RORC Caribbean 600

This year's RORC Caribbean 600 was characterised by photo finishes. Here's our pick of the highlights...

First to grab the headlines was a battle of the giants that went down to the wire in this year’s hotly contested RORC Caribbean 600. A trio PHOTOS ARTHUR DANIEL/TIM WRIGHT/RORC of 70ft tris chased each other in a record-breaking dash from Antigua and around the beautiful Leeward Islands, the winner sailing into the history books with a new multihull race record of just 29 hours, 38 minutes and 44 seconds. Incredibly, at the end of this super-charged battle just two minutes, 13 seconds separated first and second, with the winner decided in the final few miles of the 600nm race.

Scooping that top prize was Jason Carroll’s Argo - third time lucky for the boat, which had been runner up in this now-iconic race twice before.

They overhauled Giovanni Soldini’s Multi70 Maserati in a fierce tacking duel in the closing stages of the race, while Peter Cunningham’s Powerplay – the early race leader – settled for third.

Jason Carroll described the race as “an emotional rollercoaster” and the finish as “awesome”, adding, it was “so exciting for the whole crew, this was an opportunity not just to sail fast but to flex your sailing skills.” He also acknowledged the strength of competitor Maserati, saying “they sailed a great race.”

Close quarters

ABOVE

IRC1 and 2 after the start: Peter Lewis' J/121 Whistler chases Christopher Daniel's J/122 Juno

RIGHT, TOP

Jason Carroll's MOD70 Argo flies past rival Maserati on the way to multihull line honours

RIGHT, INSET

Jason Carroll (left) lifts the trophy together with Brian Thompson

Team triumph

In the early hours of the following morning, the ClubSwan 125 Skorpios, skippered by Fernando Echavarri, crossed the finish line in Antigua to take monohull line honours with an elapsed time of 1 day, 16 hours, 39 minutes and 51 seconds.

Less than an hour later, the 100ft super maxi Comanche followed under skipper Mitch Booth. The two boats had raced within sight of one another for the entirety of the race. There was a possibility that Comanche had done enough for the overall win; however, a storming performance by Christopher Sheehan’s Pac52 Warrior Won saw the USA flagged boat seal the overall win on corrected time.

For Sheehan and his crew, it was

Multihull battle Argo navigator Brian Thompson tells Georgie Corlett-Pitt about why this was his most thrilling edition of the race to date...

Winning always makes a race memorable – and setting a new race record has got to help too! But for pro offshore sailor Brian Thompson, who already has many records to his name, super close racing, ideal conditions and being part of a slick well-prepared team were the added ingredients that made this a perfect race...

“It was a fantastic race with the lead changing hands almost at every island,” says Brian. “The most spectacular part was the first evening when we were going up behind Nevis and into to lee of St Kitts heading for Saba, and all three MOD70s were doing 35+ knots in flat water; we were perhaps 30 metres away from Maserati at times, doing that sort of speed - that was an amazing sight, one that really burns in the memory.” 14-18 knots winds throughout meant that Argo carried full sail and was pushing for max speed without any real worry of capsizing. But with their competitors pushing just as hard, there wasn’t a second the eight-person crew could take their foot off the gas. “We had to keep the boat going 100 per cent the whole time, and also pick the best route through the through the islands, and that takes real concentration, especially from the drivers. There was very little rest for anyone,” says Brian. He credits much of the team’s performance to their hard work in maximising training time pre-race; talking around the course and practising specific boat handling manoeuvres they knew were likely to come into play. It paid off. The three giant tris traded places throughout the early stages of the race, but the key gains came in knowing where they could take risks on the course, and in having the confidence to pull off super-slick manoeuvres, even at 30 knots, that gained them valuable seconds.

Dodging the rocks

“The trickiest part of the race was probably going round St Barths and St Martin because there are a lot of rocks to avoid and a lot of manoeuvring in a short space of time, says Brian. “We overtook Maserati there as we were quicker to set the gennaker, having talked it through beforehand and having everyone ready to deploy it. “Guadeloupe was really critical because of the light airs in the lee. The race really is a sprint, that leg from St Barths to Guadeloupe is really the only time anyone can get some sleep. We got everyone up early and made sure we were ready for the light airs. You could be doing wonderfully until this point then just park and the fleet catches you up;

