Red Funnelling

A preview to this weekend's opening event to the RORC Calendar

The RORC racing season kicks off on Friday 25 March with the Red Funnel Easter Challenge at Cowes, Isle of Wight, UK.

With a firm commitment to sailing through support of such events, Isle of Wight specialist, Red Funnel has been involved with the regatta since 1991. Commercial Director, Colin Hetherington confirms: “The Red Funnel Easter Challenge has grown from strength to strength since its inception but particularly over the past six years. It is now firmly placed on the yacht racing calendar as the first major regatta of the season. The event last year attracted over 600 people which is good news for Cowes and the Isle of Wight.”

The Red Funnel Easter Challenge is billed as a training regatta and top RYA instructors will be on hand with on-the-water tuition whilst racing and there will be video debriefs afterwards which will give more in-depth analysis.

The coaching team will be lead by Jim Saltonstall ably assisted by Mike Richards. Jim has coached virtually all of Britain’s Olympic sailors, including Shirley Robertson, Sarah Ayton, Sarah Webb, Ben Ainslie, Adrian Stead, Iain Percy... “I would describe the Red Funnel Easter Challenge as the first real event of the year. It is the ideal way for new crews to come together and build a team, an opportunity to do a whole weekend’s training for the major events to come later in the season,” said Saltonstall.

There will be a huge variety of boats competing at Easter with hundreds of crew from all walks of life from novices to top professional sailors.

Internationally known navigator Mike Broughton will be racing on Murka: “This will be the first regatta for Murka, a brand new Swan 45 and the first time Murka’s owner driver Misha Mouratov will have a taste of one design racing. The crew came together earlier in the month and as a result of our training we have made some refinements to Murka and the crew have had the opportunity of working together as a team.”

Communications on Murka are never going to be easy as Mike Broughton explains; ” We are really looking forward to the Red Funnel Easter Challenge. An extra challenge for our crew is simply to call gybe set with six Russians, four Brits and an Iraqi on board! We often revert to hand signals to get the message over. But don’t get me wrong the Russians are very keen and warm hearted and great fun to sail with.”

Keith Miller’s Swan 45 Crackerjack will be competing with a very impressive line up of top professional sailors including Paul Brotherton, Richard Sydenham and Nick Pearson.

Another Swan 45 competing is Fever. Stuart Miller, who runs the boat and will be trimming headsails for the regatta, explains what Fever are aiming for this Easter: “Our goal on Fever for the Red Funnel regatta is to bed in a new crew. We will also be looking at rig settings and sail shape, in the hope of making some refinements for better boat speed. This is also the first event in the North European Swan 45 circuit and we understand that a very strong Crackerjack team owned by Keith Miller will be participating.”

Shaun Fröhlich’s IMX 45 Exabyte 3 had an outstanding 2004, winning some major trophies. “The Exabyte 3 team will use the Red Funnel regatta as a training exercise as last year. It is an ideal opportunity to get starting procedures tightened, manoeuvres perfected and a particularly good opportunity to work on boat speed with close proximity racing. We had a highly successful 2004 season, winning nine major bits of silverware including the Assuage Trophy. The team has high ambitions for this year and look forward to setting about their racing with renewed focus and determination.”

Three will also be three DK46s competing at the Red Funnel Easter Challenge comprising Erivale (Mike Greville), Fidessa Fastwave (Chris Brown/Peter Harding) and Shockwave (Nick Lutte) while coming over from Ireland will be Colm Barrington and his crew on the Ker 39 Flying Glove , very impressive in last season’s Rolex Commodores' Cup.

This year also sees the return of the Farr 52 Team Tonic, which has been chartered for the event by the Irish Admiral’s Cup team as the team's Ronan Grealish comments: “Our goal for the Red Funnel Easter Challenge is to get the crew together before the brand new Transpac 52, Patches, is ready to sail. We will have limited sailing time on the TP52 before the Admiral’s Cup so it is very important for us to have the full crew together for as much time as possible and Team Tonic, the Farr 52, is as close to the new boat as we can get in the UK. The Red Funnel Easter Challenge will be very much a training weekend for us. We are not going there to go pot hunting. We see it more as an opportunity for the new crew to gel and fine tune manoeuvres.”

Team Tonic was out racing this Sunday and some very well known south coast sailors were on board including Shirley Robertson as well as America's Cup sailors Jonathan Taylor, Jules Salter, Ian Budgen and Lou Varney of Diverse Yacht Services.

There is also an IRM class at the regatta with two Farr 40s entered, Nick Haigh’s Too Steamy and Creative Pay entered by H20 Yachting and several Farr 45s. Ian Sullivan driver of Farr 45 Audacious spoke about the regatta with some relish. “Three Farr 45s are confirmed for the regatta: Audacious, Atomic and Rebel. There may be a youth team and possibly some others, so we should have some really tight one design racing. For the Red Funnel Easter Challenge we have supplemented last year’s team with a few well known faces from the south coast as we have lost a few crew to the Irish Admiral’s Cup Team. We are also trying out a few new people as well. We lost our training/trials weekend last week so are using the regatta to finalise the crew for the coming season.”

Alistair Ray has a well campaigned J/109 and a brand new set of sails for the Easter regatta. He has grand plans for the season, as he explains: “ Jumunju was bought in 2003 with the intention of taking part in some top class competitive sailing over the next few seasons including this years Rolex Fastnet and with a view to potentially doing the Rolex Middle Sea Race. The goal for the Red Funnel Easter Challenge is to continue our development from last year, in particular improving on third place in RORC IRC2 and regularly finishing in the top three boats in the inshore regattas. This will be a tough task but we are very enthusiastic at this stage in the season.”

Max Kenna won the European Etchells championship in France this year under the expert guidance of Ian Walker. Kenna has made a departure from Etchells racing to enter the Red Funnel Easter Challenge. “One of the problems with being almost 17 stone is that as soon as you offer to crew for someone they always insists on sticking you on the mast. I’m now keen to try my hand further back on the boat but people aren't jumping at the opportunity to have me steering their boats or making critical decisions, so seven mates and I have chartered an X332. The main thing we will be aiming for over the Easter Regatta is to learn how to sail the boat properly. We hope to take advantage of the free tuition and have asked Jim Saltonstall to have a look at what we are doing wrong and we are looking forward to the after sailing briefings when there are bound to be a few pictures of us screaming at each other! Previous Easter Regattas I have done were a brilliant laugh so it should be good.”

The buzz from the competitors is that the Red Funnel Easter Challenge heralds the start of the RORC sailing season. There is a mood of expectation among the competitors and that the event is the platform on which to build the season ahead.

Jim Saltonstall sums up his thoughts for the Red Funnel Easter Challenge: “When it comes to sailing you never know everything. The process is continuous whatever level of sailing you participate in. I sincerely hope that everybody thoroughly enjoys the Red Funnel Easter Challenge, we are only on this planet once so it is important to enjoy every minute of it!”