The Rolex Middle Sea Race: Why the corners decide it, not the straight line...part one
A month to go and and in two parts here are some ideas on how to win one of the best late season classic offshore races in the World.
Rolex Middle Sea race: Always an exciting start in the Grand Harbour
Rationing water, then an almighty bang
In October 2015 I was navigator and tactician aboard Jarhead, Greg Nasmyth’s J/109, in the 36th Rolex Middle Sea Race. Thirty six feet of boat, and a course that would take us five days and nine hours.
We started in a bit of breeze, which was the last straightforward thing that happened.
The east coast of Sicily took a very long time. We drifted north under Mount Etna, and drifted is the correct word. Somewhere in there I did the piece of arithmetic no navigator wants to do, which is not a course to steer but a rate of consumption. At the speed we were making, over the distance still in front of us, we were going to run out of drinking water before we ran out of race. So a table went up below, everybody got a stated allowance, and that was that.
We got through the Strait of Messina eventually and drifted on past Stromboli. Then we turned left along the north coast of Sicily and the race changed its mind.
The breeze filled and kept filling. By the north western corner it was properly up. It built again down towards the islands, and by the time we turned for home it was a gale. We were running square for Malta under a reefed main and a jib, I was on the helm, and we touched fourteen knots.
Then there was an almighty bang.
Something had failed where the mast passes through the deck. Looking at it closely there was a hair line crack, vertically, we did not think the rig was coming down, and we had eight or nine hours left to sail. So we did what you do. We took the asymmetric sheets, wound them round and round the base of the mast, turn after turn, and lashed the whole lot back to the chainplates until the spar had something to hold it if there was a complete failure. Fortunately the wind had eased and no movement was visible so with trepedation we continued.
Then I sat down the nav table and established that we had exactly one manoeuvre left in the race. Coming through the gap between Malta and Comino we would have to gybe. In that easing breeze, with that rig, the gybe was the race. Everything between there and the finish was steering.
We gybed. We finished third in class and thirty fifth overall, out of a hundred and twenty two starters, in five days nine hours and five minutes.
Jarhead now part of the Young Sailors Foundation in Malta
Jarhead has a second life. Greg Nasmyth and Samantha Rowe-Beddoe founded the Jarhead Young Sailors Foundation in Malta by donating her, and she still races out of Grand Harbour under MLT 923. There are worse things to do with a boat.
Nine seconds
Offshore racing is settled on corrected time, not on who gets there first, and the Middle Sea Race settles it more finely than most.
That year it went to Michele Galli’s TP52 B2, over Vincenzo Onorato’s Mascalzone Latino, by nine seconds after three and a half days of racing. The organiser’s account gives nine. The RORC table gives ten. Either way, two boats came out of six hundred and six miles closer together than the time it takes to read this sentence.
Ian Moore was navigating Mascalzone Latino. Asked where the race had gone, he said this:
“B2 was always going to be quicker than us in a straight line and they did well in the transition zones at Stromboli and Capo San Vito.”
Read it properly. Moore is not saying speed did not matter. He is saying that speed was already accounted for, and that what remained, the nine seconds, was won at two corners.
Nacho Postigo, navigating B2, described the same four days from the winning side:
“For me this was a typical Middle Sea Race; you struggle to find the wind, and when you do, it happens in excess.”
He was describing our race too. Rationed water under Etna, fourteen knots and a broken mast gate off Malta, in the same event.
The same corner, two years later
I sailed it again in 2017, navigating and calling tactics on Tom Kneen’s JPK 10.80 Sunrise.
That was the Mistral year. The fleet went slowly up the east coast and through Messina, and then the north coast and the western leg took it apart. A hundred and four boats started and thirty five finished. We were knocked down off the north western tip of Sicily, the same corner Moore had named, and once she was upright and pointing the right way Sunrise stormed home. Twelfth overall, three days twenty two hours.
Two things about that race are worth more than our result.
The first is that the boat which won it overall, Igor Rytov’s Bogatyr, was also a JPK 10.80. Same designer, same model, same waterline. She won. We were twelfth. Whatever separated us, it was not the boat.
Rambler 88 monohull line owners in 2017 but not winner under IRC
The second is what George David said afterwards, having taken monohull line honours in Rambler 88 in the same race:
“It was a typical Rolex Middle Sea Race in that we parked for six hours at Stromboli like we always do!”
Parked for six hours, and sixty nine boats retired, in the same four days.
The argument
The Middle Sea Race is usually sold on its beauty. Two active volcanoes, a start under the bastions of Grand Harbour, October sun, a prize giving in a sixteenth century hospital. All true, and none of it is why the race is worth your attention.
