It’s interesting. There wasn’t much fuss made of John Tremlett’s latest win at Cowes Week and if you weren’t concentrating – which I wasn’t – you might have missed it.
But it’s never too late to celebrate something really worthwhile, and in the case of Tremlett’s unprecedented domination of the X One Design class, we are talking about something remarkable.
The 56-year-old sailor originally from Portsmouth has been on an amazing run which has seen him win the Captain’s Cup – the class’s trophy for winning Cowes Week – no less than 10 times.
His first victory was in 2013 on board X80, Lass. Then he won it every year for the next five, before switching to X91, Astralita. In that boat he won it in 2021 and has then repeated that feat for the last three years in a row.
This year he prevailed in mixed conditions with his regular Astralita crew – Fraser Graham and Tim Copsey – not only winning the Captain’s Cup for a 10th time, but also winning White Group and Cowes Week overall.
Other legends of the class have won the Cup at Cowes multiple times – notably HV Culpan (seven), Eric Williams (six), Peter “Basher” Baines (five) and Lt Col Stuart Jardine, who also won it seven times in Oyster and Lone Star. But no one has hit double figures and Tremlett hasn’t finished yet.
So what? you might say. Well, the XOD class is a very special fleet of old wooden 21ft keelboats which are notoriously difficult to sail well and at any time attract a decent standard of sailors, vying for a Cowes Week trophy which is often said to be the hardest one to win at the entire regatta.
The boats were designed in 1909 by Alfred Westmacott – he of the Victory class and Solent Sunbeams – since when 196 of them have been built. They were first raced in 1911 and they are spread over six divisions based from one end of the Solent to the other – from Poole and Lymington in the west, to Itchenor in the east by way of Yarmouth, Cowes and Hamble in the middle.
So what is Tremlett’s secret? A modest individual, he is not much help on this score. But he comes from an interesting sailing background with a pair of uncles – Ian and Bill Tremlett – who won the Tornado world championship in 1968, and a shipwright father, Mike. He sailed in the America’s Cup in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and went on to set up Portsmouth School Sailing Centre.
Tremlett started out racing Lasers and was in the national youth squad in the mid-1980s under the watchful eye of Jim Saltonstall, before moving on to half-tonners and other keelboats, then Etchells, some Star sailing and, later in life, Finns. In Etchells, sailing as bowman alongside Ante Razmilovic and David Bedford, he won regattas against international fields in Miami and the trio were European champions in 2003.
But the sailing experience that is most relevant to his success in XODs was Tremlett’s long apprenticeship in the Victory class based in Portsmouth. This began at the age of 16 and lasted three decades, with him winning that class at Cowes Week something like 15 times.
Tremlett says the Victory is a “bloody hard little boat to push around,” and is much more difficult than an X to sail well, with a shorter keel and a clinker hull which makes it more “draggy” than the X. But the Victory proved the perfect warm-up for what was coming next as the Poole-based professional yachtsman Bedford explains: “With his experience in the Victory class, John is very used to a horrible little boat which will stop easily, which doesn’t give you much feel through the helm, which doesn’t like chop and in which you have to be a super-good gainer of momentum, as well as preserver of it. He’s done a lot of that, so he’s a good X boat steerer.”
Bedford, who has raced many times against Tremlett in XODs, says Tremlett is a master of racecraft, smooth through manoeuvres and economical with his tacks which must be used sparingly. “In these boats, you ‘spend’ your tacks and you have to save up for tacks; you don’t get that many and, if you spend one in the wrong place, it’s not like you can undo it,” explained Bedford, a two-time Captain’s Cup winner himself. “So John is good at the discipline of X boat racing which is difficult. Lots of people aren’t good at being able to hold a tiller still, sail a boat at the appropriate angle to either maintain or build speed – or not slow it down – and most of them waggle the tiller too much and don’t realise when the speed’s dropping and when they need to start getting it back.”
Of course winning the Captain’s Cup means mastering the infinite challenges of the Solent and on that score Tremlett is right up there with the grandmasters of the art. Bedford again: “At Cowes Week you need to know the Solent in your type of boat, particularly a little one where it’s really difficult. You need to know your way up the Green, you need to know when to cross the tide, you need to know lots of tidal nuance, lots of bits of shoreline and so on. John’s done decades of that with the Victory and the X, so that all adds up.”
