Round Britain preview

James Boyd looks at the Royal Western Yacht Club's classic two handed event, starting on Sunday

Sunday will see the start of the Royal Western Yacht Club's two handed Round Britain and Ireland, an event which coincides with the club's 175th anniversary year. It will also mark the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh's patronage of the Club. Prince Phillip will be on hand to fire the start gun.

The Round Britain and Ireland race was first held in 1966 and has been run every four years (more or less) since, based on a no-handicap format with the fleet simply divided up into classes defined by overall length, a structure similar to that of the Europe 1 New Man STAR (OSTAR). Starting in Plymouth the race stops in Crosshaven in southern Ireland, Barra in the Outer Hebrides, Lerwick in the Shetland Islands and Lowestoft in Suffolk before returning to Plymouth. Stopovers last two days from the time competitors arrive until they leave, so there are no mass restarts.

Among short handed races the event has become a classic.

The 1966 race was the first major event of its kind to be won by a multihull - Derek Kelsall and Martin Minter-Kemp on board Toria, a boat which later influenced the great French sailor Eric Tabarly to try his hand at multihulls and prompted the massive interest in this genre of sailing in France. In 1970 line honours returned to a monohull - Les Williams and Robin Knox-Johnston in the 71 footer Ocean Spirit.

Knox-Johnston returned again to take first place in the gale-ridden 1974 race, this time with an early maxi-multihull, the 70ft catamaran British Oxygen, while Williams finished sixth sailing with a young Peter Blake as crew. Four years later the race was won by Chay Blyth and Rob James on Great Britain IV, a 54ft trimaran in a fleet that included names such as Knox-Johnston, 1980 OSTAR winner Phil Weld, a young Nigel Irens, Warren Luhrs, Tony Bullimore, Angus Primrose, among others.

James returned as skipper of his own boat four years later, the 60ft trimaran Colt Cars GB, one of the first multihulls to be built using composites such as Kevlar and carbon fibre. Sailing with his wife Naomi, James finished just 43 minutes ahead of his old skipper in an elasped time of 16 days 15 hours 03 minutes. James who many felt was one of the greatest British talents in offshore racing at the time, was tragically lost overboard the following year.

The 1985 race was a clash of the titans, a fight between two of the first of the modern day 60ft trimarans - Tony Bullimore's Apricot and Mike Whipp's Paragon, until the latter had to retire with structural problems. The race however proved that multihulls had come of again with impressive performances from Pierre le Maout who sailed his Macallan-Festival de Lorient -a Formula 40 catamaran with accommodation only marginally better than a Hobie cat - around in sixth place. Perhaps more impressive still, was the Danish team on the 25ft Dragonfly trimaran who managed to overtake Don Parr's 63ft monohull Quailo of Wight upwind in a gale while coming back down the North Sea.

The 1989 event was not so interesting other than for followers of maxi-catamarans. The giant French 75 footer SAAB Turbo crewed by Francois Boucher and Loic Lingois hurtled around the UK in an elapsed time of 15 days 7 hours and 30 minutes more than a day ahead of second-placed Richard Tolkien and Peter Foot on the 53ft trimaran Williams Lea.

For the first time in 1993 the race was sponsored by Teeside Development Corporation and the Lowestoft stopover changed for Hartlepool. The race was won by fledgling multihull sailor Steve Fossett and crewman Dave Scully on Florence Arthaud's recent Route du Rhum winning 60ft trimaran, which Fossett had bought and renamed Lakota. Incredibly, and as a display of how multihull technology had evolved, they halved SAAB Turbo's time to just 7 days 12 hours and 4 minutes, the current race record. However not far behind was the 35ft tri Severalles Challenge sailed by Brian Thompson and Helena Darvelid (both now sailing on Tracy Edwards' Maiden II) who finished in 9 days 21 hours and 30 minutes.

The speed of the 60ft trimarans compared to the monohull fleet was making the race near impossible to manage for the Royal Western Yacht Club and so for the next race in 1998 Open 60 monohulls were allowed with multhiulls limited to 40ft in length. This in fact provided some excellent racing between Peter Clutterbuck's trimaran Spirit of England and Richard Tolkien's FPC Greenaway and the two Open 60s Musto Performance sailed by Nigel Musto and Andy Hindley and Victoria Group sailed by Mark Gatehouse. In the end it was Tolkien's trimaran which won this contest finishing 30 minutes ahead of Spirit.

This year there are 38 entries ( click here to see the full list) and the most promising candidate for line honours is again Spirit. Recently she was sold to American Bill Foster who has teamed up with Sir Robin Knox-Johnston for the race. "It is going to be rather an interesting race," Knox-Johnston told madfor sailing. "There is a nice group of multihulls. Any of five could win and I would't like to predict it. The small multihulls are as good a fleet as you'll get".

Aside from Spirit the main contenders are Robin Herbert who is sailing with former Team Philips crewman and sailmaker Graham Goff on the immaculate Gleam, a regular winner in RORC races, while Ross Hobson and Bill Minto are sailing on the 1998 winner, now called Mollymawk.

Among the monohulls are two Open 40s - Hans Plas' Roaring 40 and Syllogic, the Dutch Open 40 skippered by Pieter Adriaans and which is fitted with 'intelligent' self learning autopilots. Also racing is Alice's Mirror, designer Adrian Thompson's original open class racer, again sailed by Jeremy Freeman, and Mini sailors Paul Peggs and Simon Curwen who are on Audiacious.

Aside from being a top short handed event, the Round Britain & Ireland Race is well known for its excellent parties in some truly fantastic locations and one of the major challenges skippers and crews face - aside from anchoring in the dense kelp off Barra - is simply keeping ones liver in shape long enough to return to sea.