Two very different races set off from Antigua over the past week. Last Sunday saw the beginning of the Mini Globe Race around the world, followed the next day by the start of the RORC Caribbean 600.
The course for the RORC Caribbean 600 is akin to a knitting pattern as it loops its way between and around and past 11 Caribbean islands – from St. Maarten in the north to Guadeloupe in the south. The fastest boats were – given the right conditions – reasonably expected to finish in around a day and a half and even the slowest boats will be back in by this weekend.
The 60+ fleet was made up of more than 600 amateur and professional sailors from 62 nations. The Zero and Super Zero classes included some of the world’s top ocean racing boats crewed by a range of star names from the professional sailing scene.
First home was American Bryan Ehrhart’s Lucky – formerly Rambler 88.
Lucky did at one point lead in every division in the race but in the end the overall IRC title went to the VO70 Tschüss 2. The boat (originally Franck Cammas’ 2011-12 Volvo Ocean Race winner Groupama 4) is owned by Christian Zugel and co-skippered by Johnny Mordaunt.
Zugel and Mordaunt assembled a dream team crew for the race that included Sonia Zugel, Al Fraser, Alex Higby, Andrew McLean, Campbell Field, Christopher Welch, Cian Guilfoyle, Edward Myers, Freddie Shanks, Luke Muller, Neal MacDonald, Pete Cumming, Simon Johnson, Stefano Nava and Stu Bannatyne.
Behind them there were close battles throughout the fleet – none more so than in IRC Zero between Niklas Zennstrom's Swedish Carkeek 52 Rán and Frederik Puzin's French Carkeek 54 Daguet 5. The battle reportedly went down to the wire with the Rán crew finally getting the upper hand by just eight minutes on corrected time to take second overall in IRC.
With both boats set to go head-to-head in this summer's Admiral's Cup reboot we can expect plenty of epic racing to come between these two top flight crews as the 2025 season progresses.
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In contrast, when the Mini Globe Race – the brainchild of Australian adventurer Donald MacIntyre – set off on Sunday the fleet of 14 solo skippers racing home-built 21-foot wooden boats were embarking on a round the world adventure that is expected to take around 13 months to complete.
McIntyre’s inspiration for creating the race was John Guzzwell’s four-year circumnavigation aboard his 20ft 6in (6.25m) yawl, Trekka between 1955 and 1959. The race course takes the fleet westward around the world with the fleet first heading from Antigua to Panama. From there the boats will be trucked overland before a mammoth second leg to Fiji. Later stops along the way include Darwin, Australia, Cape Town, South Africa, and Recife, Brazil.
While the Caribbean 600 line honours winner Lucky ripped around the 600-mile course leaving the rest of the fleet in her wake to finish in just under a day and three quarters, the Mini Globe Race adventurers have so far been travelling in a tight pack with top speeds around the 5.5 knot mark as the fleet approaches the halfway point of the opening leg.
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Sadly, the longstanding US publication Sailing Magazine ceased its print publication last month after a nearly 60-year run.. Founded in 1966, it was America’s longest published pure-sailing magazine.
According to a story on its website: “The publication that started as a newspaper for Lake Michigan sailors and grew into a glossy, oversized national sailing magazine respected by readers and advertisers alike for the quality of its writing and photography, published its last printed issue in January 2025.”
Publisher Bill Schanen said the independent, family-owned magazine could not compete for advertising revenues with much larger media companies that can offer advertisers deals across the breadth of the multiple titles that they own. Schanen went on to cite “recent acquisitions that have resulted in a single company owning almost all of America’s national boating magazines.”
The publication will continue to publish online and via its email newsletter.
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While doing some Google research into a completely different topic I stumbled across this amazing film from 1957 made by BBC Northern Ireland introducing the British TV audience to the Flying 15 sailboat.
“For many people the owning and sailing of small boats is becoming an increasingly popular pastime,” the presenter declares in the definitively plummy BBC accent of the time. “Today it is estimated that there are 700 clubs and 150 thousand amateur yachtsmen who own or sail boats.”
After introducing us to the legendary British designer Uffa Fox who created the Flying 15 and raced regularly with Prince Philip aboard his boat Cowslip, amazingly the 30 minute film then went into a detailed guide on how viewers could build their own Flying 15 by following along with a team of professional boat builders from the Kircubbin Sailing Club on Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lock.
I’m not sure how many viewers of the programme were inspired to buy the plans and the raw materials to build their own Flying 15 back then, but I found that once I started watching the build process I couldn’t click away.
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While we are on the subject of boat building, this story by Erik Shampain as part of a series for Sailing World Magazine about how he his father, and his father’s friend are trying to bring a decrepit looking Melges 30 sportsboat (the precursor to the Melges 32) back to full racing trim is well worth a read.
Justin Chisholm
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