With the much-anticipated return of the Admiral’s Cup this summer and the off-the-scale popularity of the Rolex Fastnet Race, which has its own centenary in 2025, the RORC is arguably as influential today as it has ever been. It runs the world’s largest offshore racing series which this year features the RORC Transatlantic and the Caribbean 600 as well as the Fastnet and includes the Royal Malta YC’s Rolex Middle Sea Race. It has expanded its reach with involvement in events like the Roschier Baltic Sea Race and gained a clubhouse on the Solent to complement its iconic headquarters in central London by merging with the Royal Corinthian in Cowes. But the RORC is more than just an organiser of international offshore regattas and provider of excellent facilities in useful locations – there’s a lot more to it than that. What is it that makes the RORC unique and special? One aspect is its determinedly international outlook. The consistently high calibre over the years of its members – not their wealth or status but specifically their merit as sailors – is another aspect, as is the quality of its race officers and the events they organise for other clubs as well as their own. A crucial factor, throughout the RORC’s history and equally today, is its ability to adapt successfully as society and sailing evolve. »We’ve always embraced significant changes though not without question,« the club’s current admiral Janet Grosvenor says. »Technology has changed so much – boats obviously, regulations, equipment, people’s expectations. I remember we debated long and hard about VHF radio.« The RORC has made significant contributions in shaping the evolution of yacht design and rating rules. It has raised the standards of safety at sea not just in the aftermath of the 1979 Fastnet tragedy but on many occasions before and since. It is also due great credit for welcoming many thousands of people from all walks of life into the sport of offshore racing. To understand the true essence of the RORC, as Grosvenor explains, it’s useful to know a bit about its history. She has lived a large chunk of that history, working in the RORC’s race office from 1969 and leading it for several decades. »I think part of my role now as admiral,« she says, »is to help the commodore and committee understand past mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future.« FOUNDERS’ ETHOS The Fastnet Race came before the club and it in turn was inspired by the Bermuda Race on the other side of the Atlantic. Prior to this, ocean racing had been almost entirely limited to very large yachts with fully professional crews. When they sailed offshore, as Ian Dear explains in his official history of the RORC’s first 75 years, owners were rarely on board and certainly not in command. The founders of the Fastnet Race and RORC were an interesting cast of characters. A breakaway group from the mainstream yachting establishment, their idea was widely regarded as dangerous heresy. They knew there would be fierce resistance from leading figures in both the racing world and the cruising fraternity who were determined to kill it. Ocean racing was deemed unsafe for amateurs and to race full tilt through the night, rather than reefing down and waiting till dawn to get back up to speed again, was thought by most offshore sailors to be very poor seamanship. The eminent cruising sailor and author Claud Worth was especially harsh in his criticism of the race and its founders. The man who lit the fuse, Joseph Weston Martyr, was a charismatic adventurer who had crewed in the Bermuda Race and then used his column in »Yachting Monthly« magazine to throw down the gauntlet. »An American is building an ocean racing ketch with a view to challenging British yachtsmen to an ocean race in their own waters in 1925,« he wrote. »She will be sailed by a crew of amateur yachtsmen who know almost all there is to know about the deep-water racing game … Who is there to take up the challenge?« Martyr’s American ketch did not arrive in 1925 and might never have been more than a bluff – he wrote gleefully to a friend in New York of »stirring things up« – but his column struck a chord with a very capable minority of experienced offshore sailors in Britain, and it certainly got things started. The man who by all accounts did most to establish the Fastnet (or the Ocean Race as it was initially called) was Evelyn George Martin, who then led the RORC for many years. One of the most eminent yachtsmen of his generation, he was a champion racer in boats large and small, with equal renown as a deep-water cruising skipper. »But for the work done by Martin I do not think we would have had any ocean race at all,« Martyr wrote after the first edition. »Whatever he steers, be it boat or club, is bound to go ahead on a true and steady course at its maximum rate of speed.« A stalwart of the sailing establishment who set up national and international racing dinghy classes that are still going strong today, a distinguished naval officer in both World Wars and a member of the yachting press, EG Martin was also and perhaps above all a free-thinking outsider. For most of the 1930s, for example, despite being the Eton and Oxford educated son of a family that owned one of the nation’s banks, he worked a Thames sailing barge that he had restored himself and lived aboard her full time. // In den 1930er-Jahren gewann Olin Stephens’ Stormy Weather das Fastnet Race gleich zweimal. Hier ist sie am Start des Rennens von 1987 // Olin Stephens’ Stormy Weather won the Fastnet twice in the 1930s and has sailed in the race many times since. Here she is pictured at the start of the 1987 edition FEW OF THE WORLD’S GREAT YACHT CLUBS HAVE PLAYED AS PIVOTAL A ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH OF OFFSHORE SAILING AS BRITAIN’S ROYAL OCEAN RACING CLUB, WHICH CELEBRATES ITS CENTENARY THIS YEAR. THE RORC DID NOT INVENT OCEAN RACING. LONG-DISTANCE PASSAGE RACES ARE ABOUT AS OLD AS THE SPORT OF SAILING ITSELF. BUT ITS FOUNDERS PIONEERED THE CONCEPT OF AMATEUR OCEAN RACING IN EUROPE AND THE CLUB HAS CONSISTENTLY BEEN RIGHT AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE INTERNATIONAL OFFSHORE RACING SCENE THROUGHOUT THE LAST 100 YEARS. TEXT: KIERAN FLATT Fotos: Alamy read more 18 19
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