Inside the Rolex Middle Sea Race: A Sail Designer’s Perspective
The Rolex Middle Sea Race is one of the great offshore sailing events, a demanding, beautiful, and at times brutal race that captures the essence of Mediterranean racing. A course of contrasts: flat calms and sudden gales, warm sunshine and biting squalls, strategy and endurance in equal measure. The Rolex Middle Sea Race has earned a reputation as one of the most technically challenging offshore races in the world.
First run in 1968 and organized by the Royal Malta Yacht Club, the race takes sailors on a 606-nautical-mile loop that begins and ends beneath the towering bastions of Valletta’s Grand Harbour. From the thunder of the starting cannons, the fleet charges north toward the Strait of Messina, where shifting currents and fickle winds test even the most seasoned tacticians. Rounding Stromboli—often illuminated by its volcanic glow—competitors then skirt the rugged northern coast of Sicily, weave through the Aeolian and Egadi Islands, pass the Pantelleria Channel, round Lampedusa, and finally beat back to Malta.
My participation in this year’s edition
This year, I had the pleasure of participating in the Rolex Middle Sea Race. I joined Ars Una, a 49-foot cruiser-racer yacht designed by Felci and built by Adria shipyard in Italy, as the helmsman. If you want to know more about the boat, check out their Instagram page ArteMare (#artemareasd), where you can find a great collection of photos from the races we took part in.
We started with moderate winds and pouring rain for the first 24hours, which, together with a long upwind leg along the east coast of Sicily, gave the crews a hint of how challenging this race could be (you can watch our start in this video: https://www.youtube.com/live/e3i-VxVxUKM — at minute 46). But once past the Stretto di Messina, the wind decided to take a long break, and all the crews faced endless days of very light breeze, between 3 and 6 knots, almost till the very end of the race. Ars Una is a heavy boat, about 11 tons of displacement, so we had to give the best of ourselves to make sure she kept flowing through the water and kept pace with the lighter boats in our class. I believe we managed to pull off a great race and scored third in both IRC and ORC in our class, not without a good fight from all the other participants.
A Sail Designer’s perspective
Sail Inventory
Although I joined the team this year as the helmsman, I also had the pleasure of working with the captain and the owner of the Ars Una on their sail inventory back in 2021, which resulted in a new set of sails.
The primary objective of the boat has always been coastal and offshore racing, which is in line with the type of boat: a relatively heavy boat, but also very stable and very “easy” to handle in high breeze. I just learned a few days ago that the boat’s record is 26.7 knots, achieved in the 2022 Middle Sea Race, a very tough one. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to enjoy the ride!
Given the type of boat and its objective, we equipped the boat with the following sails:
- Offshore Mainsail with two reefs.
- Light-Medium J1.
- Medium J2.
- Heavy J3.
- J4.
- A2 (full runner in medium breeze).
- A1.5 (Runner in light breeze).
- Fractional heavy runner A4.
- Furling Code0, to be used also as an A3.
- Spinnaker Staysail.
Center row (from left): A2 with spinnaker staysail, A1.5, Code 0
Bottom row (from left): J3, J1
Checking & Preparing the sails
In preparation for the Middle Sea race, it was time for a proper check of the sails, which now have 4 years of life and many miles on them.
We decided to have a testing day first in August (not so easy to organize in the middle of the cruising season for Ars Una —big shout-out to the captain and the crew for getting it done!) to visually check the sails and understand what modifications or improvements were needed. At the end of this testing, we decided it was worth doing a few works on the sails:
- Checking all upwind sails and reinforcing the more stressed areas of the sails.
- J1 recut to flatten the exit of the sail.
– Checking and reinforcing the upwind sails
The check-over and service of the sails are key to ensuring they keep performing well later in their lives and, more importantly, to prevent breakages caused by overstressed parts of the sail.
What I always look for first is the boltrope of the sails, as sails are hoisted and dropped several times on the foils, and, in a racing environment, it is not uncommon that the boltrope slips out of the foil during the hoist, which leads to damage to the tape and sometimes the rope itself.
In this specific case, we found that the mainsail’s boltrope was damaged in correspondence with the reefs. Nothing out of the ordinary, as that portion of the boltrope is subject to some significant horizontal loads when the sail is reefed. But, coming up to an offshore race where there is a high chance of reefing the mainsail, this needed to be repaired.
If the rope itself is damaged, it’s necessary to replace the entire boltrope. If, instead, as in this case, only the tape is damaged, we can just reinforce it locally with chafe-resistant material such as Hydranet (dyneema-based) or Teflon. Of course, it’s important to know the slot’s size before adding any thickness to the botlrope.
Another part of the sails (both mainsail and jibs) that undergoes significant stress during the life of the sail is the batten pockets. It’s quite intuitive that, because of the flapping of the sails (during each maneuver or in the starting procedure), the portion of the sail where the batten ends, what I call “inboard end of the batten”, deteriorates faster than the rest of the sail. We can see this in the images below. These sails were originally produced with internal batten pockets and internal batten reinforcements, which is a nice upgrade for racing sails, as it minimizes the number of seams on the sail and reduces the bulk of the batten pockets.
The solution was to add some external reinforcement in these areas. The type of material and the number of layers to be added depend on the sail material and stiffness. For most of the batten pockets, it was enough to add some adhesive dacron cloth, while for some battens (like the one shown in the photo above), a layer of dacron was also needed to provide extra strength.
– J1 recut to flatten the exit of the sail
The second job that we carried out was about the J1, and I find this particularly interesting. The J1 has been used and abused (as I like to say!) during its life, as it’s quite common to be caught in 15 knots for a long time before being able to change it to the J2 without losing too much ground. And the J1 is the lightest of the jibs onboard, so it’s the one that will give up its shape earlier than the others.
During the August test, we took several photos of the jibs to assess their shape, and we found that the J1 had lost some of its shape and had become rounded at the exit. To understand it, let’s look at a photo I took during one of the first sails with the J1. The sail’s sections have a smooth curvature throughout the section and a very flat exit, which helps the flow exiting the sail.
When we tried the sail in August (4 years after the original trial), we noticed that the exit of the sail was no longer straight as it had been, as highlighted in the image below. This is not surprising for a sail of this age, but it will certainly make the trimmer’s life more difficult, as the back of the sail is constantly “closed” (or hooked), making it difficult to find the correct twist.
I used my design software to analyze the shape in greater depth and pinpoint exactly where this curvature began.
Luckily for us, the wonders of sailmaking are endless, and this type of situation can be addressed effectively by doing a so-called “moon pie”. This consists of laying the section flat on the floor and slitting the sail where the extra belly appeared. Once this is done, the two” sides” will naturally tend to overlap in order to flatten the section.
Keeping this overlap, so with a flat section, we then reinforce the sail with some material of the same strength as the underlying cloth, and the job is done …
… and this is the sail flying after the recut. You can see how smoother the section exits are now. At the time I took the photo, we didn’t give enough batten tension, which caused those wrinkles at the back, but as soon as we made this adjustment, the sail looked perfect.
At this stage, we were ready to tackle this Middle Sea Race to the best of our potential!
Final considerations
As a sail designer and sailmaker, I believe that taking care of the sails periodically during their life is key to the success of a racing campaign and should always be considered part of the boat preparation, while instead is often neglected and inevitably leads to performance drops.
A big thank you to Ars Una and Artemare for letting me share this article and for letting me be part of this amazing race with them. To many more to come!
