iShares Cup, Amsterdam

All that wind in the past few weeks and when you need a good breeze it disappears. It's like mid-summer today in the Amsterdam canal basin where 10 Extreme-40 catamarans are competing in the final round of the iShares Cup.

The only teams with a chance of winning the series are Alinghi and Team Origin and up to half way through the programme, Alinghi look to be breezing it, which, given the light airs, is hardly the right choice of adjective.

I spent some time this morning floating around on Team Origin with a star-studded cast of sailors including three Olympic Gold medalists, Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy and Andrew "Bart" Simpson, joined on the boat by Sir Keith Mills, the team principal.

Mills has been working behind the scenes helping to broker a deal on the America's Cup between Ernesto Bertorelli and Larry Ellison.

He seems optimistic that the two businessmen who have been at the centre of protracted legal action over the future of the race, will come to an accommodation before the next court hearing in the New Year.

So will the next event be multi-hulled or single-hulled? It's too early to say but most people I have spoken with think it's inconceivable that the future of the event will not consist of a single-hulled challenge competition preceding a two-boat sail off for the cup itself. Mills still believes the challengers will be racing against each other next year, culminating in a cup race in 2011.

And what of the two big multi-hulls that have been built for BMW Oracle and Alinghi? Mills thinks they will make fine museum pieces. What a ridiculous waste of time and money.

In a class of their own

During one of the Rolex races I sailed with Charles Dunstone, chief executive and co-founder of Carphone Warehouse. From the back of his yacht, Hamilton II there was a grandstand view of two J-class yachts, Velsheda and Ranger competing head-to-head just to our rear.

It made for some stunning pictures, two of which I have featured here. I'm keen to write a feature on the J-class yachts which must still be the classiest sail boats on the water all those years after they first appeared. There are four new ones in build right now so the class is going to have an injection of some real competition. We ain't seen nothing yet.


On the water, at least, there is no love lost between Ronald de Waal, owner of Velsheda and John Williams, the owner of Ranger (the two boats collided at the Rolex even) but the rivalry may be coming to an end if Williams decides to sell Ranger as some reports have suggested.

Porto Cervo Marina, Sardinia

It’s always interesting to see how the other half lives. But in the week of the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup we're not talking about the other half but the other 0.00001 per cent. There used to be a night spot here nicknamed “the millionaires’ club.” Today they have renamed it the “billionaires club.”

The Yacht Club Costa Smeralda was built in 1967 by the Aga Khan - the Paris-based head of the Nizari Muslims, the largest branch of the Ismaili Shi'a sect - and a few of his friends. Create an exclusive yacht club within a sleepy, sunny, rocky inlet and wait. One by one the big yachts came – the really big yachts: yachts with toy cupboards in the stern holds. In the place where smaller yachts store their mops, buckets and painters, the biggest maxis have sailing dinghies, power boats and canoes.

Search across the deck, beyond the godlike physiques of the so-called rock star sailors to the scruffiest incarnation of Harold Steptoe and you may well be looking at the owner.

What do the sailors do after a hard day’s racing in the Rolex Cup? A group of them I noticed were playing with remote controlled yachts. The rest were hitting the bar.



The super yachts range from sleek Wallys (I have always thought it must be something of an indignity to describe oneself as a Wally yacht owner) to the timeless J-class boats evoking the great days of sail.

The shirts may be scruffy but there’s no mistaking the accessories. Men with chunky watches, glistening like medieval body armour, heave their burdened wrists chest high with all the effort of a weight-training exercise.

If you want to give a maxi-yacht owner a hernia, just ask him the time. The yachts look unsinkable; you also get the impression they are fully recession-proofed.

“It’s a different world,” an event organiser confessed to me. “Before I discovered the big boat circuit I had no idea it existed. They keep an incredibly low profile,” she said.

There’s no stigma in being rich in this place. Not much advantage either. No matter how big you make your boat there will always be another that's bigger or taller with vast swathes of teak. They have a name for the rain forest here. They call it decking.

Williams wins Danish Open

Ian Williams extended his lead in the current World Match Racing Tour at the weekend when he and his Pindar racing team won the Danish Open. Williams, the current world champion, pulled clear of his nearest rival, Frenchman Mathieu Richard who failed to make the semi-finals.

This was my first trip to one of the match racing events and the Danes were very welcoming hosts. All the crews have identical boats so it really is a test of team work, tactics and helming skills.

There is simply no room for error so every manoeuvre has to be like clockwork. It's more like boxing than racing with umpires following the two-boat races on an end-to-end course that must be rounded twice. This means that spectators have a clear understanding of who is in the lead as the boats converge for each buoy rounding.

