They don’t call it Bomb Alley for nothing. The name comes from the winds that whip through a narrow passage between the Maddalena Archipelago and Sardinia, part of the course for the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup. For the 2024 races that began this week, there was enough wind, with gusts up to 54 knots, to suspend some sailing.
The Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup, a fixture of Mediterranean sailing since 1985, races out of Porto Cervo, Sardinia, on the northeastern face of the island. For the first time, racing this year includes a Maxi World Championship title for the winner among 10 boats 80 to 100 feet long, vying among a total fleet of about 40. Competition wraps up Saturday. Superlatives apply.
Bomb Alley is a racecourse classic, a birthplace of legends. Winds are squeezed to high velocities in the narrows. The same winds in strategic places are blocked by this islet or that, robbing the sails of power. A boat might drift into a calm, but demons are waiting to knock that boat flat if the crew eases out of the calm spot unprepared for the blast. Thus, Bomb Alley.
Murray Jones, an important player in New Zealand’s America’s Cup victories, called this “a fantastic place to sail; beautiful; challenging.” The veteran Ken Read, who has won multiple world championships, called it “a top racing venue on the planet with the best big boats and the best big-boat sailors, the elite of the elite, bobbing and weaving through spectacular islands and outcroppings. Get your name on the Rolex Maxis trophy and you’ve done something in our sport.”
About those islands and outcroppings, however. Navigators are charged with guiding the boats, cutting corners close, but not too close. They know the beauty, but also the worries. It is not unknown for teams to navigate the rocks ahead of race week, to build their own charts of hazards and depths.
In mild weather, it might be reassuring that underwater rocks show through clear waters. Not this week. Add wind and whitecaps, and the sea turns dark, inscrutable. The ante on getting it right goes up. A boat under full sail might be closing fast on a turning mark — or hazard — perhaps with another boat also bearing down hard. Did we mention adrenaline?
Murray this week shared the tactician’s role aboard the 100-foot Galateia with the American Tom Whidden, a tactician who has won the America’s Cup three times, but reminds people that “I’ve also lost it twice.” Those two are typical of the level of professional sailors who showed up for this event. They were supporting Galateia’s owner-driver David Leuschen at the center of it all.
The experience of driving is intense. Drivers control a machine 100 feet long and 140 feet high that blows spray left and right while they balance on a fine line between the sail power overhead and the keel’s counterweight below, with 25 people working for them on deck and the boat alive in their hands.
“I don’t see the point of racing these wonderful yachts if you don’t helm them yourself” said Andrea Recordati of Milan and a second-generation member of Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, the host of the event. His 100-foot Bullitt (he’s a movie fan) won the Rolex Middle Sea Race last year, whetting his appetite to keep improving the Wally Cento he bought in 2021. As the new commodore of the yacht club, he would not have expected to have the fleet sit out the first two days of racing in a gale, but it happened. History had its own way of writing a wrinkle into “celebrating the 40th anniversary of our partnership with Rolex.”
When the sun sets Saturday on Italy and the racing is finished, everyone will have a story. No one, however, will have memories more clear than the tacticians, whose job was to analyze every move and direct where to aim the boat while allowing for wind shifts, competitors that might be blocking and when the navigator says way or no way. And then, in less time than it takes to read that, they’ve moved three spaces.
Who are these people?
One is the American Ed Baird. Among his many achievements, Baird sealed his hero status in 2007, steering the Alinghi as if it could be on rails, defending the America’s Cup for Switzerland. He came to the 2024 Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup as tactician for ICAP Leopard 3. The boat has a lot of moving parts.
“There is a small backup motor that runs all the time, powering the hydraulic ram that cants the keel from side to side, for stability,” Baird said. “It also keeps two daggerboards active, so there is a lot of machinery moving around.”
Deployed, a daggerboard — a fin — provides lateral resistance and limits sideways slip when the boat is sailing upwind. Downwind, daggerboards become resistance and up they come, out of the way.
