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I replied that I was surprised. There were photos showing the boat one hundred years ago with sails set. Surely, the rig and the sails were known. “Not really,” he said. “We have maybe 40 photos of the boat under sail. We don’t know what sails were below decks or what she carried on every point of sail.”

He went on to say that this year they had radically increased the foresails size and he thought that the boat was capable of 24 knots on the right reach. In fact, some of the old logs suggested she had done that before.

Guisseppe loves his boat. And maybe he is prone to exaggerate or just guilty of wishful thinking. But I think he may be right. They added sail with abandon and pressed these boats like F1 cars are pressed today. These were the F1 races of their times. The boats were built with utter ruthlessness for speed. As classics we treat them with reverence. They viewed them as disposable. We shall see what Lultworth does, but more on that later.



For those of you unfamiliar with the rather exotic world of classic yachts the Panerai Series is a relative newcomer. This is its 3rd year and it runs over five races held in some of the Mediterranean’s finest locations. It starts in Antibe, then moves to the Italian coast at Porto Santo Stefano, then to Port Mahon in the Balearics and then to Porto Rotondo one of the loveliest bays tucked into a corner of north-east Sardinia.

It was there that I joined the event. We arrived in Sardinia on Friday to Porto Rotondo in the late afternoon just as the first day’s races were completed. September in Sardinia is special. The sun still casts that lucid light that seems to appear as if by latitudinal magic when one heads south and east into and across the Mediterranean. It is a strong, clear light. It picks up the white of the sails so that the sails become sharp edged abstract geometries. It makes the brass bright work on the boats sting the eyes and turns the harbour waters aquamarine. Everything has an edge and clarity.

Sardinia makes a perfect backdrop for classic yachts. It does not have the polished perfection of Cap d’Antibes nor the vibrancy and ebullience of Palma de Mallorca but it shares that isolation and remoteness of the region. It is not completely Italian just as the Balearics are not quite Spanish. Each has its own lost Latin dialect and language that evokes Spanish, French and Italian in different mixes. Each reminds you that these were kingdoms of their own with cultural nuances that poised them between louder cultures whose dominance eventually drowned them out.

When I checked in, as usual knowing only Spanish and English, I put on my pretend Italian; which is essentially Spanish with hand waving. The receptionist was charming enough to put up with me but switched from Italian, to Sardinian. Like tuning an old radio, I couldn’t understand the Italian but the Sardinian, like Catalan, hovered on the edge of conversation. And of course, as always, she was far more charmed to be speaking in her true tongue than the Italian of the mainland.

But this was Italy, a point which came home with some force the next day when I was talking with Peter, the first mate aboard Mariella which I was a guest on the for day’s sail. We were talking about Agneta which had been built for Gianni Agnelli, of the Agnelli family that built and owned Fiat and is one of the most famous and influential families in Italy. According to Peter the rules for Vintage Yachts originally was limited to boats built before December 31st 1949, but the Agnelli’s boat was not finished until 1952. Thus a new rule was born which said that if the boat had been designed before 1949 and built before the end of ’52 then at the discretion of the association it could be included as a vintage yacht. How amusing that only one boat in the world happens to fall within this rule.

Of course, our first goal upon arriving (after drinking some champagne with our hostesses whilst planning our attack) was to find a way off the party boat to which we had been assigned and aboard one of the great yachts that were stacked stern to along the docks in front of us. Cutters and sloops, schooners, yawls, and ketches were jammed alongside one another. White hulls, blue hulls, and even a couple of naturally varnished hulls gleamed in rows. For me it was a pure case of desire.

It is difficult to describe the longing that comes over me when I see a great yacht. I want to have it out on the ocean, under my control with all possible sails aloft. It makes me anxious with unfulfilled desire.

We were fortunate on all counts. We ended up on Mariella on Saturday and Lulworth on Sunday with the added fun of tooling around the race course on a Wally speedboat with the Yachting World editors and cameraman as they took their action shots.



