The final Red Ruby race for 2024 was the La Drheam-Cup / Grand Prix de France de Course au Large from Cherbourg to La Trinité-sur-Mer, France, in July.
This multiclass event typically features a 600-mile course for the doublehanders, but this year the course was shortened to 500 miles due to expected very light air at the finish. The entry list was arguably the most competitive doublehanded fleet of 2024, with nearly all the top U.K. boats and several top French doublehanders. The race was also the second leg of the IRC Double-Handed European Championship.
My partner for Drheam-Cup was British shorthanded expert, Will Harris. Will graduated from the Artemis Offshore Academy in 2011 and has been pursuing shorthanded racing ever since. He competed in the singlehanded Figaro circuit for many years, then signed on with Boris Herrmann’s Malizia IMOCA program in 2019, competing in The Ocean Race and several doublehanded IMOCA events with Boris as co-skipper.
At 30, Will has a great deal of recent shorthanded offshore experience and is intimately familiar with the coast of Brittany and the English Channel. While he had not sailed a Sunfast 3300, the boat is quite similar to the Figaro 3, which was his home for many years. I felt very lucky to have someone of Will’s knowledge and experience to learn from and as my partner for this race.
The start was a short Code Zero reach to a set mark, then a 10-mile close reach to Cap de la Hague to the north of Cherbourg. We had a great start to leeward of the fleet, until we were informed by VHF radio that we were over early, earning a one-hour penalty. Yikes! I thought we were clear, but I guess my judgment of the line is not what it used to be. In any case, we immediately had the challenge of an extra hour to make up, so we got to work.
A big dark cloud was approaching from the west as we neared Cap de la Hague and started the next leg across the English Channel to the Shambles. The wind quickly headed and built from 20 to 30 knots. We successfully dropped the A2 spinnaker and trimmed the jib for the 70-mile reach across La Manche. We were going well and leading our class, with Chili Pepper just behind. At sundown, the breeze started to lift and we reset the Code Zero for the final miles to the Shambles.
Next, we turned upwind for a 200-mile leg, all the way to Wolf Rock off the southwest tip of England. The course follows the coastal counties of Devon, Cornwall, and Dorset, with a series of bays and headlands that requires lots of tactical choices. The first night, we did not sail our best. I was having trouble keeping the boat going fast in the choppy conditions, and the wind shifted right a bit later than we expected, putting us on a bad shift for a time. When dawn arrived, we saw that our lead had evaporated. Our closest competitor was another Sunfast 3300 named Game On. They had gained 2 miles in the night, and a number of other boats were also close by. Time to get to work again!
Will had a clear plan of how we wanted to play the coastline, using the shifts at the headlands and setting up for the right shift to come later that day. We also got a little bit of a break. The wind started dying, and we wanted to do a tack change from the J2 to the J1. When we got the new jib up and dropped the old, we noticed there was more wind if we carried on a port tack instead of tacking back to starboard. We only went for 10 minutes, but when we tacked back, we were to windward and lifting off the boats in our pack. We went from half a mile ahead to 4 miles in the next few hours.
All afternoon and evening, the wind held at 10 to 15 knots, but it was pretty shifty. We did our best to stay in phase and managed to round Wolf Rock with a modest lead in our class, and ahead of most of the fully crewed boats.
The next leg was south for 150 miles to a waypoint in the Atlantic. We initially worked our way left to take advantage of the expected southerly shift, but in the late evening the breeze died for a few hours. But as the southerly filled, we got it first, and again we extended our lead on the pack. Now there were only three boats in sight, but we could see a bunch more on AIS. All day we sailed upwind in moderate air, trying to make the boat go fast. At midnight we finally arrived at the Drheam waypoint, tacking onto starboard for the final leg to La Trinité-sur-Mer.
We were feeling pretty good about our position, over 6 miles ahead of the next boat and over 20 miles ahead of most of our fleet. However, there was a big high-pressure zone between us and the finish 130 miles away. We elected to try to skirt the high to the north, and reached off below the rhumbline. Again, the wind got very light for several hours, barely enough to fill the spinnaker.
Finally, some new wind from the northwest started to fill. The boats behind got it first and made some gains, but we were still in a strong position. As we approached the coast of Brittany we got headed with more wind, so now we were running down the coast to the finish, 50 miles to the southwest. The wind held all night, but as morning dawned, the breeze was dying again and the current turned against us. The final miles were going to be hard.
There was one more big tactical decision before the finish—choosing which side of Belle-Île-en-Mer island to pass. We chose inshore, but in the end, offshore held more wind. We battled our way to the final turning mark. The French J/99 Axesail had been gaining on us all night in the moderate running, and the Sunfast 3600 Bellino had also brought new wind from behind, along with a few others. We were still ahead, but we owed both boats time, plus our one-hour penalty for the start. It was close, but we didn’t quite have enough of a lead. When the morning wind filled in Quiberon Bay, it was an easy fetch to the finish, so no more tactical options.
We crossed the line about 45 minutes ahead of Bellino and Axesail. They both beat us on handicap, but we stayed ahead of fourth place by 10 minutes, and our efforts were rewarded with a podium finish. It was bittersweet; we felt it was a race we could have won. On the other hand, we sailed really well, with some very good tactical moves and no big mistakes except the start. We sailed hard and fast for four days. It was a really interesting and challenging course, always with decisions to make, and always ways to go faster.
Huge thanks to all the Red Ruby team, but especially to Will Harris for sailing with me on this race. He is an absolute master of all aspects of shorthanded ocean racing: weather, strategy, boat speed, energy management. I learned so much sailing with him. It was very cool to see what the state of the art really is.
In the end, Red Ruby won the IRC Double-Handed European Championship by virtue of our fifth-place finish in the Cowes Dinard Race, plus our third in Drheam-Cup. Thank you to all who have contributed to this effort over the last two years; you know who you are! It has been a great ride.
