The line-up this year is as spectacular, as it is diverse, with a huge spread of boats, from the 100 footers – Mike Slade’s line honours hunting ICAP Leopard, and the more comfortable Performance Yachts 100, Liara of Tony Todd – down to the smallest class 3 yachts, the shortest being the Polish 30-footer, Four Winds, belonging to Wieslaw Krupski.
The RORC’s IRC handicap system is used to level out the widely differing performances found across this range of boats as best indicated by their IRC time correction factors: Leopard’s stands at 1.868, while Tony Harwood’s comfortable Nicholson 38 Volante is the lowest rated boat entered with a TCF of 0.863. This means that to beat Volante, Leopard has to sail 2.16 times faster than her or when Leopard crosses the finish line, Volante could still be ahead of her if she were only half way across the Celtic Sea outbound to the Fastnet Rock with more than 325 miles of the 608-mile long race still left to sail.
With such a large fleet, the boats are divided up into classes: SZ, Z, 1, 2 and 3 with a special class SZCK, for the canting keel yachts such as ICAP Leopard and the Open 60s such as Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss. In addition, one of the most competitive classes this year will be the Class 40 of which 20 examples are racing, including Giovanni Soldini’s Telecom Italia, winner of last year’s Artemis Transat.
One of the favourites for the overall handicap prize is certain to be Dutch skipper Piet Vroon and his new Ker 46, Tonnerre de Breskens. Launched this season, Tonnerre has already won two of the three of the RORC races she has entered.
“It has been going very well. I am rather pleased!” says her Dutch owner enthusiastically. Vroon cannot remember exactly how many Rolex Fastnet Races he has done, but thinks the number is around 21. This includes winning overall in 2001, although he admits he followed this up two years later with a 237th place. “It is the only offshore race left. All the other ones are just overnight,” he says as to the attraction of the race. “The course is interesting and difficult. It is not all that easy to predict where you have got to be. In spite of all the electronics and weather information, it always works out slightly different from what you expect. Like in 2001, if you happen to get it all right – if you pass Portland at the right moment, Land’s End, if you catch the tides right, if the wind changes your way – by the same token, if you miss it by half an hour you can be out.”
Typically small boats do well when the race starts light and conditions build mid-week. In recent history the best example of this was when Jean Yves Chateau’s well-sailed Nicholson 33, Iromiguy won overall in 2005. “For me it is the greatest race in Europe,” says Chateau of the Rolex Fastnet Race. “There are many, many beautiful racing boats and we very much like this race. I have known this race for a very, very long time. When I was a child it was a dream to do this race, and for me when we won this race four years ago, it was extraordinaire!”
Chateau returns this year with just one crew change. Already this year he has been warming up by competing in the RORC’s races and at present lies ninth overall in the RORC 2009 championship.
At the bigger end of the spectrum, the race favourite is probably Niklas Zennström’s new Judel Vrolijk 72 Ran 2 that has already had a successful season in the Mediterranean. She also benefits from local knowledge having a largely British crew, led by Volvo Ocean Race veteran Tim Powell.
While winning the Rolex Fastnet Race comes down to how well each of the entries sails relative to their rating, many additional wildcards are thrown at the competitors from, in particular, the weather, but also tides and the numerous tidal ‘gates’ off every headland along the south coast of England. This is what makes this race one of the most tactical games of snakes and ladders in the yachting calendar.
One advantage of having a bigger boat is that they are less affected by these tidal gates than the smaller boats, as Tim Powell explains: “With all these kind of races you need an element of good fortune to make it through the tide gates smoothly. The one thing about our boat is that it doesn’t take a lot of wind to get going and get a decent speed up – whereas the smaller boats might struggle to get through a tide gate if there’s only 5 knots of wind. In that we’d keep on punching through. I am a firm believer that you need a bit of good fortune with the tides stacking up right for you. But that’s something you can’t control too much. You end up where you end up.”
Ran 2 will sail with her normal all-star cast including numerous America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race veterans but they will face the very highest competition with crews of equally accomplished sailors on board the STP65s Rosebud and Luna Rossa and on Karl Kwok’s Farr 80 Beau Geste. Powell says he will be particularly looking out for Rosebud and Beau Geste as they are the more offshore-orientated.
A record entry of 300 boats will each carry an OC Tracker for the 2009 Rolex Fastnet Race, which starts from Cowes this Sunday, 9th August. The Fastnet Race is a 608 nautical mile offshore classic which sees boats ranging from 30ft cruisers to 100ft Maxis racing from Cowes on the Isle of Wight, to the Fastnet Rock, off the south coast of Ireland, before returning to the finish in Plymouth. Every yacht will carry an OC Tracker device, supplied jointly by OC Technology, part of the OC Group, and race organisers RORC. The OC Tracker is an Iridium-based GPS unit that automatically supplies position updates for the entire fleet, which can then be viewed online on a special race viewer.
This year’s edition marks the 30th anniversary of the tragic 1979 Fastnet Race, when gale-force winds battered the fleet. Fifteen yachtsmen lost their lives, and a total of 23 yachts were sunk or abandoned. A massive search and rescue operation resulted in over 130 sailors being rescued at sea, however, the limited communications technology carried by yachts at the time meant that one of the greatest difficulties facing the rescue services was locating each boat.
“This year we have record entry numbers of 310 – 300 yachts racing in the Fastnet and 10 IMOCA 60 yachts in their own class. We also have a new, improved race player and all the OC Trackers will be on the same race viewer,” explained Clémentine d’Oiron, Manager, OC Technology. The OC Trackers are a self–contained unit that operate automatically. “The crews have to just put them on the boat and switch them on by simply removing a small magnet, and then just leave it be. It will be automatically reporting every half hour throughout the race.
“It’s all self-contained, with no wires, and is really straightforward. The OC Tracker stays in sleep mode all the time, and only wakes up to send its message, which means it has a lot of battery life because it’s only on for 3 minutes every hour. It’s the most reliable system in the world and we’ve got the biggest fleet of trackers in the world.”
However, d’Oiron warned that occasionally a boat may not show on the race viewer. “Sometimes if the boat is too heeled over the OC Tracker might not be able to send a signal, so it will keep trying again. But if a Tracker isn’t working on the map, that doesn’t mean the boat necessarily has a problem.”
The first Trackers have already been fitted to Fastnet entries this week, with the remainder added and activated well before the start of the Rolex Fastnet Race at 12.00pm on Sunday, 9th August.