Firefly class at the Tideway Dinghy Derby 2026
by Alex Baxter 23 Jun 11:13 BST
20 June 2026
"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure."
Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy
Why We Do Not Play Squash
Rilke was not, so far as the records show, a dinghy sailor. And yet in The First Elegy he managed to describe the Tideway Race more precisely than any of us could that evening on the bank, beer in hand and forearms quietly ruined: beauty, he wrote, is "nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure". He might have been watching the start line.
Because once the boats are packed away and the trailers loaded, you do have to ask the question honestly. Why sail at all? We could play squash. One racket, one ball, a warm room, a roof. No tide tables, no wetsuit that never quite dries, no two-hour drive to stand on a slipway and squint at the weather. And yet here we are, in an exceedingly hot changing room, wearing overly tight clothes, large-brimmed hats, applying ample sun cream - some more than others - and doing it anyway.
The Tideway Race is the whole argument for our madness, set out in a single afternoon: the beauty first, and then, just when you have relaxed into it, the terror.
The Blessing
The morning gave no warning of what it had planned. We had arrived braced for chaos: no boat park, no car park, a fleet of Firefly's to be threaded into a space that looked, on paper, far too small for them. Runners galore, Cyclists to match. Unsuspecting Putney residents could not know what had hit them. In the end, it was almost serene, the rowing clubs having decamped for the weekend and left the river to us. So, there was time on the bank. Time to wander between the hulls, to greet faces we see far less often than we would like, to puzzle over what exactly was happening at Ranelagh, and to be folded into a welcome so warm it felt slightly unearned. A good omen, we decided.
Then the gun, and the tide took us downriver, and for a while every one of us was briefly a god. To sail the ebb through London is to be handed the city as a gift. Battersea Power Station stood up out of the haze. The golden Buddha of the Peace Pagoda caught the light. A whistle sounded somewhere above us as we slipped under the first bridge, and the faint, honest waft of the rubbish barges drifted across the water, and a helicopter landed to remind us we were still on Earth.
The Firefly asked almost nothing of you: an occasional gybe, a gust to read, a friend to race two boat lengths away. You enjoyed the company of your crew, whom you see far too infrequently these days. And you felt, sliding down the tide between the towers, and the sprawling London metropolis of noise, bridges and thousands and thousands of people's lives, small and insignificant and entirely happy. Phones came out. Photographs were taken. Life, for those few minutes, was beautiful and wonderful and faintly absurd.
And then Parliament. The old gold front of it, sitting there since 1840, looking, it must be said, considerably larger from a Firefly than from my former office window. Good to see the old place, I thought to myself. A command of "Smile!" was issued to the Morris's; the money shot was duly had. Duty done, photos complete, vibes immaculate. All that remained was the gentle business of sailing back up the Thames, and then, with any luck, the rather good mozzarella sandwich waiting in the bag. You could not, in that moment, have told me otherwise.
The Turning
How wrong we were. How sailing loves to wait. For this is not squash. This is a sport of the elements, where Mother Nature stands just around the next bend with her arms folded, waiting for the precise moment you stop paying attention. We rounded the mark at Westminster with the tide still pouring out beneath us, and the second half of the day arrived all at once, hard and cold and entirely without sympathy. The downwind dream was over. Ahead lay the river itself, running against us, lined with barges, and the only way home was to claw up it tack by tack, crabbing along the bank to dodge the worst of the ebb and the constant, undignified threat of running aground. A new dawn had broken. A race was afoot.
The Race of a Thousand Tacks and the beginning of Terror
At the front, the order had already begun to sort itself out. Jono Pank and Isla Armstrong in Swaggle, Paul and Laura Kameen in Buffalo Biscuit, and Nigel Wakefield with Emily Saunderson in Top Top Too reached the buoy with daylight around them: Team Tip Top Too leading at the turn, Buffalo Biscuit second, Swaggle third. Team Tip Top Too and Team Buffalo Biscuit swung wide of the first moored boat; Swaggle went inside it and squirted out ahead of the pair of them. A small, ruthless lesson in geometry, taught and learned in the space of a boat length.