Most of the boats have fewer moving parts. Leopard’s configuration, including water ballast, is best suited to long-distance racing. Using water ballast in the short races that are a component of Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup would mean transferring the water from side to side on multiple maneuvers, which probably burns too much time to pay off.
However, whether dashing across the Atlantic or around the rocks of the Maddalena Archipelago, Leopard’s powered winches are important to making the machinery manageable. Forget about humans frantically spinning handles on winches that move the sails.
Powered winches are standard in this fleet, and they are finding their way onto smaller race boats, too.
Power assist goes a long way toward making a 100-foot boat raceable, but, “Don’t kid yourself,” Baird said. “You still need 22 big, strong, smart people working together in combat mode.”
Jochen Schümann, in his role as tactician on the Wally yacht Magic Carpet Cubed, compared himself to “the conductor of an orchestra, giving direction.” As a four-time Olympian with three gold medals for Germany, his path follows a familiar pattern.
He sailed a small boat. He mastered the art of reading wind and current. He developed what sailors call a feel for speed until he could close his eyes and know instinctively what the boat was telling him. He learned the arts of maneuvering for advantage in a fleet with rapidly changing dynamics. Those are the skills a sailor builds over a lifetime and they translate to a 100-foot boat at Porto Cervo.
Perhaps the owner of a 100-foot boat has spent a lifetime building the wealth to play the game, but then it takes a team, and every player is a star.
Maxis Through the Years
Big boats have raced against each other for as long as there have been big boats, but the organizing efforts that led to the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup began with a different set of acronyms.
1980 The term Maxi was coined for a group of yachts, each about 70 feet long, handicapped under a formula known as the International Offshore Rule. As Class A, they raced a series of short and long races out of Porto Cervo, fixing Sardinia as the go-to location for the annual championship of the newly formed International Class A Yachting Association. The first winner was the American businessman Jim Kilroy’s Kialoa IV. Awards were presented by the Aga Khan, a founder of the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda.
1984 Rolex entered the picture at Porto Cervo as sponsor of the Rolex Swan Cup, open to the popular line of boats from the premier Finnish builder
1985 Rolex sponsored the first Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup.
1997-99 Larry Ellison, a founder of the Oracle Corporation, won with Sayonara before switching his focus to chasing the America’s Cup.
2001 With handicap formulas changing, Class A became history and the yachting association was reinvented as the International Maxi Association.
2013 The international sport was now managed by World Sailing. Two world-title events were allotted annually to the I.M.A., and the modern era began. The first sanctioned World Championship mixed dedicated race boats with holiday cruisers, exposing a need for separation.
2014 I.M.A. leadership created the Maxi 72 class for 72-foot boats, to support fair racing. Enthusiasm was high. The class win went to Alegre and skipper Andy Soriano, defeating past winners Bella Mente and Ran. For Soriano, having slipped to the runner-up spot two years in a row, the new format delivered a satisfying win. “The level of competition has been raised more than any of us could have imagined,” he said.
2015 The World Championship title was awarded to the Maxi 72 class. The American Hap Fauth’s Bella Mente took the title by one point over Robertissima III. Maxi 72s continued Worlds title racing in 2016 and 2017. By 2018, too many of the boats had been modified beyond the parameters of Maxi 72s. They continued to be competitive individually, but not as a class.
2017 The grandest fleet of big boats, the J Class, assembled six boats, enough to qualify for a Worlds title. Racing was in Newport, R.I., the home of so many America’s Cup matches. In the 2017 Worlds fleet, only Velsheda, launched in 1933, was original. The other five boats were replicas built of modern materials under class requirements to match the lines of one of the original Js. Harold Goddijn won with Lionheart, developed from a naval architect study for Ranger, the winner of the 1937 America’s Cup.
2024 The Maxi World Championship title was awarded in a blustery week with sailors hoping for a sunny reprieve to wrap it up.
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