When it comes to racing massive sailboats, there’s a wisdom to renting.
The Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup, which begins on Monday in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, is often considered the world’s premiere big-boat regatta. Yachts must measure at least 60 feet, bow to stern, to participate, and many boats are crewed by high-level professional sailors.
Factor in refreshed equipment and sails, along with salaries and expenses for large crews, and the costs for this regatta can make even wealthy eyes water.
Recent years have seen the rise of charter opportunities, where clients can charter a yacht with some of its crew or an individual berth aboard a yacht, for this event, which is organized by the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda and the International Maxi Association. These opportunities are limited and aren’t cheap, but they are more affordable than owning and managing a maxi yacht and its crew.
For some sailors, chartering enables participation in an otherwise-aspirational event, while for others it can be a pathway to buying their own yacht.
“When you’re looking at the top-end guys, they are spending staggering amounts of money,” said Andrew McIrvine, the secretary general of the maxi association, of competing in the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup. “They might be spending $300,000 to $500,000 just for the week.”
Chartering, by comparison, can seem frugal.
Lucy Jackson, the director of LV Yachting, a company based in England that works with private yacht owners to provide charters, along with a few of the yacht’s full-time crew, for clients, said that chartering a yacht for the cup costs about $50,000 to $120,000 (taxes included), depending on the specific boat.
Konstantin Kobale, the chief executive of Ocean Racing, said that individual berth charters for the event, in which a sailor pays to become part of the crew, cost about $5,500 to $7,500 each, depending on the yacht.
While the fees to charter a boat often don’t include accommodation, food and transportation on shore, or race-entry fees and crew tips, they do include the salaries of several of the yacht’s professional crew members who work to ensure the safety of the clients and the yacht.
“Because all these boats are raceboats, they’re tweaky,” Jackson said, explaining that vessel-specific expertise is required to adjust a yacht’s mast and rigging, setup the sail-control lines and select the right sails for the prevailing winds.
“A private owner of a boat that’s worth a couple of million isn’t just going to let it out to somebody without knowing that he’s got someone on there who can help,” Jackson said, referring to the yacht’s professional crew members.
While pros are in charge, charterers actively sail the boats on the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup’s technically demanding courses. This, of course, requires experience.
“We wouldn’t do a regatta like that with a complete novice crew,” Kobale said. He said that typically about one-third of his charter crew members were returning clients, who were familiar with the boat, but the others were also experienced sailors. “Most of them just own smaller boats and then join us for the maxi experience,” he said.
Kobale described a three-day training process ahead of the cup that familiarizes guest crew members with their shipmates, the yacht and racecourse maneuvers. This also allows the professionals to evaluate each guest crew member’s skills and slot them into appropriate roles.
“The orientation works well, obviously their safety briefings, too,” said Jens Luehring, who chartered a berth with Ocean Racing for the 2021 Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup. “The team is phenomenal, they help you through it,” he said.
Luehring, who has sailed for almost 40 years, said that he sought out a charter opportunity at the cup after having previously raced aboard smaller yachts in Porto Cervo and the nearby Maddalena Archipelago.
“I wanted to try the maxi races,” Luehring said, adding that this doesn’t come easy. “It’s an event which is almost impossible to get into unless you are either very, very well-connected with some people who have a ton of money and race these boats.”
The berth-charter experience, he said, afforded the opportunity to race next to yachts that he would otherwise only see onscreen or in yacht-racing magazines. “That is very enticing and very cool,” he said.
Craig Clifford had a similarly positive experience chartering, along with about 15 friends, an entire boat through LV Yachting for the 2024 cup. He said they were accompanied by three professional crew members. “The crew were mainly there to look after the well-being of the boat, to make sure that things were being done safely,” he said. “They left the racing to us, really.”
First, however, the group had to demonstrate its abilities to the yacht’s crew, who he said were initially cautious.
“That’s understandable,” Clifford said. “They have a lot of responsibility towards the boat’s owner to make sure that everything’s looked after and no damage is done.”
While the 2024 cup saw strong winds that forced the regatta to cancel some racing days, Clifford said his chartering experiences — both at this regatta and at another event — inspired him and a syndicate of friends to buy an 82-foot Swan.
While ownership means that the syndicate could compete at the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup aboard its own boat, Clifford said that he would charter a maxi yacht again if things don’t work out to bring their boat to Europe.
He also said he would be open to putting his syndicate’s yacht into the charter trade, provided that the right people were involved and that the opportunity made sense.
“Clearly the reason to do it is the income,” said Giles Redpath, who owns a 75-foot McConaghy-built catamaran, which he charters through LV Yachting.
Another is the adage that yachts and crews rot in harbors.
“I got into chartering it out because I can’t use it all the time — I’m still working,” Redpath said. “When you’ve got four full full-time crew on a boat, it makes sense to get it used. Otherwise, it’s just sits there doing nothing.”
Jackson and Redpath said that for charter yachts to attract clients, they needed to be in good condition. This is especially true for the maxi cup, where privately owned yachts benefit from vast war chests.
“You’re not going to get a boat that sort of caliber,” McIrvine said, describing a gap between chartered boats and private yachts. “You’re up against people who’ve got better equipment and better people to start with, then they’ve trained together, they’ve almost certainly got newer sails,” he said.
Competitiveness aside, McIrvine said that the event accepted all qualified yacht entries. “We inspect the boat to see it obeys the measurement rules, safety rules, its sails and all equipment is legal.”
But for some charter clients, winning isn’t necessarily the point
“We were not particularly competitive,” Clifford said, explaining that while his team wasn’t familiar with their chartered yacht, they still raced it as hard as they could. “Our focus was to go sailing as a group of friends and have a few beers along the way and a few laughs and just mix in circles that we otherwise wouldn’t have got the opportunity to do.”
To that end, managing expectations is important.
If “you want to be in the top three, that’s not going to work,” Luehring said, explaining that he guest-crewed aboard a yacht that was designed for racing across oceans, not for the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup’s maneuver-intensive racecourses. “But the experience is really great,” he said.
But perhaps best of all is the aftermath.
“We flew in and basically got on the boat and met the crew and went sailing,” Clifford said. “And then at the end of the regatta, just hand the keys back and look forward to the next time.”
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