weapon.

Cover smartly, not blindly. When the models genuinely agree, when the ensemble families are tight and the fleet is compressed for good reason with conditions stable, you are unlikely to gain much by being clever. That is not the moment for a heroic split — it is the moment to sail the boat properly. Trim better. Steer better. Change sails earlier. Hit the tidal gate. Eat before you get stupid. Sleep before you get proud. In a compressed fleet, consistent execution is its own form of strategy, and you may gain thirty minutes by not making the small, accumulated mistakes that everyone else makes when they get tired.

Identify the moment of divergence. In every offshore race of meaningful length there is usually at least one moment where the race opens up — the models disagree, the tide gate becomes marginal, the ridge weakens, the breeze fills from the wrong side, the majority commits to one version of the future while another version is still available. That is the decision point, and your position in the race matters. If you are leading on corrected time with a sensible cushion you do not need to gamble like a boat in eighth place. If you are mid-fleet and need to move, the moment of model disagreement may be your chance. Risk is not a moral quality — it is a tool that destroys races when used stupidly and wins them when used properly.

Use the tracker against itself. The tracker tells you where the fleet is, and more importantly it tells you what the fleet believes. When you see the convoy converging on a gate, you are looking at the collective routing output. The question to ask is not “where is the fleet going?” but “why is the fleet going there?” — and then the harder question: “do I agree?” Sometimes you will. Sometimes you will not. The difference between those two answers is where your race actually begins.

Build your own polars obsessively. This is not glamorous work — it is logging, calibrating, checking instruments, writing down sail combinations, comparing target speed with real speed, reviewing tracks after races, asking honestly whether a slow leg was caused by a wrong route, bad trim, tired sails, a cold driver or a polar that was simply nonsense. But this is where amateur fleets consistently leave large amounts of performance lying around uncollected. If your routing inputs are more accurate than your competitors’ inputs, your routing output will diverge from theirs in the direction of reality. That is a real edge, not a fashionable one.

Read conditions, not screens. The most underrated skill in modern offshore navigation is the oldest one. Look outside. Read the water, the sky, the pressure. Watch the boats around you. Listen to the helm. Feel the sea state. Ask the watch coming on what has changed. The navigator who can come on deck at 0300, look at the sky and say “the model is late” is still worth more than another laptop running another route. Miles still matter. Experience still matters. Judgement still matters.

9. Five Questions Before You Follow the Fleet

Before committing to the routing line, ask five questions.

First: are the models genuinely agreeing, or are you only looking at one attractive routing line without checking whether the ensemble supports it? Second: are the ensemble routes tightly packed, or is the software hiding significant uncertainty behind one confident-looking answer? Third: is the fleet going there because the weather genuinely supports it, or because everyone copied the same first solution from the same data? Fourth: does your boat actually sail to the polar being used, in the sea state you are in, with the sails currently set and the crew currently awake? Fifth — and most important — what does the deck say? Not the laptop. The deck. The clouds, the pressure, the water, the tide line, the helm load, the boats around you, the feel of the boat.

If those five answers all point the same way, follow the route and sail the boat hard. If they do not, the race has just become interesting.

10. The Deeper Point — Offshore Racing Has Changed

There is something genuinely interesting about what has happened to offshore racing over the past two decades, and it is worth discussing;

The technology designed to distribute competitive advantage has, in many situations, compressed the old routing edge almost to zero at the top of the fleet. Everyone has the models, everyone has the software, everyone can see the fleet and everyone can look clever on the chart table. But that does not mean the racing has become easier. It means the opposite. The old offshore game had more informational dark corners a clever navigator could sometimes hide a strategic advantage over the horizon, and the fleet would not find out until the next sched. The modern game has fewer hiding places. The fleet can see more, know more, compare more and react faster.

The premium has shifted. Less oracle, more judgement. Less mystery, more execution. The modern offshore navigator has to use the technology without becoming obedient to it, sail fast when the route is obvious, stay patient when the fleet compresses, and be brave only when the evidence genuinely justifies it. The era of the navigator as the one person on board who knows something no one else does is largely over — the technology democratised that knowledge. What it could not democratise is judgement. And judgement, as it has always been, remains the scarcest commodity offshore.

The fleet will follow the routing software. Let them. Your edge is in the part of the race where the software is incomplete, the conditions are local, the fleet is nervous, and the only reliable answer comes from weather sense, boat feel, hard-earned experience and the courage to think for yourself.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.

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Thanks for reading.

Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place.

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