The Newport Bermuda Race: 1,070 Miles of Gulf Stream

Every two years in June, a fleet of offshore sailing yachts leaves Newport, Rhode Island, and turns southeast. For the next three to five days, depending on the boat and the wind, they will sail 1,070 nautical miles to Bermuda — crossing the Gulf Stream, threading through the Bermuda Triangle's confused seas, picking their way through the dangerous shoals that surround the island, and finishing at St. David's Lighthouse on the island's eastern tip. The Newport Bermuda Race is the oldest regularly scheduled ocean race in the world. It has been run since 1906, interrupted only by the two World Wars, and it remains one of the defining events of the offshore racing calendar.

History: The 1906 Beginning

Thomas Fleming Day, editor of The Rudder magazine, organized the first race in 1906 with three boats and a conviction that offshore racing was both possible and desirable at a time when the yachting establishment considered any ocean passage in a small yacht recklessly dangerous. Day had already demonstrated his point by sailing a 25-foot yawl to Rome in 1904, and he was not persuaded by warnings. The first Bermuda Race went off in June 1906 with the staysail schooner Tamerlane winning — covering the course in 5 days, 1 hour, and 44 minutes.

The race ran irregularly through its early decades, cancelled and revived as enthusiasm and resources allowed. The Cruising Club of America (CCA) took permanent ownership of the race's organization in 1923 and has co-organized it, alongside the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, ever since. The biennial schedule — even-numbered years, starting from Newport the third Friday in June — was established in the 1930s and remains unchanged.

The race grew steadily through the postwar decades as offshore sailing democratized. The 1960s and 1970s saw fleets approaching and exceeding 200 boats; the 1980 race drew 156 starters despite the shadow of the 1979 Fastnet disaster. Recent editions have settled into a field of 150 to 190 boats across several competitive divisions.

The Course: Newport to St. David's Lighthouse

The course is a rhumb line from Brenton Reef off Newport to St. David's Head, Bermuda — 1,070 nautical miles on a bearing of approximately 166° true. It is, by ocean racing standards, a straightforward point-to-point course with no intermediate marks. The strategic complexity arises entirely from the Gulf Stream.

The Stream runs northeast along the course's western side, a river of warm water flowing at up to 3.5 knots. A boat that crosses the Stream efficiently can gain 30 to 50 miles on a boat that misses the favorable current or, worse, finds the unfavorable counter-currents on the Stream's western edge. The eastern edge of the Stream — where the warm blue water meets the cold, darker Atlantic — is marked by temperature breaks, wind-against-current seas, and floating sargassum weed that can foul propellers and, on slow days, drape itself across hulls in quantities that reduce boat speed measurably.

Finding the Stream and deciding how to cross it is the race's central tactical problem. The Stream meanders — its precise location and width vary between races and even day to day within a single race. The boats that win the Bermuda Race more often than not are the ones whose navigators read the satellite sea-surface temperature charts most accurately and crossed the Stream at its narrowest, most favorable section.

The Gulf Stream: Boost, Edge, and Weed

The Gulf Stream is not simply a favorable current. It is a dynamic oceanic system that presents multiple hazards alongside its navigational gifts. The interior of the Stream — the warm blue water flowing northeast — offers the advertised boost of 2 to 3.5 knots. A boat sailing at 7 knots through the water can achieve 10 knots over the ground in the best conditions, and the cumulative effect over 12 to 18 hours of favorable current is significant in a race of this distance.

The Stream's edges are different. Where the warm Stream water abuts the cold Slope Water to the west, the temperature gradient generates wind-against-current seas — short, steep chop that slows boats and stresses gear even in moderate conditions. When the Stream is running hard and a southwest wind is building against it, the western wall becomes genuinely dangerous: breaking seas, confused swells from multiple directions, and conditions that expose any weakness in a boat's deck hardware, rigging, or crew preparation.

Sargassum weed — a floating brown seaweed that accumulates in windrows along the Stream's edges — is a constant nuisance. At its worst, the weed packs densely enough to wrap around a keel, drape over a rudder, and reduce boat speed by half a knot or more. Crews carry boat hooks and dedicate watch time to clearing the weed. Navigators route around the densest visible concentrations when satellite imagery provides enough resolution to show them.

