Maxi Rolex Cup Porto Cervo

A report with beautiful pictures of beautiful yachts from the extraordinary Carlo Borlenghi

Mini Profile:

Wise heads on young shoulders are a valued commodity and being in charge of a multi-million dollar yacht is the sort of responsibility that turns hair grey even faster than it fattens bank accounts.

Being the youngest skipper of a Wally racing yacht at the Rolex Cup regatta - he is in permanent charge of Thomas Bscher's Tiketikan ( a corruption of the words teak and titanium) all the year round - is something which marks out Adam Bateman from the average, run of the mill young man making his way in the world of super yachts.

At 26, he has been in the business for eight years, as he started at 18 on Bill Whitehouse-Vaux's 72-foot Mistress Quickly, which spent most of its life in the Mediterranean. He had known him since, at the age of 14, also being responsible for towing out to and back from the race course, the International 6-Metre Thisbe. It is a job which requires concentration and control, not always the attributes of a teenager.

He did his first transatlantic crossing on Irvine Laidlaw's Swan 60, Highland Fling, under the watchful eye of Campbell Field, son of Whitbread race winner Ross Field and crewing this week for Adam.

Two sessions on the Wally IMS 60 Boabunda were followed by 18 months on another of the yachts starring in the Rolex Cup, the 180-foot Adela, and he then put in an extended assignment on the lightweight Tripp 88, Shaman.

They started in the US, went to the Caribbean and Venezuela, on to England and Norway and then to Spitzbergen, reaching 80 degrees 22 mins North.

You have to be engineering-minded to run a Wally, he says, not last because of all the hydraulic systems. But he also enjoys racing. No surprises there. His father Peter, a victim of cancer last year, was a national dinghy champion in the UK before becoming Britain's Olympic coach.

"I get to go sailing, which I love, and I am paid for it," says Adam with simple clarity. His father would have approved.

Quote of the day:

"We can't even go into the bits of the chart that are marked in blue." Jo Richards, tactician, on the 24-foot deep draft of the 124-foot Antonisa, when the centre board is down.

Vae Victus dropping their massive spinnaker