Wild Times At St Maarten Regatta

Rob Melotti Reports on a Weekend of High-performance Sailing at the Biggest Regatta in the Caribbean
 

- Rob Melotti

Bearing away at the windward mark, off Anse Marcel at the northern tip of St Martin (French side), it was a relief to finally relax my grip on the guardrail, as the deck of the Volvo 70 SFS II returned to the horizontal for the first time in nearly an hour. For the second time in two days I found myself at the windward end of the Anguilla Channel, the five-mile wide wind funnel that separates steep-sided St Maarten from low-lying Anguilla. The previous day, with just seven others aboard R-Six, a 66ft luxury carbon catamaran, I had been free to roam across the entire expanse of the vast deck, trampoline and saloon. In contrast, squeezed onto the rail with 20 others aboard SFS II, I had spent most of the day hanging on for dear life at extreme angles of heel. R-Six was the yacht I had been looking forward to racing for weeks, but the Volvo 70 I will never forget.

Now in its 37th year, the annual St Maarten regatta, lavishly sponsored by Heineken, is a four-night music festival on top of a weekend of great sailing. This year’s event saw 164 yachts across the maxi class, three multihull classes, seven Caribbean Sailing Association (CSA) handicap classes, three bare boat classes, the Melges 24s, the lottery class and an ocean racer class for former Volvo yachts. Following on three weeks after the RORC Caribbean 600 and finishing a week and a half before the start of St Barth’s Bucket, the St Maarten Heineken claims to be the largest warm-water regatta in the world (although numbers are down on the 250-plus boats it attracted a decade ago). But what draws so many yachts to this uniquely crowded Caribbean crossroad?