South of the Stream, the final 400 miles to Bermuda offer the race's most pleasant sailing if the conditions cooperate — reaching or running in the trade wind conditions that the Bermuda High establishes in June. They also offer the navigation challenge of Bermuda itself: the island sits in the center of a shallow-water platform surrounded by reefs, and the approaches require careful chart work. Boats arriving in poor visibility have gone aground on the outlying heads.

Safety Culture: The Fastnet Shadow and the Bermuda Response

The 1979 Fastnet Race, run in the Irish Sea that August, remains the defining disaster in modern offshore racing. A severe storm caught the fleet during the race, and 15 sailors were killed, 24 boats were abandoned or lost, and the event fundamentally changed how the offshore racing community thought about safety requirements. The Fastnet inquiry produced detailed findings about boat design, crew preparation, and race management that forced every major offshore race to reconsider its standards.

The Bermuda Race community's response was thorough. The CCA and RBYC introduced the Bermuda Race Certification process — an integrated set of requirements covering boat stability, structural integrity, safety equipment, and crew experience that goes significantly beyond the base-level offshore safety rules promulgated by World Sailing. To enter the Bermuda Race, a boat must pass a formal inspection. Crew members must hold current certifications in offshore seamanship and first aid. The requirements are updated after every significant offshore incident, anywhere in the world, that produces new safety knowledge.

The 1932 race — which the CCA and RBYC point to as the event that first established serious offshore safety standards in the United States — preceded the Fastnet by nearly fifty years. The 1932 storm caught a field of 42 boats and produced enough incidents to generate a thorough post-race review. The standards that emerged from that review became the template for the race's safety culture, which the Fastnet findings later reinforced and extended.

The Boats: Who Races It

The Bermuda Race fleet is divided into divisions that accommodate a remarkable range of vessels. The St. David's Lighthouse Division fields the grand prix boats — high-performance offshore racers, custom carbon-fiber designs or state-of-the-art production racers, crewed by professional or semi-professional teams optimizing for elapsed time. The 2012 record of 39 hours, 38 minutes, set by the 88-foot trimaran Rambler 88, represents the outer edge of what is possible in favorable conditions.

The Ocean Division and the Gibbs Hill Division are larger and more diverse — IRC-rated cruiser-racers, production designs from 40 to 60 feet, and the sailing families and yacht club teams who form the race's consistent core. A well-sailed J/44 or a Swan 48 can win corrected-time honors in its class, and class trophies carry genuine prestige.

The Classic Division is what makes the Bermuda Race unique among major offshore races: a class specifically for traditional wooden vessels, pre-1978, which must sail the full course without auxiliary power and be presented in period-appropriate condition. The classics arrive in Bermuda to considerable fanfare. Their elapsed times are significantly longer than the modern fleet, but their place in the race is protected, and the prize-giving treats them as equal participants.

How to Enter: Crew Opportunities and the Finish

Entry to the Newport Bermuda Race requires boat certification through the CCA or RBYC process, current safety equipment meeting race specifications, and a skipper and crew who meet the experience requirements. First-time entrants are strongly encouraged to attend the pre-race safety seminar in Newport, which covers Gulf Stream tactics, weather routing, and emergency procedures specific to the course.

Crew positions on Bermuda Race boats open up in the months before each edition. The CCA maintains a crew registration system; the Sailing Forums and class associations list positions. Experienced offshore sailors willing to sail as crew — cook, watch captain, navigator, bow — will find opportunities if they search early. Completing the Bermuda Race is, for many offshore sailors, a career milestone.

The finish at St. David's Lighthouse — a white-painted tower on the island's northeastern bluff — is visible 15 miles at sea in clear conditions. Boats that have been at sea for three to five days converge on it through the pre-dawn hours as well as midday, and the arrival in the pink-sand light of a Bermuda morning, after days of open ocean, is routinely described by first-time participants as one of the best things they have ever done on a sailboat.