CMC Race and Rally 2025

While Emmanuel was off reporting on the Race division, I was going to cover the participants in the Rally class. The objective for this 2025 edition was therefore to share with you the two aspects of the same event - I also suggest you (re)watch the Shorts (short vertical videos) that we posted daily.
I arrived in Saint-Martin two days ahead of the rally and was able to see all the preparations for it, attend the various pre-event meetings and see how everyone’s roles were allocated. At the end of the day, everyone made sure they all swapped phone numbers, and WhatsApp groups were created to ensure that important messages could be relayed to the participants. It is certainly not so simple to simultaneously lead two fleets of multihulls that are constantly “leaving each other behind…” As for me, I settled into my (very) comfortable quarters aboard a brand new Moorings 464PC.

Our Video:

Start Day – 1:

It was time for the press conference for this latest edition of the CMC and that made an opportunity to meet the Saint-Martin officials and to discover some exceptional multihulls that were joining the race, such as Adrien Lee’s HH66, Lee Overlay Partners III and Andrew Joos’ Gunboat 72 Layla. We also got to see some well-known skippers such as Marc Guillemot on the MG5 and Pierre Altier, leader of the Diam 24s. Finally, it was an opportunity to award the Environment Hero of the Year prize - this distinction is an initiative launched last year to highlight the key players in environmental protection in the territory of Saint Martin.
Multihulls World being the official press sponsor of the event, we had a small booth in the tent dedicated to multihull registration. So I set up with my magazines and business cards to share our passion with the skippers and their crews who were coming in to sign up.
The skippers’ briefing restored a sense of seriousness to the noisiness of the gathering itself. Petro Jonker, the race director, took the floor to confirm the program for the first day as well as the VHF frequencies to be used, the safety rules, the departure time, etc. Tomorrow, the adventure begins!

Day 1 – Bound for Phillipsburg

For the Rally division fleet, we didn’t do a traditional race start but began with a start time for each competitor which is calculated according to the rating (a coefficient that integrates the theoretical speed) of each multihull and the route to be followed. I discovered that the Lagoon 380 Bayla had a 100% female crew on board who never missed an opportunity to put on a show – it was party time from morning to night on board!
For all of us, it was a question of reaching Phillipsburg where beach games had been organized for the afternoon. The trade winds were a steady 15/20 knots almost straight down the line of the route, forcing the competitors to tack. But this was only a warm-up leg because the distance was relatively short. Later, all the crews, including those in the racing division, were invited to watch the ...