World biggest regatta

Miranda Merron recounts her part in this weekend's giant Barcolana race in Italy

There are several yacht races which claim to be the world's biggest, but the Barcolana has to be the winner. The entry list this year reached a mere 1,960 boats, a few boats short of the outright record of 1,982 last year. So why do 24,000 sailors make the annual pilgrimage to Trieste, Italy, a town tucked away in the far north-eastern corner of the Adriatic, to take part in a 14 mile race?

There are two things that set the Barcolana apart from other mega-entry regattas: there is only one start gun, and the results are based on the order in which boats finish (ie no corrected time).

Imagine a start line about 1.8 miles long - it sounds like a lot - until you work out that each boat has only 1.8 metres of space on that line. Now take into account the different sizes of boats fighting for space on the line. The fleet ranges from the 90ft Alfa Romeo to 20ft day boats, via a smattering of Volvo 60s, ex-America's Cup boats, many mid-range racing and cruising boats, and a handful of Mini 6.50s.

Fenders are kept ready, and the engine stays on until the start, just in case. Exercising luffing rights is out of the question. There are marker buoys every few hundred metres on the start line, to help boats stay on the right side before the start. Anyone clearly over the line gets disqualified.

I was given the dubious task of calling tactics on Team Evolution, a Farr 38 skippered by Lucia Baldassi. We opted for a spot on the line a long way away from the big boats, on the basis that we might have a chance of getting clearer air. In fact by the time we started, our patch was hopelessly over-crowded, but mainly with smaller boats.

The entire fleet started on port tack in a light south-easterly. We pulled away from our group of 200 or so, and settled in for the beat up to the first mark six miles away off Slovenia. The wind increased, requiring a headsail change which had to be delicately timed because of the several hundred boats starting to come across on starboard. And when we wanted to tack onto starboard, there were two much bigger boats in our way, but a 30 ft starboard-tacked rocketship of some type did us the favour of forcing both boats to crash tack.

At the top mark, chaos reigned, as boats of different sizes, speed, and ability converged. We stayed wide, and sailed over the top of most of them on the short dog leg, while picking up some choice Italian phrases, which I have memorised for future use.

We hoisted our spinnaker, and gybed our way down the minefield of the many boats still on the first leg, as well as getting into an altercation with a bigger port-tacked boat helmed by a vociferous individual.

The next mark-rounding was slightly less exciting, as it involved only seven boats, and we were off reaching the final two miles to the finish line. Once safely finished, we looked back, and decided we had probably placed inside the top 300 boats, and since it was about to rain, it was hard to tell how much of the horizon was still covered with boats. In fact, we finished a perfectly satisfactory 83rd.

The Barcolana was won for the second year running by Neville Chrichton's Alfa Romeo, with Ian Moore as tactician. Ian now counts three consecutive Barcolana victories, and kindly provided the mathematical calculation for the start line real-estate allocation per boat. A spectacular event worth making the effort to attend.

More photos on the following pages...