2025 Lipton Cup Sailing Challenge at Royal Cape Yacht Club
by Royal Cape Yacht Club 2 Sep 10:09 BST
23-30 August 2025
Lipton Challenge Cup 2025 © Royal Cape Yacht Club
In the heat of the moment, it's always easy to be euphoric about an event, but the 2025 Lipton Challenge Cup contest is one which will go down in history as having been one of the very best ever.
A new class of yacht, the small J22 one-design, was chosen for the very first time and what it did immediately was to swell numbers from single digits to a respectable 18 yacht fleet. It also attracted a good core of very competitive youth sailors who either took on the experience of older and more experienced Lipton Cup sailors or sailed as a mixed team with youth and experience on the same boat.
The organising Club, the Royal Cape Yacht Club, pulled out all the stops and provided a great venue and organisation that would be hard to beat by any Club in the country.
The above, added to the fact that the weather played ball for the five-day contest, ensured that 10 races were sailed, a first for the event in 71 years, all, with one exception, in good fair breeze.
Most importantly, there was no single team that ran away with the event as each and every race was contested in fine style with youth and experience pushing each other to the limits in each and every race.
The team from Hermanus Yacht Club (HYC) had age and Lipton Cup victories in the form of the tactician Markus Progli, who combined well with a youthful Calvin Gibbs (26) as helmsman and two youth sailors who are still at school, being James Rae and Scarlet Cilliers. The team were in the hunt from the very beginning, and when it mattered most on the final day, they displayed big match temperament (BMT) and sailed their Club to victory, despite enormous pressure from those challenging.
Their victory, the third time Hermanus Yacht Club has won the coveted title in 71 editions of the contest, was done simply with consistently good results in each race. In ten races their worst position was an 8th, otherwise they were always in the top five, with bullets in the first and third races.
This was a team who, when looking down and out at times, due to a bad start or poor tactical decision, put adversity behind them and soldiered on while carving their way through the fleet and out of trouble. They were cool, calm and collected - and were very popular winners.
It is worth mentioning that the two youngest in this team, James Rae and Scarlet Cilliers, were debutants in this contest, and that some hurried scouring of the record books did not reveal any other woman winners of this magnificent Lipton Cup. So Scarlet becomes the first ever woman winner - and to do that on debut is a wonderful feat.
This report is not complete without mention of some of the other top contenders.
Multiple Lipton winner representing the Defending Club, the Royal Cape Yacht Club, was a threat throughout the contest, and wore the overall leaders yellow dot for three consecutive days. However, they faltered on the penultimate day when adjudged to have been over the start line. The team failed to hear their boat number called by the officials and only returned to restart correctly after sailing for several minutes. Being stone last and with the fleet disappearing fast into the distance, they put their heads down and ultimately passed three boats before the finish. A 4th in race 8 saw them drop to second overall, and 5 points adrift of Hermanus (HYC).
On the final day, the RCYC team were unable to claw back the yellow dot with a 5th in race 9, and a victory "going away" in the final race just to stamp their mark on proceedings and finish with three race wins - better than the rest of the fleet.
The Royal Natal Yacht Club (RNYC) team was another that was always in contention, but a disqualification (DSQ) in race 2 scuppered any chance they had on lifting the Lipton Cup in victory. Without that DSQ, they would have led overall for several days and may even have won. Despite valiant efforts in the closing races, they were simply not able to lift their game and knock the others out of contention. Their third overall must have been a bitter pill to swallow.
Saldanha Bay Yacht Club (SBYC) was another young team that was jointly skippered by Sean Kavanagh and Theo Yon. They won races 2 and 8, and led overall after day one, but were just unable to string enough consistently good races together to be major threats. Again, Kavanagh was a debutant, and had they managed to be consistent, he may, at the age of 17, have become the youngest skipper ever to win the Lipton Cup.
In conclusion, this was a fine regatta, with awesome displays of top-flight competition, and very worthy winners. The J22 is likely to stay as the Lipton Cup boat for a few years yet, and one may just see a fleet double the size next year or the one thereafter, such is the renewed enthusiasm for the only true inter-club sailing challenge in this country.