Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez: A maritime history book

The iconic season-closing regatta Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez was an immersive history lesson for Crosbie Lorimer

The great French sailor, Eric Tabarly, an instrumental figure in the origins of what is now Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, is reputed to have said that strolling along the quays of the riviera town during this regatta was like ‘flicking through the pages of a maritime history book’.

Tabarly’s words deftly distil the essence of this unique event held each year in the small town of Saint-Tropez, perched on a north facing promontory in the gulf to which it gives its name.

At first sight it seems inconceivable that this charming but pocket-sized fishing port could possibly accommodate the majority of the 250-boat fleet, representing almost 135 years of yacht design history, that descends on Saint-Tropez each year.

But remarkably, for the last 25 years the skilled RIB drivers of the Capitainerie (Saint-Tropez’s busy harbour master’s office) have somehow nudged, towed and coaxed everything from 130ft schooners and modern maxis to small engineless sloops into cheek-by-jowl order along the harbour’s modest walls and pontoons.

It’s perhaps that very concentration of yachting history, all in one place, that lends this event its charmed intensity, drawing huge crowds down the town’s narrow laneways to walk the quays or admire the scene from the numerous waterfront eateries.

Sir Richard Matthews, founder of Oyster Yachts, has sailed at Les Voiles for many years, returning for the event’s 25th anniversary in 2024 with his 12 Metre Crusader. He remains beguiled by the whole experience.

“It’s a magic place,” he said. “You walk the docks at Saint-Tropez, it’s yacht porn basically! It’s just unique in my experience with the bands playing in the streets. Everybody loves it and we certainly do, it’s fantastic.”

This relaxed end-of-season atmosphere at Les Voiles owes much to the conscious efforts of the host club Société Nautique Saint-Tropez (SNST) to preserve the spontaneous, quirky DNA of the event’s origins.

The spur-of-the-moment challenge in 1981 between American Dick Jayson’s Swan 44 Pride and Jean Redele’s 1964 12 Metre America’s Cup boat Ikra is well documented. But the twists and turns that SNST’s Patrice de Colmont took to evolve that mismatched challenge into Les Voiles’ popular precursor, La Nioulargue, is worthy of its own documentary.

For all the amicable ambience that pervades the regatta, the competition across the three classes and 19 divisions of Maxis, Moderns and Tradition is real enough, even when the fixed start line location off the town’s sea wall for the latter two classes can often add a random dimension to the results. Upwind or downwind, you take what comes on the day.

Short straw

With 15 divisions across these two classes sent off from the line at midday, the early divisions can also draw the short straw when the sea breeze makes a late appearance, as it did on several days in 2024; a particular challenge for the favourably rated boats in the Moderns class.

But for the likes of Will Ryan, a regular on the TP52 Super Series circuit and strategist aboard King Frederik of Denmark’s chartered TP52 Nanoq at Les Voiles, it’s all part of the deal: “For one-design racing you’ll typically go to where the best wind is first and then do good quality racing there. Whereas here it’s all about the show. It’s fun to be part of the show, but it does come with the consequences that make it a challenging race course.”

It was, however, a challenge well met by Nanoq’s team, taking the North Sails Trophy for best IRC B boat in the Moderns, despite the King’s absence on royal duties.

Many of the sport’s best navigators also relish the challenge of the complex weather patterns at Les Voiles. Ocean racing meteorologist Will Oxley, the navigator aboard Nanoq, holds Les Voiles as one of his top three favourite regattas around the world. He explained that the Mistral, which has played havoc with many sailors and regattas in the summer of 2024, does not always impact Saint-Tropez.

“It’s interesting because just to the west of us we’ve got the Gulf of Lyon and the Mistral funnels down there, said Oxley. “But here we are in a bay and we’ll often see that the Mistral misses the bay in the morning.

“You typically get a light breeze coming down off the mountains and then you often get sea breezes setting up on each side of the bay, frequently from completely different directions.”

Unpredictable breezes

Those mercurial breezes were much in evidence during this year’s regatta, with the Moderns and Classics divisions struggling to get off the start line from the town’s Portalet Tower on several days.

But even for the four Maxi divisions which enjoyed a mix of coastal and windward/leeward races in the more reliable offshore breezes, meeting the race cut-off time proved a challenge on the Tuesday, while racing was abandoned across all fleets on the Thursday.

Among those Maxis, Black Jack 100 enjoyed consistent line honours wins in the Maxi A division under her new owner Remon Vos, but it was Peter Harrison’s Jolt that held off Sir Peter Ogden’s Jethou to take both the Barons de Rothschild and IMA trophies.

For the professionals that sail at Les Voiles, this regatta is often seen as a welcome counterpoint to the intensity of fully professional events.

Dual Olympic medallist and multiple World Champion in the Tornado class, Mitch Booth, is these days usually to be found racing with all-professional crews on some of the fastest maxi yachts in the world.

At Les Voiles he was enjoying a changed role that he described as ‘tactician/coach’ with two other pros and a mixed crew of family and friends aboard Matthew Gander’s CNB 76 Playstation PS5, which is relatively new to racing.

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He offered some insight into the role that professionals play on the mostly amateur-crewed day racer Maxi yachts at regattas like Les Voiles.

“Every race the owners want to win, but the atmosphere here is quite friendly and relaxed too. We call these boats cruiser-racers, but in fact they’re really cruisers that race and most of these boats are not raced on a regular basis.

“We typically go through the boat before the event, checking all the strops and blocks; they might say ‘Oh, we haven’t used that spinnaker for two years,’ or ‘We don’t know how it should be hoisted or how it sheets.’ It’s just applying the race mentality onto a non-racing boat.”

