ANTIGUA CLASSIC YACHT REGATTA

The Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta is five days of racing for old boats out of English Harbour in mid April: schooners, yawls, ketches and the occasional tall ship, some of them a century old, sailing the trade winds off Antigua’s south coast.

It runs the week before Sailing Week, and draws a different sort of owner.

The Split

Antigua Sailing Week began in 1968 with a fleet of whatever was in the harbour, much of it old and wooden. By the 1980s the modern racing yachts far outnumbered the classics, and the older boats were being lost among them. In 1988 their owners left and started a regatta of their own.

The first had seven boats and a long course between Antigua and Guadeloupe, which officialdom and fickle winds soon brought closer to home. Kenny Coombs founded it and ran it for twenty-five years.

Its reputation was made in 1991, when Elizabeth Meyer sailed in with Endeavour, the J-class yacht that had challenged for the America’s Cup in 1934 and that she had rescued and restored after decades out of the water. Baron Edmond de Rothschild brought a six-metre the same year.

In 1996 the regatta opened a class for new boats built on old lines, the Spirit of Tradition.

The Fleet

The classes are sorted by what a boat is rather than how fast it goes: classics built to traditional designs, vintage yachts, the Spirit of Tradition, tall ships under square rig, and the working sloops of the islands, built on beaches for fishing and cargo.

The Concours d’Élégance is held on the dock. The boats are judged not on speed but on how faithfully they have been kept: the varnish, the rigging, the fittings, the brass. Many owners care more about it than the racing.

The racing is along the south coast in steady trade winds. The organisers call it safe and gentlemanly, which in practice means nobody goes looking for a collision with a hundred-year-old hull.

What to Know

English Harbour is where Caribbean chartering began. In the years after the war the Nicholson family found the old naval dockyard derelict and began taking guests out on yachts, and the restoration of the Dockyard started in the same years.

The fleet berths at Nelson’s Dockyard, and its docks can be walked between races. The best view of the racing is from Shirley Heights, above the harbour.

Ashore there is a cream tea with hats, gig racing, and a ball in costume in the Copper and Lumber Store, one of the Dockyard’s own buildings.

Many stay on for Sailing Week, which follows at once, and see the two fleets back to back.

The Court

The Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta is not the Court’s own. A place aboard a classic for the racing, a berth on a yacht to watch from, and rooms in English Harbour are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the week: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. A member who wants to crew should say how much they have sailed, and the Court will find a boat that suits.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.