Blunt force: Has a 33-foot scow conquered offshore racing and just proved it round Ireland?

Courrier Pogo - The newest and fastest 33 footer - making a big impact in the early Summer of 2026

This week, off the Antrim coast in the small hours, a 33-foot boat with a blunt nose came within three hours of beating a yacht nearly twice her length all the way round Ireland. Following the tracker it looked like a very tough race with wind holes and critical decisions at every moment but played out in slow motion. Plenty of the boats took flyers like Venomous out into the deeper Atlantic, which nearly paid off. Some ran out of time with work deadlines to meet. Some of the best teams like Sunrise obviusly had a deadline and retired. Bellino, with Deb Fish the RORC Commodore and Rob Craigie, kept the faith and won IRC 2 handed.

The stand out boat was Courrier Pogo , a brand-new Pogo RC, newly acquired by the veteran French skipper Géry Trentesaux. While eleven good boats sat becalmed for four hours at the Rathlin tidal gate, his scow slipped through the North Channel in the night and kept moving. In a 2026 Round Ireland Race decided almost entirely by light air and tide, Courrier Pogo , sailed by a Franco-Irish crew that included the Figaro winner Tom Dolan, produced the standout performance of the fleet, finishing second overall on the published results. She did not quite win. The 56-foot Botín Khumbu took line honours and the overall, beating her on corrected time by a little under three hours over the 704-mile course. But on the run home to Wicklow this 33-footer reeled in and passed a Sydney 43 and a Lombard 46, boats half as big again, and beat everything else afloat. A 56-footer won. A boat you could lose in its cockpit came second. That is not supposed to happen. It is happening, and the man who did it is the same Frenchman who won the 2015 Fastnet on a JPK. The dynasty simply changed boats.

Géry Trentesaux’s Pogo RC, Courrier Pogo, second overall round Ireland and beaten only by a boat nearly twice her size.

That is the state of modern offshore racing in a single night’s sailing, and it is worth being precise about what it means, because it is not the story we are usually sold.

I first met this future a decade ago, tied up in a marina, looking slightly wrong.

I have been at this a long time, and from most seats on the boat. I went up the mast in the America’s Cup as a young man, then spent the 1980s in the thick of the Admiral’s Cup, where I picked up the nickname Barking Mad: a loud tactician with a weakness for calling flyers off the side of the course. They did not all come off. Enough did, often with an older boat beating a newer one, that the name stuck, and when I later bought a Swan 40 there was really only one thing to call her. A state-of-the-art Farr 40 followed, named 2XL, which reads as “too excel”, with “excellence at speed” stitched across the crew kit. We were not, as you can tell, much troubled by modesty in those years. Then came the time out that a young family and a business demand. When I finally came back, I did something deliberately contrary: I took a classic, a 1969 S&S 34, and optimised her under IRC to see whether a well-sailed old boat could still win against the modern fleet. She could. I mention all this not to wave a CV about, but because the thread of my whole racing life, a stubborn bet that preparation and a good call can still beat the newest hull in the park, is exactly what this piece is about.

Which is partly why I noticed the JPKs early. It was the middle of the last decade, and I was navigating and calling tactics on the J/109 JeVante through the RORC season, when a new kind of French boat started turning up in the results. The 10.80s first, then the 11.80s. To my eye they did not look like much beside a properly turned-out 40-footer with a deep crew and a good wardrobe of sails: slab-sided, a little agricultural below, often two aboard where we had eight. We did not take them seriously, in the way you never take seriously the thing that is about to beat you.

Then the corrected-time sheets came out, race after race, and there they were. Not winning by trickery, but by being exactly the right boat, sailed by exactly enough people, prepared to a standard that made our amateur enthusiasm look like what it was. I remember the particular irritation of being beaten by a boat we had out-crewed three to one.

So I did the only sensible thing. I joined them. I was tactician aboard the JPK 10.80 Sunrise in the Rolex Middle Sea Race, and later skippered the JPK 11.80 Sunrise to second in a RORC Channel Race. That same boat, under her owner Tom Kneen, went on to win the 2021 Fastnet overall. I was not aboard for that one, but I had felt at first hand exactly why she would. I know these boats from the inside, which is precisely why I am uneasy about what they are doing to the sport. This is not the grumble of a man they left on the dock. It is the worry of one who climbed aboard, won with them, and then looked up and saw where the road was heading.

