Yacht racing is a sailing sport involving sailing yachts and larger sailboats, as distinguished from dinghy racing, which involves open boats. It is composed of multiple yachts, in direct competition, racing around a course marked by buoys or other fixed navigational devices or racing longer distances across open water from point-to-point. It can involve a series of races when buoy racing or multiple legs when point-to-point racing.
A maxi yacht usually refers to a racing yacht of at least 21 metres (70 ft) in length.
The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is an annual event hosted by the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, starting in Sydney, New South Wales on Boxing Day and finishing in Hobart, Tasmania. The race distance is approximately 630 nautical miles (1,170 km). The race is run in conjunction with the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, and is widely considered to be one of the most difficult yacht races in the world.
Sparkman & Stephens is a naval architecture and yacht brokerage firm with offices in Newport, Rhode Island and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. The firm performs design and engineering of new and existing vessels for pleasure, commercial, and military use. Sparkman & Stephens also acts as a yacht and ship brokerage. The firm offers similar design and engineering services for the performance optimization of existing yachts.
Ronald John Holland is a yacht designer, who came to prominence in the 1970s with his successful racing designs, and is now best known for his superyachts such as Mirabella V and Ethereal. He is now based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Germán Frers, Sr. is a naval architect renowned for designing successful racing yachts. He designed his first yacht in 1958. There is a design team consisting of Germán Frers and his son Germán Frers, Jr., supported by a team of engineers, architects and designers, some of whom have been with the company for more than 25 years. The company has designed more than 1,000 yachts. The designs range from exotic super yachts to no-nonsense racing hulls.
Royal Huisman is a Dutch shipyard that specialises in the newbuild construction and refit, rebuild and renewal of sailing and motor yachts.
Condor is a maxi sailing yacht designed for racing and built in 1981 by Killian Bushe at Kiwi Boats U.K.,in Penryn Penryn, England. She was registered in Hamilton, Bermuda during her 7-year ocean racing campaign and her sail number is KB-80. She is not to be confused with her predecessor Condor of Bermuda (KB-78), also owned and campaigned by Bob Bell.
Condor was "probably the most famous Maxi ever, winning every major ocean racing event Twice" according to her present owners, Prosail, the overnight adventure charter outfit in Australia's Whitsundays on the Great Barrier Reef.
Pen Duick is the name best known for a series of ocean racing yachts sailed by French yachtsman Eric Tabarly. Meaning coal tit in Breton it was the name Tabarly's father gave to the 1898 Fife gaff cutter he purchased, and that his son learned to sail. He thereafter used the name for a series of successful racing yachts through the '60s and '70s.
S&S 34 is a cruising and racing fibreglass monohull sailboat class. It was based on a design by Olin Stephens from Sparkman and Stephens after a commission from British yachtsman Michael Winfield.
Dorade is a yacht designed in 1929 by Olin Stephens of Sparkman & Stephens and built 1929–1930 by the Minneford Yacht Yard in City Island, New York.
Morning Cloud was the name given by the British politician Edward Heath to a series of five yachts which he owned between 1969 and 1983.
Ragamuffin 100 is 100 ft maxi yacht which was built by TP Cookson for Charles St. Clair Brown; The boat was designed by Greg Elliott and Clay Oliver and launched in Auckland in February 2005.
John B. "Jim" Kilroy owned and raced the record-breaking Kialoa sailboats from the 1950s to the 1980s, helping pioneer the era of maxi yacht racing.
Alfa Romeo I is a 27.43-metre (90.0 ft) fixed keel maxi yacht, launched 2002, which placed first in the 2002 Sydney-Hobart race and the 2003 Giraglia Rolex cup regatta.
Alfa Romeo II is a maxi yacht designed in 2005 by Reichel/Pugh for yachtsman Neville Crichton. First-to-finish in the 2009 Transpacific Yacht Race, she also set a new elapsed-time Transpac race record for monohulls.
Greg Elliott is a New Zealand sailing yacht designer. He is most notable for the Elliott 6m an Olympic-class keelboat selected for the women's match racing event for the 2012 Olympics.
Comanche is a 100 ft maxi yacht. She was designed in France by VPLP and Guillaume Verdier and built in the United States by Hodgdon Yachts for Dr. James H. Clark and christened as Comanche.
UFO 34 is a cruising and racing fibreglass monohull sailboat class. It is a sloop based on a design by Holman and Pye. The design features a spade rudder and a Bermuda rig with a large, overlapping headsail. Over 150 UFO 34s have been built both in the United Kingdom and Australia.
George Harding Cuthbertson (1929-2017) was a founding partner of Cuthbertson & Cassian yacht designers, one of four companies that in 1969 formed C&C Yachts, a Canadian yacht builder that dominated North American sailing in the 1970s and early ‘80s.
