More sailing news

The line honours titles, awarded to the fastest multihull and monohull yachts, have been decided at the 2020 Rolex Middle Sea Race.

The Swan One Design Worlds, the racing component of this week’s inaugural Swan Experience, concluded earlier today in Scarlino, Tuscany. The week’s class winners have been confirmed. Marcus Brennecke’s German yacht Hatari is the new ClubSwan 50 world champion. The Swan 45 worlds was claimed by Lennard van Oeveren’s Dutch entry Motions. Competing for the Gold Cup, Cetilar-Vitamina was the triumphant ClubSwan 36. The same boats also claimed The Nations League 2020 prizes (calculated on combined Swan One Design Worlds and Swan Tuscany Challenge points).

Supported by Rolex since 2002 and organized by the Royal Malta Yacht Club (RMYC), the annual Rolex Middle Sea Race commenced today from Valletta. 50 yachts from 15 countries are taking on the 41st edition of a revered and famous offshore challenge. The race, beginning and ending in Malta, offers a tactical and spectacular 606-nautical mile circumnavigation of Sicily featuring two active volcanoes and a myriad of islands.

Unstable weather conditions on the Tuscan coast forced a shortened racing programme today at the Swan One Design Worlds. With just one windward/leeward race completed, the impressive starts and performances from today’s winners - Onegroup (ClubSwan 50), Motions (Swan 45) and Cetilar-Vitamina (ClubSwan 36) - proved decisive in reshaping the respective Class leaderboards.

This week sees maxi yachts, both classic and modern, descend upon the Cote d’Azur for the second week of the new format Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez. For the first time this year, the event has been divided in two, lengthening it to a fortnight. This transformation was made by organisers, the Société Nautique de Saint-Tropez (SNST), prior to the onset of the pandemic and in retrospect, in the current crisis has proved fortuitous: There are fewer yachts in Saint-Tropez at any one time and fewer people out on the streets.

The Germans won both the 49er and 49er FX fleets on the final day of the 2020 Forward WIP European Championship, while Italy foiled to victory in the Nacra 17 catamaran fleet.

The Netherlands will become the international sailing capital in 2023 following a joint decision by World Sailing, the Royal Netherlands Watersport Association, the municipality of The Hague and TIG Sports to move the 2022 Sailing World Championships to the summer of 2023.

Mid-September it may be, but conditions for the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s 2020 IRC championships felt more like June this weekend, with shorts and T-shirts conditions and allowing a full schedule of racing to be laid on by PRO Stuart Childerley and his team. The event concluded today with two windward-leeward races on the central-eastern Solent in more variable and generally lighter winds than on Friday or Saturday.

Two experienced racing sailors got into big trouble this Saturday morning off the coast of Scheveningen in The Netherlands. Due to the turbulent weather, one of the two crew members went overboard, after which the other sailed with the yacht on a sandbank.

The central Solent delivered on the opening day of the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s IRC National Championship. The westerly wind started off light but built to a solid 18 knots, the September sun even putting in an appearance, as the three class fleet progressed through two windward-leeward races and one round the cans.