In the battle for dominance, however the boats undertake many more manoeuvres than in a fleet race, tacking and back tacking when fighting for position. In the pre-race jostling they sometimes do a series of pirouettes as they try to make the best position on the line.

The tour seems to be attracting increasing interest from potential hosts, not to name some big names in sailing such Magnus Holmberg. A group from a Bahrain bank were visiting this tie, looking at the feasibility of staging an event in Bahrain.

The tour includes stages in Brazil, Germany, Korea, Switzerland and Sweden but has no UK event as yet. This seems odd since the world champion is British. Sooner or later one of the hungrier ports - Cardiff, Liverpool or Hartlepool perhaps - is going to wake up and bid for the event. It beats duck racing.

Danish Open - World Match Racing Tour 2008

I'm packing my bags for Frederikshavn which is hosting the Danish round of the World Match Racing Tour. The plan is to profile Ian Williams, the world match racing champion. I met Ian over a year ago in Antigua where we exchanged life stories while propping up a bar in English Harbour (he's the one in the light coloured cap).

Unfortunately I forgot everything he told me (which might be a good thing). This time I plan to have my notebook and pen with me. During the Beijing Olympics If you saw the way Ben Ainslie was edging out his nearest rival, Zach Railey, in the final race of the Finn class - the one that had to be abandoned and re-run - you could get an idea of how match racing works.

When one yacht is racing another - as they do in the America's Cup - tactics are everything. Often the boat that gets its nose in front first will try to cover any moves by its competitor.

Williams is a master of this kind of sailing. If Ainslie joins the full tour next year as expected, it will make for some exciting head-to-heads. The only reason we have not seen Williams in an Olympic event, incidentally, is that the men's match racing discipline was voted out of the Olympics before Athens in 2004.

It's great that in the UK we have so much to cheer among our medal haul. Yet only Ainslie among the UK Olympic sailors could be said to be anything like a household name, although many of the rest of them, such as Iain Percy, are becoming well known within the sailing fraternity.

It's a reflection of our society, perhaps, that a nonentity such as Jade Goody, famous only because she appeared on a dire mainstream TV programme, would probably garner more recognition in a street survey than any of the UK's Olympic medal-winning sailors.

When a recent street survey was carried out in the US and people were asked if they could name any sailors the top three were: 1. Christopher Columbus, 2.Ted Turner, 3. Popeye!

That's why I want to write about Williams - not that the FT magazine is exactly mainstream - because people of his calibre deserve better recognition outside sailing. He is world champion for goodness sake!

The last time I saw him, incidentally, was during Cowes week when he was heading towards the pontoons after winning the Laser SB3 class. It was so far ahead of the field I couldn't see the second finisher. That's how good he is.

Cowes to Madeira

Cowes week came and went. I always think Cowes town gets too rowdy during the annual regatta while out on the water it's chaotic.

I buried my prejudices and sailed in one of the Sunsail races. It wasn't a bad race. Unfortunately we were saddled with a particularly poorly prepared boat (what preparation?) that had a ripped sail with a baton missing. Our helm deserved a medal.

I can see the attraction for corporate teams who can come down from the city, have a fun day's racing, then clear off with a one-off rental payment - no mooring and upkeep fees for a company boat.

The day after the Artemis Challenge, a round-the-Isle of Wight race contested by Open 60s,I had the opportunity to go out on the winning boat, Pindar. With a righting moment of 48 tons compared with about 38 tons on Artemis, it has a big power advantage. It's a beast of a boat, but an amazingly well-balanced beast from the helm. I'm preparing an FT feature on Brian Thompson who I believe has an excellent chance of winning the Vendee Globe in what promises to be the most competitive Vendee yet with some exceptionally strong French and British entrants.

Just now, however, my thoughts are with Puma Logic, the boat I helped crew in the 2006 Round Britain and Ireland race. It looks like they had some fierce weather in the early part of the race from Cowes to Madeira.

If you want to get a taste of what ocean racing is really like in a big sea on a comparatively small boat, read the Puma Logic blog. Good luck to all of them.

Round the Island Race

Come and join ICAP Leopard for the Isle of Wight Round the Island Race this weekend, said the ICAP team who hope to break the race record to add to a string of other records they have broken of late.

It would have been quite something to have been out on the rail of this super-maxi and back in Cowes for lunch. Sadly I had another commitment - sea kayaking with friends, off the Isle of Wight ironically.

It should be quite a sight, watching close on 1,900 entries competing in what must be Britain's most popular yacht race. If you're out there and you see four canoes bobbing around on the water as you're approaching The Needles do give us a wave.