Sunrise, the JPK 11.80 I skippered to second place in a Channel Race. You learn why these boats win from the inside.

In July 2025, at the centenary Rolex Fastnet Race, a JPK 1050 called Léon won the whole thing. Overall. Out of 380 boats in the IRC overall standings, and more than 400 across the wider centenary fleet, the best corrected time, at a rating of 1.067, belonged to a 10.45-metre production boat sailed double-handed by Jean-Pierre Kelbert and Alexis Loison. It beat Maxis, TP52s and grand-prix forties alike. It was the second time in history a two-handed crew had won the Fastnet outright. The first was also a JPK, Night and Day , the Loisons again, in 2013.

That is not a fluke. That is a trend with a long enough run now to call it a takeover.

The quiet grand slam

Before we talk about where this goes, look at where it already is. The JPK record under IRC at the Fastnet reads like a dynasty: Night and Day (a JPK 10.10) overall in 2013, double-handed; Géry Trentesaux’s Courrier du Léon (a 10.80) overall in 2015, fully crewed; Tom Kneen’s Sunrise (an 11.80) overall in 2021; and Léon (the 1050) overall in 2025. Every one came out of the same JPK design lineage, led by Jacques Valer, and built in the same shed on the Brittany coast.

Set the recent overalls side by side and the pattern is hard to argue with.

The Round Ireland line matters precisely because it is the exception: a big, fully-crewed Botín still took the overall. The story is not that the scow wins everything. It is that a 33-foot production boat is now a credible favourite in races it had no business contending a decade ago, and that French production yards have owned four of the last Fastnet overalls outright.

Note the detail that should make us think hardest. In 2021 the winner was British-owned. The boat was still French. When a Briton wins the most important offshore race in the world, he does it in a French hull, built by a French yard. That is not a French failing. It is a British one.

And the boats are getting smaller, not bigger. The cutting edge of IRC offshore racing is no longer a 45-foot cruiser-racer with a cabin you would happily cross an ocean in. It is a 33-to-35-foot planing machine optimised within an inch of its life, and make no mistake, these are brilliant boats. Light, fast, beautifully resolved, electrifying to sail. Every one of their so-called compromises, the spartan interior, the heel-it-hard-to-go-upwind manners, the crew of two, is a deliberate trade made in the pursuit of speed per pound of rating, and the trades are clever ones. The catch is not that the boats are bad. The boats are superb. The catch is that as the winning size shrinks, the centre of gravity of the whole sport shrinks with it.

What actually changed under the waterline

For forty years the conventional wisdom for a small offshore boat was simple: to rate well under IRC you had to be relatively heavy. Light, planing hulls were fun for an afternoon and hopeless in the light airs that decide most Channel races. So we all bought sensible, moderate boats and accepted the compromise.

That compromise is dead. Three things killed it.

First, the scow bow . Borrowed wholesale from the Mini 6.50 and Class40 worlds, the blunt, beamy nose gives enormous form stability and a flat run aft that lets the boat plane early and stay balanced when heeled. Sam Manuard, the designer who did more than anyone to prove the shape offshore, describes his big scow Palanad 4 without embarrassment as “basically a 50ft Mini Transat prototype.” The counter-intuitive part is that these boats go upwind well, provided you heel them. “The boat needs to sail above a minimum heel angle of around 18-20° in order to improve its hull drag as well as reducing the slamming impact through the waves,” Manuard says. Sail it flat and it is a barge; sail it on its ear and the chine becomes a waterline.

Palanad 4- the 50-ft offshore racer designed by Sam Manuard, this breakthrough scow design - showing how a blunt bow transforms into a fine entry once heeeled, reducing wetted surface whilst the deep blade keel and bulb ensures correct leeway - plus a drier ride for the crew - who knew?

Second, light displacement that finally rates . The Sun Fast 30 OD weighs 2,700kg, which is 800kg, or 22%, lighter than the Sun Fast 3300 it effectively replaces, yet carries almost the same upwind sail area. The Pogo RC comes in around 3.3 tonnes. Antoine Le Provost of VPLP, who drew the Sun Fast 30 OD, is blunt about the priority: “Most of the polar chart shows minimising frictional resistance is the priority, so we needed to keep the wetted surface area down.” Less boat in the water, less wetted surface, more speed where the racing is actually decided, in under ten knots, which is what you get for half of a typical British July.

