Sailing Scenes

ACTION AFLOAT AND ASHORE
The day before the Round The Island Race, we were commissioned to take photos of the sand polo at Sandbanks for two of the event’s sponsors – The Boat Club and Midas Prosecco.
We’re used to photographing fast-moving action on the water and, with long-standing contacts in the equine world, we have also photographed horses and equestrian events. We don’t expect polo – sand or otherwise – to become a regular photographic commission, but it presented a different and engaging challenge. And, in this case, we had boats and the sea in the background, so we really felt quite at home.

MORE FROM THE ROUND THE ISLAND RACE
Photographing big events like the Round The Island Race involves a lot of processing time afterwards.
We have now been through all the shots, editing and indexing some of them. Here are more samples. You will find a few hundred others (still many more to go) on the SailingScenes web site: https://bit.ly/RoundTheIslandRace2026

SUN, SEA, SPARKLE…AND SNIFFING OUT THE WINNERS AROUND THE ISLAND
We shot the Round The Island Race on Saturday, seeing a lot of boats that we know and have seen many times over the 20+ years.
Among them were most of the top-placed finishers in IRC overall. We had looked at the tides and the weather forecast a day or two earlier, worked out where the smart money would be going among the boats with the best chance of doing well – and, lo and behold, that’s exactly where we found them.
Here are few samples. More will be following and uploaded to the SailingScenes web site soon.

SUN, SEA AND SPARKLE – AT LAST!
We have headed into the bay a time or two in recent weeks to top up our library of cruising shots, and found a few boats having a good sail. With Old Harry, Ballard Down, Durlston Head and Swanage among the backdrops, we have a few to choose from. All we need is the right boat to be in the right place at the right time, pointing the right way and flying the right sails. Then we need to be in the right place too, with the right lens on the right camera, and using the right aperture and the right shutter speed. If we get a few dozen other elements right as well, we might get the right shot. More on the SailingScenes web site: bit.ly/BoatsInTheBay

RACING AROUND THE ROCKS (MORE)
We have now uploaded Saturday's photos to our web site (and added a few more samples here): https://bit.ly/ParkstoneDinghiesSwanageJune2026

RACING AROUND THE ROCKS
We happened to be out in Poole Bay and Swanage Bay on Saturday and coincided with part of Parkstone YC’s bay race for the dinghy fleets, which took them from Studland to Swanage and back.
The photos will be uploaded to our web site soon, but here are a few samples in the meantime.

COLOURFUL CATS
Multihulls can be great fun and extremely practical. We have cruised, raced, photographed and tested many of them, the latest test subject being the 18ft Chat cat, which we sailed on the Tamar last autumn.
Predictably, the weather forecast got it wrong on the day. By the time the sun appeared it was so low that shooting against it was quite a challenge, but we had to shoot against it because the background was better to the west. Thankfully our efforts were not in vain, and the Chat graces the front cover of June’s Practical Boat Owner.
We were sailing another multihull on the same stretch of water just the other evening. We had spent the day testing and photographing a 37ft monohull for Yachting Monthly, then came ashore and went straight out again on a 38ft trimaran to race against a variety of other multihulls including a Corsair and a Dazcat. It turned out that some of those on board had connections, and our J1 was one of Ben Ainslie’s test sails from last year’s America’s Cup. Good to know that some of these sails have a second life…

SYNCHRONISED SPINNAKER DROPS
We all know that choosing the right moment to drop the kite on the approach to a mark is critical. But when we’re behind the lens rather than racing ourselves, we think that crews should score points for artistic merit as well as efficiency – especially when the drops on two boats are synchronised as beautifully as they were on Premier Flair and Quokka 8 during the International Paint Poole Regatta a few years ago.
We have photographed a few spinnaker drops in our time – but when it comes to synchronicity, this one is still the clear winner.

TESTING TIMES TWO
We have two boat tests in the April 2026 issue of Yachting Monthly. One of the boats is also on the cover: the Gib’Sea 312 Plus, a Rob Humphreys design from the late 1980s that we sailed and photographed from Lymington on a bright and breezy autumn day with a family of five (a couple, their two sons and a black Labrador).
The other test – a new boat this time – is of the Saffier 27, a swish, speedy and stylish day-sailer from Holland. This particular example cuts a dash in her grey-and-orange livery.
Two very different boats that both meet their owners’ requirements very well. They were also great fun to sail and rewarding to get to know, to photograph and to write about.

YES WE CANT!
We have been lucky enough to sail some interesting boats among the 500+ that we have raced, cruised and tested over the course of several decades. And one of the more unusual has been the Fan Class 32.
This is the only commercially produced yacht we have come across with a canting rig. The idea – which wasn’t new at the time – was that the rig did most of the ‘heeling’ while the hull stayed largely upright. Catching sight of it was enough to make a lot of people check the alcohol content of their beer.
The Fan Class was the brainchild of a French sailor and engineer who had had enough of thrashing to windward at 25 or 30° of heel. He designed a system whereby the rig was attached to a large stainless steel ring around the outside of the hull. It was balanced by twin keels on the bottom of the ring, helped by a pair of industrial gas struts and a hydraulic damping system.
On our test it sailed pretty well and, broadly speaking, seemed to do what the designer intended. Seemingly it never became a commercial success, but we wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the idea were to emerge again one day.