THE SUPERYACHT CHALLENGE

The Superyacht Challenge is four days of racing off the south coast of Antigua in early March, sailed by a deliberately small fleet of very large yachts.

A dozen or so boats, three hundred sailors, and no overall winner.

The Harbour

English Harbour cannot be seen from the sea.

That is why the Royal Navy chose it. From the early eighteenth century the fleet lay in it invisible to the French and to anyone else looking along the coast, and the entrance is still difficult to make out today. What gives it away now is the one thing the Navy never had to think about: the masts of moored yachts standing above the hill.

It is also extraordinarily sheltered. A hurricane in 1723 wrecked thirty-five ships in harbours around Antigua. The two lying in English Harbour took no damage at all.

The dockyard was built by the Navy and named for a young captain who served there and hated it. It is the only continuously working Georgian dockyard left anywhere in the world, and the regatta’s prize-giving is held beneath the pillars of one of its buildings.

The Trophy

There is no overall winner.

Boats race in four classes, from the Privateers down to the smaller Buccaneers, over pursuit courses as long as forty-eight nautical miles. Results are kept and each class has its winners.

But the principal trophy of the regatta is not won on the water. It goes to the yacht judged to have shown the best spirit across the week, and it is voted on by the other competing yachts and by the race committee.

Which means a fleet of the largest sailing yachts on earth, owned by some of the wealthiest people alive, has arranged its own regatta so that the thing everybody most wants is decided by the opinion of their rivals.

There are also barrels of rum.

What to Know

The fleet is kept small on purpose. A dozen boats or thereabouts, and the organisers have never chased a larger entry. It is the opposite of Antigua Sailing Week, which follows six weeks later and takes a hundred.

The trade winds run twenty knots or so with an Atlantic swell behind them, which makes the racing fast and very wet for anyone on deck.

Racing is off the south coast, and the best view from shore is Shirley Heights above the harbour, which is also where the island’s Sunday evening happens.

The boats are open in a way they never are elsewhere. Owners and crews mix on the dock, and a person properly introduced is generally invited aboard.

The Court

The Superyacht Challenge is not the Court’s own. Places aboard competing yachts, spectator boats and rooms in English Harbour are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. The Antigua season runs from here through the Classic Yacht Regatta and Sailing Week in April, and a member may take all three.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.