It is worth your attention because the course keeps handing you fresh chances to lose time and fresh chances to take it back, and it does that more often, and with larger consequences, than a course of the same length has any right to.
That is a claim about frequency and consequence, not a claim that this race is harder than the Fastnet or the Hobart. I have no metric that would settle that and neither does anybody else. What I can show you is why the course behaves this way, and what fifty eight years of results look like as a result.
1. It was designed as a simple circuit, and everything follows from that
Founded in 1968 by two British yachtsmen living in Malta, Alan Green and Jimmy White, with the Maltese sailors Paul and John Ripard of the Royal Malta Yacht Club, and co-organised by the RMYC and the RORC ever since. Green went on to become Race Director of the RORC. The founders wanted something on the scale of the Fastnet, then 608 miles. Their circuit came out at about 610.
Paul Ripard’s contribution was structural rather than nautical, and it is the one that mattered. He argued that the race should start and finish in Malta rather than run point to point. A circuit, not a passage. That single decision is why the course has eight corners instead of one long leg out and one back.
Eight boats started. Josian, John Ripard Sr’s Swan 36, won, with Arthur Podesta aboard. Podesta sailed every edition from 1968 to 2014, thirty five of them, a total Christian Ripard equalled in 2025.
The Middle Sea race - an incredible race track
Then it stopped. No race was held between 1984 and 1995. The club’s own account is blunt about why: the race dropped out of the calendar following a decline in interest, and members reinstated it in 1996. Christian Ripard won that one, in the J/105 Bigfoot. Rolex came in as title sponsor in 2002.
2. Eight legs, eight corners
Six hundred and six miles, anticlockwise around Sicily, with Pantelleria and Lampedusa on the way home. The organiser’s approximate leg distances are the shape of the race:
Leg From, to Approx distance 1 Grand Harbour to Capo Passero 55 nm 2 Capo Passero to the Strait of Messina 98 nm 3 Messina to Strombolicchio 35 nm 4 Strombolicchio to Favignana 150 nm 5 Favignana to Pantelleria 74 nm 6 Pantelleria to Lampedusa 90 nm 7 Lampedusa to Comino 94 nm 8 Comino to the finish 10 nm
Compare the shape with the Fastnet, which at roughly 695 miles to Cherbourg has a 170 mile leg to the Rock and a 189 mile leg to the Scillies. Those legs are full of decisions, but they are long, and they let a crew settle into one problem for a day at a time. The Middle Sea Race has just one leg over a hundred miles, and Capo San Vito sits towards the western end of even that.
Count what it asks for instead. Out of a harbour surrounded by stone. Up a coast in the lee of a large active volcano. Through a strait under two miles wide with a real current in it. Round a second active volcano. Through an archipelago. Out to an island 74 miles from Favignana. Down towards Africa. Back through a channel less than a mile wide. Home.
Justin Wolfe, who sailed the 2023 race two handed with Christina Wolfe aboard the 33 foot Red Ruby, put a number on the cost of that:
“So much happened in the race. We made at least 22 sail changes. The conditions constantly change, the course changes, you sail hours and hours at a time without any rest at all because there is so much going on.”
Twenty two sail changes, with two people aboard.
3. What forty six editions actually show
Forty six editions have been sailed since 1968. Here is what the roll of honour supports, and what it does not.
Red Ruby in 2023 comes second by 24 seconds
The winning boat comes in every size. The largest overall winner is Comanche at a hundred feet, in 2021. The smallest is Cino Ricci’s Comet at thirty. In 2023, Andrea Recordati’s 93 foot Bullitt beat the Wolfes’ 33 foot Red Ruby by twenty four seconds on IRC corrected time. Bullitt was round in two days fourteen hours. Red Ruby took more than four days. They never saw each other.
That breadth is worth noticing, but it is not proof that boat size does not matter. To show that you would need the size distribution of the whole fleet, era by era, under three successive rating systems. Nobody has published it. What the breadth does show is that a well sailed small boat is not wasting its entry fee, which is not true of every offshore classic.
Line honours and overall wins are largely separate careers. George David took monohull line honours five years running in Rambler 88, from 2015 to 2019, and won overall in none of them. He had won overall in 2007 in the earlier and larger Rambler, a different boat with the same name.
Consecutive overall wins are rare. Aaron, Christoph and Maya Podesta won back to back in 2019 and 2020 aboard the First 45 Elusive 2, the first consecutive wins since Nello Mazzaferro’s Nita IV took three in a row ending in 1980. Repeat wins spread over time are less rare: B2 in 2013 and 2015, Artie in 2011 and 2014.
And the same course produces wildly different completion rates.
