North Sails and Campbell Field on the Rolex Fastnet Race 2021 Webinar

Last Thursday North Sails held a Webinar discussing the Rolex Fastnet Race 2021 alongside well-known professional navigator Campbell Field from Field Yachting. The Fastnet Race is the last race of our Series for this year and it will be the first year the race will end in Cherbourg, France.

This change to the course will be a new challenge to the competitors as you now have to also cross the English Channel, this brings more tactical options to the race.

In the webinar, Campbell and Ronan Grealish, and Pete Redmond from North Sails talked through the Sails selection for the race, the various routings that may be applicable for the race, and the changes to the race due to the course change.

Campbell used J/122 and SunFast 3300 polars in the routing software, Expedition, to show the different routes which could be taken depending on the wind during the race. This was especially interesting to some of the boats from our series as we currently have seven SunFast 3300s signed up.

The webinar showed that with the change of course from Plymouth to Cherbourg there will be an additional 9% sailing from 140 TWA to VMG so now 60% of the race will be in this wind region. This may change the sails which boats take in the race; North Sails' favourite sails for the race would be the Code Zero, Fractional Zero, and the Staysails. These sails work brilliantly in this wind range plus the 120 to 140 TWA wind range which also takes up 18% of the race.

To finish the webinar they helpfully answered the questions from the floor, if you have any more questions then please get in touch with North Sails or Campbell Field on:

Pete Redmond - pete.redmond@northsails.com

Ronan Grealish - ronan.grealish@northsails.com

Campbell Field - campbell@fieldyachting.com

If you missed this very useful talk then you can find the webinar on the North Sails YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOdPixQOqxI