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Sailing News for November 13, 2025

It’s crunch time offshore as the Class40 pack in the Transat Café L’Or bunches up for a dramatic Atlantic finish while Sydney’s 18ft skiffs line up for a high-stakes Spring Championship finale. The Contender class wraps a powerhouse season with new world and national champs, and three ARC veterans reveal the real-world lessons of keeping the lights on across the ocean. Finally, Anna Weis gives a behind-the-scenes look at how the F50’s trimmer and grinder work in perfect sync to keep the world’s fastest sailboats flying steady.

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Inshore & Offshore Racing

Transat Café L’Or – Class40 Convergence (4 min read)
With under 1,000 miles to Martinique, the Class40 pack is bunching up and the northern leaders are starting to feel the heat. SNSM still hold about 40 miles, but their angle looks shaky while Seafrigo-Sogestran and Les Invincibles push in from the south as the trade winds crumble. Squalls, patchy pressure and big shifts are turning this final stretch into a street fight. Expect an intense, nerve-shredding finish where one smart gybe or a lucky breeze corridor could flip the whole leaderboard.

18ft Skiff SIXT Spring Championship – Race 6 Preview (4 min read)
The final race of the SIXT Spring Championship is shaping up to be a pressure cooker, with $7,800 on the line and no discards to bail anyone out. Series leader Sixt holds an eight-point buffer, but a light Easterly and a messy handicap-adjusted finish mean nothing is safe until the computer spits out the results. Club Marine looks like the biggest threat with a juicy 10-minute allowance, while Yandoo has to fight from scratch. Expect chaos, calculators, and a nail-biting wait at the finish as the fleet battles one of Sydney Harbour’s trickiest breezes.

Olympic Class/Dinghy Sailing

2025 British Contender Class Season Review (6 min read)
The Contender fleet packed a full year of big breeze, tight racing and a seriously stacked calendar. Graeme Wilcox kicked things off by winning the delayed 2024 Worlds in Florida, then the UK fleet ground through nine Travellers’ Trophy events that ranged from glassy inland shifts to classic wave-smashing sea states. The big showdown came at Garda, where a three-way points tie handed Mark Bulka the 2025 World title on countback. Back home, Simon Mussell dominated the Nationals at Shoreham, while Stuart Jones sealed the Travellers’ Series yet again. A powerhouse season for one of the UK’s liveliest dinghy fleets.

Cruising

Three Transatlantic Cruisers Share Their Power Lessons (9 min read)
Three cruisers crossed the Atlantic and each discovered the hard way that offshore power planning is never as simple as the spreadsheet says. One sailor lost his hydrogenerator to corrosion and had to hand-steer and shut down the freezer just to keep the lights on. Another had her alternator fail mid-ocean and ended up navigating old-school with paper charts and a taped-on torch. A third realized his “AGM” batteries were just plain lead-acid and woke up to 11.9 volts every morning. Their fixes ranged from tilting solar panels like wings to doubling solar, mixing renewables, and being ruthless about power draw. It’s a masterclass in real-world energy management when the nearest marina is 3,000 miles away.

Sailing Highlight of the Day

Anna Weis breaks down why the grinder and jib trimmer are basically the F50’s balance keepers. She’s cranking the handles to feed power to the wing trimmer, then juggling foot pedals and buttons to keep the jib tuned to every tiny shift in angle or pressure. Get it wrong and the boat feels twitchy. Nail it and the platform locks in and flies smooth. It’s a quick, cool look at how much finesse hides behind all that speed.

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