Regattas

A little over a week into the 2012-13 Vendée Globe, with the doldrums still ahead of much of the fleet, and already the field of 20 has been reduced by four, with a fifth looking to be in serious trouble.

“That’s it… We’ve smashed the arse off it!” tweeted the Vestas Sailrocket 2 team on Friday. The team broke the 500 meter speed record, with an average of 59.38 knots Friday in Ludertiz, Namibia.

With the increased emphasis on “extreme” racing featuring carbon-fiber cats, gigantic ocean-going multihulls and turbocharged skiffs, many might consider the idea of an inshore displacement monohull pro circuit to be a nonstarter.

The 2012 ISAF Annual Conference wrapped up Sunday and released the decision that windsurfing, not kiteboarding, will be included in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The Vendée Globe is off to an eventful start. Nineteen of the 20 skippers were at the start line on Saturday, November 11 in Les Sables d’Olonne, France, for the 24,048 mile solo race around the world.

The 2012 ISAF Rolex World Sailor of the Year Awards were presented to Ben Ainslie, 35, of Great Britain and Lijia Xu, 25, of China yesterday at the Mansion House in Dublin, Ireland.

In the August, 2012 issue, you might have read a story about my first time flying a spinnaker in a college regatta.  I returned to the same offshore regatta in Larchmont, New York, this year, excited to perfect the craft of downwind speed.

The first of twelve 70-foot ocean racing yachts for the Clipper Race arrived in Felixstowe, UK, last night from China. The Clipper Round the World Yacht Race is the longest yacht race at 40,000 miles…

Yandex, Russia’s leading technology company, is teaming with SpeedDream to attempt to build the world’s fasted monohull. Yandex, as the principal sponsor, will lend SpeedDream its computing power and technological expertise to build a successful design.

San Francisco Bay sailors are accustomed to having the big professional round-the-world races pass them by some 93 degrees of latitude to the south. A diversion to the Golden Gate makes no sense.