Carmela Cup goes white sails only

With the active encouragement of ISAF, white-sails-only two-boat team racing in keelboats is rapidly growing in popularity, especially in Europe. To make it easier for teams to come together for our Royal Thames Carmela Cup, sanctioned by the RYA as the British Open Championship, we have - and as an experiment initially for this one event - decided to adopt the rule for Carmela 2012.

Sailed in our J/80s over the weekend of January 14th/ 15th at our London winter sailing base at Queen Mary Reservoir, west London and close to Heathrow airport the Carmela provides some of the hottest keelboat team racing in town. To ensure value-for-money in terms of time on the water and to facilitate completing a full round-robin with first-to-win-three final in the course of the shortened days of a January weekend, the event will be limited to a maximum of eight teams.

Entry is £320 per team of either six or eight sailors (3 or 4 to a boat, configuration optional) and the Notice of Race and an Application for Entry Form may be found at http://www.royalthames.com/event/365