Third, the hardware honesty : twin transom-hung rudders on a single tiller, kick-up in the Class40 style; a single-spreader or simple two-spreader carbon rig set well aft with a big square-top main; running backstays kept for trim, not survival; constrictors instead of clutches. Everything led for one or two pairs of hands. As the Yachting World tester Rupert Holmes, no romantic, put it after sailing the Pogo RC, these are “the first production-built competitive planing boats of a size that’s very popular with double-handed and solo sailors, yet also suitable for racing fully crewed.”

Here is the current state of the art, in numbers:

The one-off in that list, Didier Gaudoux’s Lann Ael 3 , matters more than its single hull suggests. Two years before the production boats arrived, it won both offshore races of the IRC double-handed European Championship, 500 miles, and proved a light planing boat could sail to its rating across the whole wind range. The yards watched, and copied.

Two designers and a rule

This is the part the British industry should pin to the wall.

The Pogo RC is drawn by two men. Pogo’s own brochure describes them perfectly: Bernard Nivelt, “véritable sorcier de la jauge IRC” , a true wizard of the IRC rule, and Sam Manuard, “surdoué des jauges OPEN” , the prodigy of the open classes, Mini, Class40, IMOCA. That pairing is the entire story of modern offshore design in one credit line. You take the speed merchant who learned his trade where there are no rating penalties, and you marry him to the man who knows exactly how to make that speed cheap on the certificate. Open-class performance, domesticated for IRC.

And it is French, because France built the laboratory and we did not. The pathway, Mini, Figaro, Class40, IMOCA, is a complete industrial and sporting system: designers, builders, sponsors, training centres, all feeding one another. Britain has produced superb IRC optimisers in Rob Humphreys and Jason Ker, and the grand-prix forty end still belongs to a wider international design group: Botín, Carkeek, Mills, Ker, Humphreys and others. But the production revolution, the boats that ordinary clubs actually buy and race, has been driven almost entirely from France, and Britain has not built an equivalent.

I will say plainly what I think this means, because it is the thread running through everything below. The sport is not broadening. It is narrowing, and it is increasingly shaped by the French offshore system. And let me be clear about the target of that sentence. This is not a complaint that France got good. France has been brilliant. It is a complaint that Britain stopped building the ladder.

The death of the spinnaker, and the foiling endgame

Notice what has already vanished. In this newest shorthanded scow corner of IRC, symmetric spinnakers and the pole that flew them are effectively dead. Plenty of pole boats still race competitively elsewhere, in club fleets, classics and the wider IRC handicap; this is about where the sharp end has gone. Everything there now is an asymmetric off a bowsprit, sheeted from the quarter, because the scow’s natural angle is not a dead run but a fast, heated reach. The boats make so much of their own apparent wind that “downwind” has quietly become “tight reaching at speed.”

Follow that line to its conclusion and you arrive at the question that should keep designers up at night: how long until the boats go so fast that they do not need downwind sails at all? Foiling already points the way. The Figaro 3’s foils were never meant to lift the boat clear; they reduce displacement by up to 30% and stand in for water ballast. Scale that thinking up and add real lift, and the apparent wind swings so far forward that a single flat-reaching wardrobe does the whole racecourse. The A-sail follows the symmetric kite into the museum.

Ellie Driver, flying the flag for UK single handed sailing, in the semi foiling Figaro 3

And then what? That is the real question, and it is not a happy one. If everyone is reaching at twenty-five knots in a straight line, offshore racing risks collapsing into a drag race with no passing lanes. The navigator’s art, the patient hunt for the favoured side, the tide gate played at three in the morning, depends on boats being slow enough for the racecourse to still be a puzzle. Make them fast enough and the puzzle disappears. You do not out-think a boat that is already there. Preparation. Decisions. Execution. Take away the decisions and you are left with a procession.

The 1979 question

There is a harder problem, and it has a date attached: 1979.

These boats are optimised for the light half of the wind range, and they get their stability from form , from being wide and flat, rather than from a deep, heavy, self-righting shape. A wide flat hull is wonderfully stable the right way up and far less forgiving once it is the wrong way up. Add a crew of two, tired, leaning on an autopilot to do the actual steering, and ask them to manage a 3.3-tonne boat in a building gale and a bad sea state, and you have a machine that is brilliant for the 80% of a Fastnet that is manageable and far less proven in the 20% that is not.

