Learning from 2025 and a Preview of 2026
The most fun I have ever had watching (instead of competing) in a sailboat race was the J/70 POD Regatta we hosted in Seattle last spring. I was in the whaler following the fleet and taking pictures. The contest had plenty of drama and lead changes and the conditions were perfect. You can read my write up here. It was not a world championship, or even a qualifier for one. Just a well run local regatta with eight races in moderate conditions. And the stories wrote themselves. Plenty of passing, complicated throw out math, and a win by tie breaker. It was a blast to watch.
J/70s on Puget Sound during the PNW One Design Regatta, Spring, 2025
Unfortunately, everyone cannot rip up and down the course right behind the fleet in a whaler observing the action up close. And even more unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to produce coverage that transmits the experience via video, photos, or the written word. SailGP is making a mighty effort with boats going 50 knots, and races only 15 minutes long, and they employ helicopters, and photo boats, and commentators... and still it is hard to get the lightning into the bottle.
Despite the difficulty, we did our best to cover eight events here last spring and got some great feedback and website traffic. So that was Phase 1 of our YachtRacing.tv experiment.
Next we jumped into Phase 2: where we followed our friends to big regattas around the world. The most fun I have ever had watching from a distance (instead of in person or racing myself) was the J/70 World Championship Mixed Plus in Torbole, Lake Garda, Italy. We had four teams in the regatta, everyone sent back great reports and pictures, the Vakaros live tracker worked great, and Chris Howell took and rapidly posted great pictures. You can see my write up here. It was a bigtime event, in an iconic location, with piles of talent. Someone reported that there were 26 Olympic medals on the course. It was a stunning event and I was glued to every scrap of information I could get.
Mike Goldfarb and the War Canoe Team at the J/70 World Championship Mixed Plus
While doing this coverage, I studied the coverage being offered at the top end events including SailGP and the 52 SuperSeries. I produced some liveblogs of the live coverage like this one for the 52 SuperSeries in Cascais. You can see how these events can draw in the audience, but also how the volume of content can quickly get overwhelming and start to take away from the experience. The number of events now livestreaming is growing fast and ranging from the spectacle of the Sydney to Hobart race start, to the simple and straightforward German National League finals.
It is getting more and more apparent that live and complete coverage of sailboat racing events is in the process of growing from "is there anything on?" to "how am I going to decide what to watch?"
As this happens, we are positioning YachtRacing.tv to be the place to go to find the sailboat racing you want to watch. We are in the process of building our 2026 event calendar. If you want us to consider an event you care about, use the "Get the Emails" form to tell us about it.