The Silicon Cup takes place on Thursday 17th – Friday 18th September 2020

 Cherbourg will host the finish of the Rolex Fastnet Race for the 2021 .Campaign starts in June with a series of training weekends and RORC qualifying passages.

Organised by the much-respected Island Sailing Club, Round the Island Race  one of UK’s largest participation sporting events  over 1,500 boats and thousands of sailors.  

Entries are now open for the 33nd edition of the Little Britain Challenge   

The Rolex Middle Sea Race was created as the result of sailing rivalry between Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) members Alan Green and Jimmy White, two Englishmen residing in Malta, and Paul and John Ripard together with other Maltese members of the Royal Malta Yacht Club.  Alan (later Secretary of RORC) and Jimmy approached the RMYC Committee and proposed a long course designed to offer an exciting race in windier autumn conditions rather than those prevailing in the Maltese summer.  The original suggestion was for a course that started in Malta and finished in Syracuse. In an inspired moment, that stemmed in part from the persuasive argument of Paul that it should be a race centred on the Maltese islands, it was agreed to not simply start the race in Malta but finish it there too. The race was now, essentially, a clockwise circumnavigation of Sicily including Lampedusa, Pantelleria and the Egadian and Eolian islands, and it would be slightly longer than the RORC’s own famous offshore event, the Fastnet Race.  

Ted Turner (USA) - media mogul, philanthropist and founder of Turner Communications, (CNN) - has written that the Middle Sea Race "must be the most beautiful race course in the world. What other event has an active volcano as a mark of the course?".  

The Rolex Giraglia is truly a classic event. As legend has it, the race was created on an evening in December 1952 when Beppe Croce, President of Yacht Club Italiano, René Levainville, President of Yacht Club de France, and Franco Gavagnin were enjoying a long dinner in a Parisian bistro. They envisioned the race from Saint-Tropez to Genoa as a challenge between yachts that could also be seen as a challenge between Italy and France that would favour relations after the Second World War.

For the first edition of the Giraglia Cup in 1953 there were twenty-two boats at the start. The number of participants grew steadily and in 1997 the event changed its name with the arrival of an important sponsor to become the Rolex Giraglia Cup. In 1998 lo Yacht Club de France began organizing three days of races in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez before passing this part of the event on to the Société Nautique de Saint-Tropez in 2002. From 2018 the regatta has changed its name further, becoming what is now known as the “Rolex Giraglia”.

Today, the Rolex Giraglia has exceeded its founder’s expectations to become a must-do event that attracts hundreds of crews, both amateur and professional, and all kinds of yachts from all around the world. Serious competition on the water is followed by serious fun in the evening, thanks to the event’s title sponsor. It’sa sporting event that is truly a blend of passion, competition, fair play, glamour and “joie de vivre”.

It is the second longest race in the Royal Ocean Racing Club calendar and first race took place in 1980 with only thirteen boats.   Since then, held biennially, the fleet has grown steadily, attracting a record 64 entrants from all over the world.