We have run a version of this experiment before. In 1979, 303 boats started the Fastnet and only 86 finished. Twenty-four were abandoned, five sank, and fifteen sailors died. The design fashion of the day, light, beamy, IOR-driven hulls with low ultimate stability, was part of the post-race reckoning, but it was far from the only lesson: forecasting, communications, rescue coordination, liferaft decisions and plain seamanship all came under hard scrutiny too. The cruellest finding was that most of the boats stayed afloat. It was the people who left them for liferafts who were lost.

Three hundred and three started, eighty-six finished, fifteen sailors lost. The sea does not sail the average.

Let me be fair, because this is not 1979 and it would be lazy to pretend it is. The safety world is transformed: the Offshore Special Regulations, ISO stability standards and angle-of-vanishing-stability limits, watertight crash boxes, properly rated liferafts, AIS, EPIRBs and personal PLBs, satellite weather, far better autopilots, and rescue coordination that did not exist half a century ago. A modern scow is built and equipped to a standard the 1979 fleet could only dream of.

But I am pointing at the rhyme, not the repeat. When a rule rewards one narrow type, the whole fleet converges on it, and the fleet’s weaknesses converge too. We are optimising, very cleverly, for the average July. The sea does not sail the average.

Wide and flat is wonderfully stable the right way up, and less forgiving the wrong way up.

Is handicap racing dead? They said that in 1982

The rule may need to change. When a 33-footer can win the Fastnet outright, IRC has found a sweet spot it never set out to reward, and the owner of a perfectly good 2015 cruiser-racer can feel his boat sliding down the rankings through no fault of his own. That is corrosive, because it can tell the cruising-minded owner, the backbone of any club fleet, that there is no point turning up.

But before anyone holds a funeral, a little history. They buried handicap racing once before, around 1982, when IOR ate itself in the Admiral’s Cup arms race. It did not die. Robin Aisher and Jean-Louis Fabry quietly started Channel Handicap in 1983, it became IRC, and it has run the amateur offshore world ever since. Handicap racing does not die. It mutates. The threat now is not extinction; it is monoculture: a rule that rewards one shorthanded planing type so efficiently, across so many common race profiles, that owners feel they must buy that exact boat or stop bothering. A fleet converging on a single shape is not a healthy handicap class. It is a one-design that has not admitted it yet.

What it actually costs to win the 2027 Fastnet

Let us be concrete, because this is where “democratisation” meets the invoice.

A new front-running scow, a JPK 1050 or a Pogo RC, starts around €220,000 to €285,000 before tax for the hull, and lands closer to €260,000 to €300,000 ready to race with electronics and pilot. Add a competitive two-handed sail wardrobe in 3Di or equivalent at €30,000 to €50,000, then prep, delivery, measurement, safety gear and a full season’s training, and a credible new-boat campaign to actually win the Fastnet overall sits somewhere around £350,000 to £450,000 by the time you cross the line first.

That sounds damning, but it deserves an honest comparison, because a fully-crewed programme is not cheap either once you count the people. These are indicative 2026 figures, not quotes:

Route to a competitive Fastnet Indicative all-in The catch New scow, double-handed (JPK 1050 / Pogo RC) £350k to £450k Newest, dearest, narrowest Used JPK 10.10 / 10.80, double-handed £150k to £250k Older, but still wins on preparation Fully-crewed 40 to 45 footer £400k+ over a season Crew logistics, bigger sail inventory, berths, food, depreciation Well-prepared older IRC cruiser-racer under £150k Won’t win overall, can still win a class

But here is the twist, and it is the most hopeful thing in this essay. The cost to win is not the cost of the newest boat. Night and Day , which won overall in 2013, was a JPK 10.10, a design you can now buy used for around €100,000 to €130,000. A well-prepared older JPK, a good set of sails and a brilliant short-handed pair will still beat a poorly-sailed new one every single time. The boat has never been the expensive part. Preparation and the right two people are the expensive part, and always have been. Mid-fleet to podium offshore was never bought. It was prepared.

The 2027 question

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where the next eighteen months actually matter. The next Fastnet, and the next Admiral’s Cup with it, is not until 2027, based at Cowes, with measurement and inspection from mid-July and the Rolex Fastnet Race starting on Saturday 24 July as the decider. The prizes that count are a season and a half away. Which means right now, through 2026, the French production boats are quietly cleaning up much of the IRC silverware, Round Ireland was just the latest, while everyone else works out what to build for the regatta that matters.

