Postcard from Palma

James Boyd reports from the Copa del Rey

Having 'done' over the course of a week both the 180th Skandia Cowes Week and the younger Copa del Rey celebrating merely celebrating its 25th birthday, we have taken the opportunity to tot up some of the principle differences between the leading regatta from Northern Europe and its Mediterranean equivalent.

First their similarities: royal patronage. Royal presence has been synonymous with Cowes Week although your actual royal presence has been a bit thin at the UK's leading regatta in recent years since the royal yacht Britannia was turned into a tourist attraction in Edinburgh's Leith Docks. In contrast royalty was very much in evidence in Palma with King Juan Carlos steering Jose Cusi's TP 52 Bribon alongside the likes of Bouwe Bekking and Canadian Star medallist and former World Champion Ross MacDonald while Crown Prince Felipe was racing on board Cam. The rest of the family including the Queen and 'infantas' Elena and Cristina watched the race from a powerboat.

Principally what we have decided sets apart Cowes and Copa del Rey (in fact this may apply across the board to any northern European regatta versus any southern European ones), is that at the latter you can get free beer, the prospect of which, if applied to the former, does not bear thinking about.

Having attended Skandia Cowes Week on countless occasions we have come to hold a distinct love-hate relationship with the event. 1,035 boats competing provides a superb spectacle and given lastg week's conditions allowed superb racing on one of the world's most complex stretches of water, but sheer numbers of boats equals competitors and hangers on in their tens of thousands, turning Cowes into a heaving mass of bodies apres-race. A fantastic 19th centry style class divide also becomes evident during Cowes Week, although this may also be evident at Copa del Rey. At Cowes this effectively boils down to those who attend balls and those who don't, blazered and probably titled octogenarians gaffawing from ancient leather armchairs at the Royal Yacht Squadron and Royal London versus 20-something crews probably sailing in one of the nasty 'modern' keel boat classes who feel happy to drink 15 pints of Chris Troupe's finest of an evening and sleep wherever they happen to hang their baseball cap that night.

We were surprised and almost relieved by how in comparison Copa del Rey, or the Copa del Rey Trofeo Agua Brava - Camper (to give it its complete title) one of the Mediterranean's leading regattas and the 'must attend' event on the Spanish calendar, is actually tiny in comparison. While the size of Cowes Week causes Cowes to be taken over completely for the week, at Copa del Rey the action is based around one club, the Real Club Náutico de Palma in the heart of Palma's enormous harbour. The club is an impressive building the requisite amount of marble, but unlike some other upmarket yacht clubs we have been to around the world, feels like a real working yacht club.

The main different between the two regattas are fleet sizes - compared to Cowes Week's impressive 1,000+ turn out, Copa del Rey this year was competed by just 103 boats.

What Copa del Rey lacks is Cowes Week's legion of one design classes. It is an purely IMS regatta and with this rule going through a transitional phase probably explains the low attendance. This year the focus of attention, as it was last year, was on the incredibly impressive line-up of TP 52s - 20 of them, none more than two seasons old and all costing a cool 1-1.5 million Euros a pop (ex-running costs). Meanwhile the IMS fleet was divided into three classes - 'Open' (for boats with a GPH of 496-609.9 sec/mile), the relatively new 670 class (for boat with a GPH of 625-674.9 sec/mile) and the IMS 600 level class racing boat for boat, a good idea in principle but with just seven boats racing was not well subscribed.

The Open class was home to the two most high profile boats outside of the TP 52 class: Pedro Campos on board the Grand Soleil 56 movistar and Fernando Leon's Cam. Both are worthy of mention. Little goes on in the upper echelons of Spanish yachting without Campos being somehow involved. He for example manages the movistar team including a number of domestic keel boat programs but also the Volvo Open 70 campaign (skipper Bouwe Bekking confides that they are likely to go again in 2008) and the Desafio Espanol Spanish America's Cup challenge.

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