Fifteen per cent of the fleet finished in 2005. Ninety four per cent finished in 2025. That is a completion rate, not a difficulty scale: crews retire for damage, for forecasts, for flights and for judgement, and six selected years are an illustration rather than a distribution. But it tells you something about how much the same six hundred and six miles can vary.
Carl-Peter Forster, who won overall in 2024 with the TP52 Red Bandit, described a single edition like this:
“This was my seventh race. It was the usual amazing, multifaceted Rolex Middle Sea Race. Wind up to 60 knots in a thunderstorm, the fastest Messina Strait crossing thanks to six knots of current with us, the usual light winds, and good boats all around us.”
Sixty knots and the usual light winds, in the same 606 miles, described as usual.
4. The record, and what speed actually buys
Stormvogel took 146 hours and 9 minutes in 1968 - she is still racing competively today
Stormvogel took 146 hours and 9 minutes in 1968. Six days. George David’s Rambler had it to 47 hours 55 minutes and 3 seconds by 2007, where it stood for fourteen years. Then 2021: Jason Carroll’s MOD 70 Argo set the outright record at 33 hours 29 minutes 28 seconds, and Comanche, skippered by Mitch Booth, set the monohull mark of 40 hours 17 minutes 50 seconds that still stands.
Six days to a little over forty hours, for a monohull, in fifty seven years.
What speed buys is not exemption from the race. It is a different weather window. A hundred footer can be through Messina before it shuts down and past Stromboli before the volcano makes its own arrangements, while a boat half her length arrives to find the door closed. That advantage still has to be earned, in trim, in load management and in routing, and it does not guarantee the handicap result.
Three yachts have taken the record and the overall win in the same year: Zephyrus IV in 2000, Rambler in 2007 and Comanche in 2021.
The 2021 case comes with an asterisk, and it is the most instructive thing in the whole roll of honour.
Tom Kneen’s JPK 11.80 Sunrise
A north easterly gale was forecast for the Wednesday of that race. The Race Committee invoked the Alternative Finish Line at the South Comino Channel, which the sailing instructions provide for, and which shortened the course by twelve miles. That decision changed the overall result. The two boats it fell hardest on were Comanche, at a hundred feet, and Tom Kneen’s JPK 11.80 Sunrise, at thirty nine.
The Royal Malta Yacht Club said so itself, in a statement on 3 November 2021, acknowledging that it had “inadvertently, but seriously, impacted the race results”.
I should declare an interest. I have navigated for the Sunrise programme, though not in that race, and I am an RORC member. I am not reopening it. Comanche is the winner and the club has been straight about what happened. The point for a navigator is narrower and it is the point of this article: twelve miles out of six hundred and six, at the last corner, reordered the race. Nothing about that fleet’s boatspeed changed. The course did.
5. Why it is respected
Partly for the obvious reasons. It sits in the Rolex trio with the Fastnet and the Sydney Hobart. It has two live volcanoes on the course, one of them as a mark. It finishes in a medieval harbour in October, and you will see it called the most beautiful race course in the world, usually with Ted Turner’s name attached, though nobody can show you where he said it.
The reason it is respected by people who have done a lot of offshore races is narrower. Bouwe Bekking, tactician aboard the 2025 winner Balthasar and a man with eight round the world campaigns behind him, put it without ornament:
“I think this is one of the great ocean races that you can do.”
He said it in a year the race was gentle by its own standards, when a hundred and seventeen started and a hundred and ten finished, and it still took a Maxi 72 with a professional afterguard, sailing far enough west toward Tunisia that the Tunisian coastguard called them up, to win by five minutes.
Here is the honest counterweight. A race decided at corners is also a race with a large luck component, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Being in the right place when a cloud fills in at three in the morning is not a skill. What skill does is change the odds of being there, and change what you do with it when you are. Christian Ripard, who has won this race four times, in Bigfoot, Strait Dealer and twice in Artie, described the mechanism better than I can:
“It remains a very tactical race and you need some good fortune in putting yourself in the right position on the race course. Like a bungee effect, you can run away from your opponents and then you round a corner and everybody comes back again.”
That is the course, in one sentence, from a man who has sailed thirty five of them.
The 47th edition
The 2026 race starts from Grand Harbour at 1100 on Saturday 17 October. Category 2 under the Offshore Special Regulations with RORC prescriptions, minimum crew of two. Standard entries closed on 18 September, with late entries at the organisers’ discretion until 25 September.
Comamche - Wins line honours
If you are going, and you learnt your offshore racing in the Solent and the Channel, bring those skills with you. You are probably the best tidal tactician in the fleet. Then look hard at the assumptions underneath them, because most of them were built for water that moves and land that does not take your wind away.
Part two starts at Messina… don’t miss it!
Stuart Greenfield FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence From first shift to first place.
Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.
It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.
That is where races are won and lost.
At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.
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