And the Admiral’s Cup is the one arena the French production wave has not reached.

Look at what is actually being drawn for 2027. The Cup is fought in grand-prix forties and fifties, fully crewed, two boats to a team, one big (AC1, roughly 13.4 to 17m), one small (AC2, roughly 11 to 13.4m), and that zone belongs to a different set of pens entirely. Botín Partners, Spanish, are building a new small-boat all-rounder with McConaghy, “inshore pedigree with offshore durability”; Karl Kwok’s Botín 40 Beau Ideal is already afloat. Shaun Carkeek has the new Neo 620 muscling into the mini-maxi arena. And the British and Irish design office is emphatically still in business here: Mark Mills, Jason Ker and Rob Humphreys are not museum names, they are live, winning grand-prix designers.

Admiral’s Cup 2025 - fan

Now notice who is largely absent from that list. Manuard, Nivelt, Valer and VPLP, the names that own the 33-foot scow world, are not the names drawing the Admiral’s Cup forty. France built the clearest shorthanded production pathway in the world. The fully-crewed, grand-prix IRC space is still far more open.

That is the jeopardy, and it is also the opportunity. The 2027 Admiral’s Cup is a fully-crewed, national-team contest sailed in home water off Cowes, the exact format in which British sailing was once the best in the world, and the exact kind of boat British and Irish designers still draw as well as anyone alive. The question is not whether France will win it. The question is whether Britain turns up with British and Irish boats, the right pens and a proper team, or whether we admire the problem again and charter someone else’s answer.

The apex: more watched, less inhabitable

Climb to the very top of the sport and a related thing is happening, just dressed in carbon and television money.

The America’s Cup has always been a technology-and-money game; it was ever thus, from the J-Class to the wing-sailed cats. But foiling has taken it somewhere new. The boats are sensational and the visible human content is thinning. The AC75 is sailed by a handful of people, most of them tucked out of sight, and for Naples in 2027 the rule-makers have leaned further onto stored battery power for the boat’s systems, taking over much of the work the pedalling “cyclors” used to do, and trimmed the crew to five, at least one of them a woman. The skill aboard is still immense. It is just less available, less visible, and much harder for an ordinary sailor to imagine ever entering.

So where is the intrigue? A good deal of it has migrated off the water. The drama of the modern Cup is as much the design espionage, the recruitment war and the budget as the cross on the startline. We are watching engineering departments out-think and out-spend each other, with a brilliant light show on top. That can be thrilling. It is just a different thing from the sport that taught most of us how to race.

SailGP is the cleverer answer, and the more honest one. Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison built a professional league of one-design F50 foiling cats, nationally branded, deliberately made for the camera, and the camera has rewarded it. SailGP says more than 215 million viewers tuned in across the 2025 season, with a single event topping 23 million and a US broadcast that, by its own figures, outdrew the 1992 America’s Cup to become the most-watched sailing race in American history. As a televised product, it may be the best thing sailing has ever made, and the sailing itself is genuinely world class.

More watched than ever, harder to climb into than ever. Two hundred million viewers, a handful of seats

But here is the question that runs through this whole essay: huge reach is not the same as a way in. Two hundred million people watch the F50s. How many of them will ever stand on a startline? People watch Formula 1 by the hundred million and do not drive racing cars. Spectacle creates an audience, not a fleet. Unless there is a staircase from the sofa to the start line, affordable boats, club berths, a reason for a nineteen-year-old to turn up on a wet Tuesday, the glamour at the top is just broadcast, beautiful and self-contained. It answers “who wants to watch?” It does not, on its own, answer “who wants to play?”

The Olympic own goal

Which is exactly why the next part stings. There was, very recently, a mechanism that could have widened the sport and made offshore racing genuinely international: the Olympics.

A Mixed Two Person Offshore Keelboat event was voted onto the Paris 2024 programme in 2018, the first offshore event in Olympic history, two-handed, one man and one woman, in a strict one-design. It was a serious idea. The Sun Fast 30 OD itself was born in that moment, the product of a “Class 30” tender run by the Yacht Club de France, the RORC and the Storm Trysail Club explicitly to broaden participation, “especially among young sailors.” For one short window, the rule-makers, the builders and the Olympic movement were pulling in the same direction: a single, affordable, international platform any nation could campaign.