Temperament is another key attribute in multiple winners in any sport and the XOD class Captain Rory Paton, who has raced with Tremlett, says there’s a focus in his sailing which is unmistakable. “He is very, very intense,” said Paton. “He is very calm at it, but very intense and quiet. I like the way he does it. There is basically not a huge amount of chat – just calm, with bits of information going backwards and forwards. And he takes the information in and you can almost hear the cogs working as he decides what he is going to do next.”
Itchenor XOD Class captain Steve Dover who also races against Tremlett regularly, says the skipper of Astralita is not one to get in a barny over a mark rounding. “John’s got a fantastic temperament,” he said. “He’s obviously extremely competitive but on the water he’s a real gentleman. If he’s on starboard and there's a close port and starboard call, he’ll just sail round the back of you and not moan. He doesn’t shout and scream, he just gets on with it and it’s the same going round marks. His philosophy is not to get mixed up in all that because you lose concentration. He does what he has to do and gets on with life.”
The other qualities you hear about when asking rivals about Tremlett are his consistency, his ability to bounce back from early reverses in any race, his upwind speed, his downwind speed and his mastery of the apparently “black art” of rig set-up on X boats.
On that score Tremlett says it is really quite simple: “Setting up an XOD, as far as I am concerned, is relatively straightforward. Because you’ve got a 10-inch rule between the caps and the lowers, you basically rock the rig as far forward as you can, set the lowers so they are tight at that, then pull the mast back. And from then on, it’s just a little bit of tweaking to see how much cap shroud tension you need.”
Another thing you hear about Tremlett is that he has the advantage – or is it a disadvantage? – of running Haines Boatyard at Itchenor which specialises in looking after Cowes classic dayboats based there – XODs, Sunbeams and International Swallows. Tremlett took over at Haines after being a science teacher at secondary schools in Portsmouth for many years. He says running the yard is neither an advantage to him nor a drawback, but adds: “I lavished more attention on Lass, which I owned before I started running Haines, than I do with Astralita.”
His own view of his outstanding record in the Class is that it is certainly not something he expected. “I’m hugely surprised at the success we’ve had,” he said. “When we turned up from the Victory class and then got involved with Lass, (with regular rotating crew in those days of Jerry Lear, Richard Bullock, Richard Jordan and Ian Andrew), I was very surprised how well we did relatively quickly and to have the success we’ve enjoyed, I find strange.”
Tremlett has no plans to quit because he still loves the boats and the challenge of trying to sail them well. “I still don’t think I’m a particularly good XOD sailor, even though the results say otherwise. I am sure others will scoff at me saying that, but it is very easy to get it wrong.
“The XOD is still a fantastically challenging keelboat,” he added. “I don’t think there are many things out there that can beat it. They are relatively inexpensive; they are a little bit antiquated, which is a nice leveller of the playing field. And there are plenty of people who turn up and think they can do it but can’t, because they are not prepared to put a bit of time and effort into it, and then walk away, which is a shame.”
On that point, like all Cowes Week classes, numbers have been falling in X boats since the high point of 2011 when 146 crews contested the Captain’s Cup in the class’s centenary year. Since then fleet sizes at Cowes have fallen from around 80 to half that number, something that worries everyone I spoke to for this article.
But in terms of the difficulty of winning the Cup at Cowes Week, Paton believes it has actually got harder despite the fall in numbers. He argues that while there were probably 10 boats that could win a race in the class’s heyday, there are now 15 in a fleet that’s half the size. Tremlett does not agree, saying the fall in numbers reduces traffic congestion which was always a challenge in old X boat fleets and something that made recovering from a poor start or OCS, for example, very difficult.
I asked Paton whether anything special was done to mark Tremlett’s 10th win this year – like giving him a replica of the famous old cup they race for. But that apparently is not the XOD style. “We’re not like that,” he said, laughing, “but we make a fuss of him…of course we do!”