Danish sailor Nicolai Sehested is more typically seen wearing a helmet as the skipper of Rockwool, Denmark’s SailGP team. But as regular tactician on Terry Hui’s division-winning Wally 77 Lyra in the Maxi B division, Sehested enjoys the relaxed atmosphere of this event too.

“It’s probably most sailors’ favourite place in Europe to race for many reasons. There’s always just very varied conditions. And you get to see so many cool boats racing at the same time.

“But the main thing is the culture. You can even hear it now,” says Sehested as a trumpeter belts out a polished rendition of Verdi’s Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from a neighbouring classic.

Small but mighty

Les Voiles has evolved over the years. But should anyone try to subvert the competitive but friendly spirit of this invitation-only regatta, SNST’s president Pierre Roinson has some tongue-in-cheek words of warning: “Influence peddling is always a factor, as some people – and we have their names! – try to change things around so they can join a class more in their favour. That is just not possible.”

Determined to sail his 26ft Solent Sunbeam Dainty in the Tradition class at Saint-Tropez in the boat’s centenary year in 2022, Peter Nicholson pursued a long campaign with the SNST Committee to offer the boat an exemption to their minimum waterline length rule.

The ever-practical Committee eventually saved face for all by offering Dainty guest status, making her the smallest boat in the regatta.

Nicholson has spent almost 60 years sailing Sunbeams, finally calling it quits at the end of this year. But having broken Dainty’s boom at the Cannes regatta a fortnight before Les Voiles, he and his crew were counting their blessings that they made it all.

“There is nowhere in the Mediterranean they could mend it or replace it. So I phoned back home to Haines Boatyard in Itchenor who had a spare,” said Nicholson, having realised that the greater challenge was getting a 3.7m-long boom delivered to Saint-Tropez in time.

“I asked an old friend Viv Williams if his [grown-up] children – who regularly run deliveries – could help. Viv said they were all busy but he quite liked the idea of coming down himself. So he drove it the 900 miles and we were up and running for the first race – which we won!

Fittingly for her last appearance at Les Voiles, Dainty also won Best Yacht in Guest Category for the week.

Among the smaller boats in the Moderns class were five Cape 31s racing under IRC. Michael Wilson owns Shotgunn, the eventual winner of the BMW Trophy for the best IRC C Division boat, and said his crew loved the change of format to IRC rating against other yachts at Les Voiles.

“One-design racing in Cape 31s is superb, very intense. You can come here to an IRC event and be competitive but it’s just nice to do an event that’s a bit more relaxed.”

Jet set and art

For many, the name of Saint-Tropez is associated with the jet set celebrities of the 1960s and 70s, most notably Brigitte Bardot, whose 90th birthday in 2024 was celebrated with a wrapped image of her younger self on the lighthouse that marks the port’s entrance.

But Saint-Tropez’s appeal was first brought to popular attention by the post-impressionist artists of the late 19th Century, chief among them Paul Signac, whose colourful pointillist paintings of yachts in Saint-Tropez harbour reflected his own interests as a very accomplished sailor and owner of numerous yachts.

The design of a number of the 19 yachts that competed in the Gstaad Centenarian Trophy pursuit race for classics over 100 years old would doubtless have been familiar to Signac, not least the 1905 Herreshoff-designed (gaff-rigged) Oriole, which won the race.

The age of a yacht has no bearing on its crew’s competitiveness, however, with Oriole’s Spanish team having bent on a new and stiffer mainsail that morning to best suit the light air conditions!
Against expectations the breeze lifted on the last day of racing to show off the whole Tradition class at its best. Being a weekend day, the locals came out in force on power boats and yachts, keeping the marshalls busy in their fast RIBs, corralling the numerous infringers of the No Go boundaries with piercing whistles.

As the mixed fleet of classics approached the port’s finish line in the late afternoon sun, the magnificent Fife-designed gaff cutter Tuiga – eventual winner of the Château Saint-Maur Trophy – was surrounded by the huge spectator flotilla.

Such is the almost venerated aura that surrounds the regatta-founding challenge between the Swan 44 Pride and the 12 metre Ikra (not present in 2024), that the former occupies the most prominent berth on Qaui de Jean Jaures each year, moored under the watchful eye of Admiral Suffren’s soaring statue, which fronts the popular Hotel Sube.

With so much of the regatta’s rich and well-documented history centred on Pride, it would be reasonable for Will and Gillian Graves (the third generation of the extended family to race Pride at les Voiles) to feel the weight of that storied heritage. But Will Graves sees it as a legacy to be embraced.

“I’ve been coming here for 14 years now and it’s an amazing event for a family. This is a heritage that Bill has from his father – Gillian’s grandfather – and I hope that our kids come and get to see this. It’s wonderful sailing, an incredible area of the world, it’s just really special.”

The Pride/Ikra challenge has been re-enacted by both boats in previous years, while the SNST also continues the tradition by encouraging other yachts to issue their own match race challenges for the coveted Club 55 Paul Watson Cup.

In 2024 two Maxis, Filip Balcean’s Balthasar and Pier Luigi Loro Piana’s My Song threw down the gauntlet for a match race, with My Song winning across the line.

But at the officially described ‘boozy’ post-race lunch, which tradition dictates will take place among the challenge crews and SNST officials at Club 55 on Pampelonne Beach, there was obviously a shared concern about the result.

In light of the marked disparity in ratings between the two yachts the SNST committee later deemed My Song and Balthasar joint winners of the Club 55 Paul Watson Cup. Only at Les Voiles, surely!

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