The Sun Fast 30 OD

Then the IOC dropped it. In 2021, citing field-of-play security, broadcast cost and complexity, and the awkward fact that World Sailing had never even run an offshore world championship, the event was removed from Paris 2024. It is not on the LA 2028 slate either. The one force that might have built an international pathway, national federations, youth funding, a genuine one-design ladder, was switched off before it ever ran a single Games.

And here is the part worth sitting with, because it cuts against my own argument. The Sun Fast 30 OD is arguably the closest thing we have to the staircase this piece keeps demanding: one-design, recyclable, relatively affordable at around €200,000 ready to race, already past forty hulls sold, and seeding charter fleets in the Solent, Lorient and Marseille so that a sailor can hire rather than buy. It could still be part of the answer. The waste is that, without the Olympic pull behind it, a boat built to prise the sport open is at risk of being quietly absorbed into the system it was meant to widen.

So the honest conclusion is not that anyone is the villain. It is that the rule, the industry and the governance all need to look again at the same time, because each is currently pulling the same way. IRC may need to examine whether one type has become too efficient across too many race profiles. The industry outside France needs to actually build a competing production answer. And World Sailing needs to remember that a governing body’s job is to keep the door open, not to manage decline with better press releases.

A hundred years old, and leaning on one race

There is a deeper reason not to write Britain off, and it has just had a birthday. The RORC turned 100 last year, founded in 1925 on the back of that first amateur scramble to the Fastnet Rock and home to Plymouth. A century is not something to be sentimental about; it is a long time to have survived, and the RORC has survived precisely by reinventing itself, again and again. It created Channel Handicap when IOR was killing the club racer. It built the Caribbean 600 from nothing into a flagship. It took double-handed racing seriously while the establishment sniffed. And it dug the Admiral’s Cup out of its grave. Reinvention is the one thing this institution is genuinely world-class at.

The Class zero yachts start the RORC C600

It also holds a card the “narrow and French” story tends to skate over. IRC, the rule those French boats use so well, is not French. It is Anglo-French, owned and run jointly by the RORC Rating Office in Britain and the UNCL in Paris, the only two bodies on earth that can issue an IRC certificate. Britain is not the rule’s victim. It is its co-author. If a 33-foot scow rates too sweetly, the people who could look at it again sit in Lymington as much as in Paris. That is a conversation to have around a table, in good faith, not a grievance to nurse.

Which brings us to the most uncomfortable structural fact of all. The Fastnet has become so dominant that it is, in effect, the sport’s one truly big race. The 2025 centenary edition drew more than 450 entries and sold its 400-boat limit inside an hour; nothing else in offshore racing is remotely that size. That is a triumph and a fragility in the same breath. A sport with one genuine flagship has a single point of failure: one race carrying the prestige, the sponsors and the entire shop window, run only every other year, with the Admiral’s Cup alongside. The strength is real. So is the exposure.

The Fastnet, the biggest ‘bucket’ race in the World, is it enough ?

So the forward question is not really about scows at all. It is whether the RORC uses its centenary momentum, and the rule it half-owns, to build more than one mountain worth climbing: a calendar with depth, a rating that rewards more than one narrow type, and a bottom rung a nineteen-year-old can actually reach. The club has reinvented itself repeatedly in a hundred years. It can do it once more.

Where is this going, and who wants to play?

Two ends, and a thinning middle.

At the bottom, the winning formula is now two people and a pilot. That is thrilling, and for many owners it is a genuine lifeline: shorthanded racing keeps people in the game who could never reliably assemble eight good crew for a weekend offshore. It is not the enemy. But it is a different route in, and it does not carry the old apprenticeship. The fully-crewed boat with eight aboard was how people learned, the berth where a newcomer did three seasons of rail meat and tactics and tea-making until they could be trusted on their own. The mistake would be to pretend the two are interchangeable. As the winning boats shed those seats, the sport sheds some of the places it used to grow its next generation.

At the top, the professional end is not really a career ladder. It is closer to patronage. Owners with deep pockets hire the best sailors in the world for a regatta, and many of those sailors reach the end with no pension and no structure beneath them. There is little in between the narrow door at the bottom and the chequebook at the top. The winning middle, the thing that once turned beginners into offshore sailors, is thinning fast.