equally you could come from way behind and catch up. It’s almost like two races, one to get to the lee of Guadeloupe, and then the second one starts as you exit; because everyone is sailing the boat so well and there aren’t that many passing lanes, if you have a lead coming out from Guadeloupe, there is a very good chance you will hold it to the end.” At this point, Maserati was in the lead. The Argo crew needed to play it clever if they had any chance of turning things around. As they rounded Redonda Rock for the final dash back to Antigua, the wind was shifting east, meaning more wind inshore than usual. With Maserati steering wide, they cut in as close as they dared to Redonda’s rocky shore - so close in fact, that, Brian recalls, “a downdraft caused the hull to fly higher than it had all race, we headed up to depower and nearly hit the island itself”. But it was just the boost they needed and together with the tight rounding they'd gained close to a mile on Maserati. “We knew after that the wind was always going to go light in the lee of the convergence zone off Antigua, and then go right for the last bit, and so that’s where we planned to try to engage in a tacking deal with Maserati.” “At the point when they got into the light air under Antigua we tacked away; we were still in stronger wind wrapping around the western end of Antigua.”

Tacking duel

With just a few miles to the finish, Maserati tacked to cover Argo, and the two engaged in a mind-blowingly close tacking duel. Argo began to gain. Brian explains: “Argo is a little bit easier to tack because our foils are easier to manoeuvre, and also we were in slightly stronger wind all the time, so we slowly got closer with every tack, and put them under pressure. “With the MOD70 you have to cant the rig to leeward before you tack; there’s a lot of drag too from the foils as the boat slows through the turn, so it’s very easy to get caught (in irons). Maserati had a slower tack and we managed to just get through their lee okay whilst they were mid-tack. Very slowly, we worked out in front of them, and then they were left in our bad air. At that point we only had three or four miles to run so then it was a matter just covering them to the finish and executing some good tacks.” With victory and the race record sealed, Brian says there was a feeling of sheer elation among the team; only much later did exhaustion set in. A warm reception awaited them on their return: “All the superyachts were blaring their horns and we realised how closely everyone was following it all on the race tracker and AIS. It was incredible.”

the culmination of many months of hard work, and the delight was clear, as Sheehan spoke afterwards of the “positive energy on board, hard work and collaboration” adding that, “Every member of the Warrior Won team has put in an outstanding performance”.

Warrior Won’s tactician, Canadian Richard Clarke, a four-time Olympian and past Volvo Ocean Race winner, explained more about their success, saying: “A race like the Caribbean 600 is short but complicated. It’s short enough that you can push really, really hard, but you have to manage fatigue. On Warrior Won with a fixed keel you have to keep as many bodies on the rail as you can. The basic aspects are keeping the boat at maximum speed with the right combination of sails up. As a tactical race the 600 rates as one the hardest in the world because there are so many islands to round and the tactics vary according to the time of day. Add fickle trade winds and squally clouds into the mix too!”

Hot competition

Elsewhere, another particularly close finish unfolded between two British JPK1180s who were vying for the win in IRC One. The two are familiar combatants, having last faced off in 2021’s Rolex Fastnet Race, where a broken mast for Ed Bell's Dawn Treader had left the door open for Tom Kneen's Sunrise.

This time, the battle played out in full going all the way to the finish. Sunrise took the spoils - but only just, beating Dawn Treader

ABOVE, LEFT

A great vantage point for the start of IRC Super Zero

ABOVE, RIGHT

Super tight racing from the off, here between VO65 Ambersail II and VO70 Hypr

BELOW

Groovederci Racing - Sailing Poland powers past Redonda

RIGHT

The overall win on corrected time went to Pac52 Warrior Won after a great team performance into second place by less than 12 minutes after IRC time correction.

Sunrise’s Tom Kneen described the duel saying: “They gave us a hell of a race, including rolling us downwind, which was terrifying from my perspective.

“We knew pretty early that we had a lot on, and on top of that we broke our jib halyard lock. We had a crew up the rig repairing it for the first reach, so we were on the back foot right from the beginning. We made up some ground on the long reach (to Guadeloupe) and then it got really tricky with the wind fading, as it did for the rest of our race. This was not a blast round the Caribbean in 20 knots, but a complex, highly technical race with a well-sailed boat chasing us!”

Meanwhile, in IRC2, Brit Ross Applebey’s victory was his eighth class win in the RORC Caribbean 600 and the seventh for his Oyster 48, Scarlet Oyster, after fending off stiff competition. He remarked: “IRC Two is far from a soft class, it is tough, close competition.”

Yet another closely fought battle took place in the Volvo fleet, where Groovederci Racing - Sailing Poland, skippered by Deneen Demourkas, crossed the finish just 20 minutes ahead of rival I Love Poland. It was a particularly commendable win considering the team had only come together at the last minute.

With 738 sailors from 32 nations and so many close battles, there's no doubt the 13th edition of the RORC600 has gone down as a classic.