Mariella is a delightful boat. She’s a vintage ketch built in 1939 and owned by Carlo Falcone, the owner of the Antigua Yacht Club Marina and a well known face on the circuit. Mariella has been a frequent winner amongst classic yachts but she is a heavier boat and needs a proper breeze to show her speed. Unfortunately, the winds barely broke 12 knots on Saturday so, though she was sailed well and expertly by her skipper and crew; they cannot move a boat by magic.

For those of us who were primarily ballast the day was wonderful. I was charmed to meet an Asturian, Graciela Ruiz Ortiz and her partner Francesco Kovarich. As my wife is from Asturias it quickly became apparent that Graciela and I agreed on most things, including the fact that the Asturianas are the friendliest people in Spain. What was equally interesting though was their wine, an organic Super Tuscan called PoggioFoco I had the opportunity to taste it later as they had done a private bottling for another boat. It reminded me that the new informs the old just as the old informs the new; they had brought an unusual approach to wine making to a very traditional area. Because their vineyards sit atop the Maremma Hills and are exposed to the ocean 12 Km away the vines are constantly exposed to a sea breeze. They used this to support their organic practice and the wine reflects that sea spirit. For an Asturiana everything is personal and emotional and the connection between wind and wine and wind and sea made perfect sense to them. Drinking their Maremma Toscanna Red and looking out over the yachts that evening it all made sense to me. I look forward to finding some excuse to be in southern Tuscany so I can visit the vineyard.

On Sunday we spent the pre-race on Lulworth. Lulworth is not your usual yacht, and her story is too long and important to capture here in detail. But in short she was one of the great five boats from the robber baron era and she he kept company with and raced against the other greats of the time -Brittania Westwood (nee Eleanora) and Shamrock.

It’s the wish of David Glenn of Yachting World to some day see the restored and reconstructed versions of these boats running side by side down the Solent again; a majestic idea that I also would really love to witness.

The first thing you notice about Lulworth is that she is a powerful and big boat. At 180 tons with her mainsail, topsail and two head sails up she powers up tremendously. This is a big, complicated boat to manage. It was no wonder that Guiseppe described a perfect day of sailing as one where neither the crew nor the boat came back damaged.

However this boat is more than just a great classic. It is a boat that has been lovingly and meticulously, some would say obsessively, restored.

Debates rage in small circles about boat restoration. Some people believe that as much of the original boat should be kept as possible regardless of the impact on the boat’s performance or outcome; whilst others believe the spirit of the boat is better shown by a reconstruction of the original. Eleanora, which is a reconstruction of the original schooner Westwood, was built in that spirit while Lulworth represents the epitome of the former. Guiseppe proudly pointed out the scar he had left in some mahogany panelling below because it had been visible in a photograph taken some 50 years before.

But Lulworth is a special case because of how rare it is for so much of an original boat to be preserved so that someone like Guiseppe can restore and showcase it in the first place. And it makes it all the more amazing to think that the boat which was powering through the sea was much the same as she had been nearly one hundred years before.

It’s remarkable to think how well these boats performed. And how demanding they were on their crew. In the old days it took nearly 50 men to raise the wet cotton main sail before the winches were installed.

This is a boat that impressed me most ‘on the reach’ and ‘wing on wing’ though. When she sails with her foresail poled out there is so much visible sail that the boat is almost lost under the sheer expanse of white that fills the horizon in front of you.

But once again the ind was light that day and Eleanora had the advantage as her schooner rig and size was better suited to the conditions.

We closed the day on a fast RIB shooting photos. Without a doubt the most exciting moment was on the downwind run when one of the boats almost lost a crewmember overboard as he tried to recover the spinnaker from the water. It was a miracle that they pulled him back aboard. It goes to show that you do not have to be actually on the boat to experience a bit of drama.

I love classic yachts. Lulworth and Mariella each show the power and grace of sail and Panerai are to be complimented on putting the world in a position to appreciate them, hopefully in future even more of this type of boat can be restored to such glorious condition.

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