And to be clear, the middle has not vanished. J/109s, J/112Es, Sun Fast 3200s and 3300s, the older JPKs, plenty of cruiser-racers and a healthy club IRC fleet still race hard every weekend. What is thinning is the winning middle, the boats that take the overall silverware. That is the part being optimised away.

So: where is this going? Faster, cleverer, lighter, and narrower. Fewer winning shapes, more of them flowing from one country’s production system. The scow did not exactly close the door to offshore racing. But it changed the lock, and not everyone has the new key.

Morning After - sister ship to Morning Cloud- rebuilt in 2021 and won class 4 RORC, the Round Britain and Ireland and St Malo RORC races - S&S at its best

I say all this, you should know, as a man who won his class in a 1967 design, Morning After, and loved every cold minute of it. I am not against fast boats. I am against a sport that quietly decides it only has room for one kind of them, sailed by two kinds of people. The boats are magnificent. It is the direction of travel I want to help to change.

The shape of the boat changes. The argument never does: a sport is only as healthy as the route it leaves open for the next person to get good. Right now that route is getting narrower, beautifully, at twenty-five knots.

But here is the FirstBeat heresy, and I believe every word of it: none of this is fixed. The lock can be changed back.

France won the bottom of the sport because it built a system, Mini, Figaro, Class40, and we did not. So copy it. Not the boats; the ladder. And notice where the door is still wide open. The fully-crewed, grand-prix, national-team game lands on our own water in 2027, off Cowes, in the shape of the Admiral’s Cup. Britain and Ireland still have the design office, Carkeek, Mills, Ker, Humphreys and others, capable of drawing a boat to beat anything afloat. We still have the RORC, one of the deepest offshore clubs in the world, and the Solent on the doorstep. What we have lacked is not talent. It is the will to commission our own, build a team, and back the route in for the next generation rather than chartering someone else’s boat and grumbling on the dock.

So this is not a funeral, and it is not a complaint that France got good. It is a challenge to ourselves. British offshore racing is not being out-sailed. It is being out-organised, and that is a far more fixable problem, if we care enough to fix it. Preparation. Decisions. Execution. The same three beats that win a race, applied for once to the sport itself.

Where is this going? Wherever we decide. The boats are French today because France decided it years ago, patiently, while we admired the view. The next decade is still unwritten, and there is no rule of physics or handicap that says the pen has to stay in Lorient.

And the sea, as ever, still gets the final vote.

A ‘mixed bag’ of race boats at the start of a Fastnet a few years ago

Stuart Greenfield

FirstBeat: Offshore Racing Intelligence

From first beat to first place.

Sources

Round Ireland 26: Khumbu may have won, but Courrier’s performance is sensational, 2nd overall (Afloat) France’s Courrier Pogo flies through the night in Round Ireland (Afloat) JPK 1050 wins Rolex Fastnet Race 2025 overall, ahead of 380 boats (JPK Composites) Fastnet Race: Loison/Kelbert overall winner on the JPK 10.50 (Boatnews) Pogo RC Review: Planing performance for shorthanded sailors (Yachting World) Sun Fast 30OD review: breaking the mould (Yachting World) How Sam Manuard is reimagining the 50ft offshore racer (Yachting World) Pogo RC, Pogo Structures (designers Nivelt and Manuard) Sun Fast 30 One Design (VPLP Design) IRC Rating classes announced uniting 2027 Admiral’s Cup and 2026 Sardinia Cup (RORC) Admiral’s Cup AC2: Offshore legends, small boats, big test (RORC) RORC announces dates for 2027 Admiral’s Cup New Botín and Carkeek designs for the small-boat class (The Daily Sail) The radical return of the Admiral’s Cup (Sailing World) British JPK 1180 Sunrise wins Rolex Fastnet Race overall, 2021 (Yachting World) Sunrise wins RORC season; second in the Channel Race (Afloat) 1979 Fastnet Race (Wikipedia) IRC owned and managed jointly by RORC (UK) and UNCL (France), IRC Rating Authority RORC Centenary 1925 to 2025 (Royal Ocean Racing Club) Rolex Fastnet Race entry numbers smash all records, 450+ entries, world’s largest offshore race Mixed Offshore event added to Paris 2024 and subsequent IOC review (World Sailing) AC75 rules and crew set for the Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup, Naples 2027 (Boatnews) Record viewing and attendance figures for SailGP in 2025 The foils of the Figaro Bénéteau 3 (Bénéteau)