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2 January 2025


Happy New Year, SOLers all, and, here, without further ado is an early outline for your sailonline.org racing programme 2025, and as always the title of SuperSOLer will be determined by the best 42 results from the usual four annual series: the Sprint Championship, the All-Round Championship, the Ocean Championship, and the TIMED Championship. Click on the buttons to discover more about these always fiercely contested annual contests.

In previous years we have raced circumnavigational series around Australia regularly and North America a few times, and across the many seas of Asia also, but Africa has been less explored. So, this year we will explore ‘Africa by Sea’, finishing with a transit of the Suez Canal, but, as there will be two discards, it can be ‘chickened out of’.

It is arguable that our long-standing Sprint Series, featuring short races of just a few hours, does not give enough ‘bang for our high-resolution bucks’ from our unique wrfems weather, so this year, additionally to the Sprints, we will race a hires series of races of 24 hours duration - the ‘Red Eye’ - which to win may require a certain amount of sleep management.

In 2016 we introduced our version of the DN ice yacht to an unsuspecting online sailing public. On good ice and in good wind it skates at up to 50 knots, tacking and gybing at will without performance loss. Racers loved it, so much so, that every northern hemisphere winter since we have organized a four-race series. In 2025 we will again host an Ice Series, but straddling the entire year, which means trips to the southern Andes and the Himalayas will be required.

Apart and entirely different to the DN, we have one other highly unusual craft in our boathouse. Although it floats in a fluid, it is not a boat either, but a balloon buoyed by the air, and this year, in response to public demand, we will race our SOL Balloon in a proper series. ‘Sinbad by Balloon’ will, like his seven online voyages of three years ago, take you to the four corners of the Indian Ocean.

In recent years, and in years gone by as well, within our Ocean Championships, we have also raced a Round the World (RTW) series, and we will do so again in 2025, but this year it will be a RWW 'Round Our Water World' eight-race series, in other words races that, again responding to demand, will avoid land as much as possible, by going from lonely island to lonely island à la Kevin Costner in the eponymous epic movie, in a mixed bag of ocean greyhounds.

     

The other four ocean races will be: 1/ a race from Cape Horn to Sables d'Olonne in a tuned-up foiling IMOCA 60, which hopefully will be able to match this year's Vendee fleet on their way home up the Atlantic, 2/ a race from Valparaiso to San Francisco inspired by Isabel Allende's terrific read 'Daughter of Fortune' , 3/ a second literature-inspired race from Cape Town to Java (lesser-known 'Mountains More Ancient' by Isna Marifa about the indentured Cape Malays of the 18th C), and of course 4/ our great and festive annual Christmas to Christmas race, back E to W.

There will be one other ocean race, which because of its great length in a comparatively slow yacht, to best match the real-life competitors we will be racing against, will not count towards the Ocean Championships; the Melbourne Osaka Cup .

Finally, as always, we will be partnering with numerous real-life race organizations and many of these partnerships will be in the form of short series. Click on any of the buttons below for further details about any of these.



       

       

Fair winds from SOL to all!

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