For Angus Cook and Lucie Hopkins, sailing Office Dibble, the day had begun with rather less elegance. Mortally line shy, haunted by the spectre of a five-minute penalty, they had crossed the start more or less last of every Firefly in the fleet; the photographs, regrettably, do not lie. What followed was a long, patient dig back into the race: grinding upwind, taking the boats one at a time, and then, as the breeze swung round further up the river, finding a sliver of clean water at last. The buoy itself, they fumbled, a thorough hash, by their own honest account. Rob and Mel Sherrington, Team Iris, rounded ahead of them; Office Dibble went round outside; and then Roger and Amy Moris in Horror, and the rest of us, came surging up at exactly the wrong moment, and suddenly they were seventh, or eighth, or whatever that is. It was there, at the bottom of their fortunes, that the decision was made that would win the race: stay on the bank, hug it, trust it, whatever it costs.
What it cost was the riverbed, repeatedly. They ran aground, hauled off, ran aground again, and somewhere in the third or fourth grounding made their peace with it. It became less a disaster than a rhythm, two or three tacks and a soft kiss of the mud and on again. Up the western flank of the first set of moored barges they crept, before Lambeth Bridge, always, always keeping to the right of every other boat. By the time the bridge loomed, they had tacked themselves back up to second, pleasing and utterly exhausting in equal measure, the boat now heavy with the water that rolls tacking pours in over the gunwale, so that bailing became a second sport practised alongside the first.
Lambeth Bridge did not want them. They went to the pier five or six times, the arch turning them away each time like a doorman who does not like the look of you, until at last they popped through to the far side and the long chase began, with team Swaggle somewhere up ahead, to be hunted down over the course of the afternoon. The plan, such as it was, fit on a postage stamp: a marathon, not a sprint. Tack smoothly. Make no big mistakes. Keep the boat moving, and for the love of God, keep her off the bottom.
Just above the bridge sat the day's strangest obstacle: not a barge at all but a vast white pleasure boat, all windows and unfinished ambition, somebody's half-converted dream moored broadside to the fleet. It went on forever. Clearing it meant tacking out into the full punch of the current and the wind together, and as they finally rounded its bow, Team Horror crossed them, so that now there were three boats fighting for the front of the fleet: Swaggle leading, Horror second, Office Dibble third, the whole thing nip and tuck and impossibly close.
Then the river, for once, offered a gift. An Uber boat nosed out from the Millbank pier. The Morrises and Swaggle, out in the middle of the channel, had no choice but to sit and wait for it to pass; Office Dibble had tucked themselves deliberately inboard, took the rough of its wash square on the bow, and tacked straight up the line of the pier while the water there was briefly clear. That was the lead, won not by speed but by standing in the right place at the right second. Not by much. But theirs.
The bravest stroke came next. Ahead lay three barges abreast and, to the western side of them, a channel perhaps three boat lengths wide, no more than that, with the bank and certain grounding on one hand and steel on the other. They simply decided to go. Board up to three-quarters, heads down, tacking every two lengths, committing utterly because there was no room left to think. They came out of the front of it just as the rest of the fleet was arriving at the back. If a single moment won the race, it was that one.
On to Vauxhall Bridge, and another ten passes back and forth beneath the arch, the genuine and growing suspicion that they might never get through it at all, until they saw the wind beginning to fill in ahead, and being upwind of everyone, took it first. Out from under the bridge, and at last the boat began to stretch its legs. Even then, the river kept its needle in: with no one ahead to chart the shallows for them, they grounded blind, once so hard that as they hauled off and stood her upright, even the rudder dragged through the mud, a properly frightening moment, that one. But they kept going, and the breeze kept building, until they could sit out over the side, stand the rig up, and finally, properly, sail.
And then the day handed them an escort. A police launch fell in alongside and stayed there, more or less, all the way home. At first, it was an honour; then it was a nuisance, the launch sitting just upwind and shadowing their wind as cleanly as any rival could have wished. Had it meant to, it could have tacked on them and finished them off. Only when the three leading Merlins came carving through did the launch slide ahead and hand back a little clean air. They hung on to those Merlins all the way to the last bridge, upwind every yard of it.
Off Battersea, the wind turned sly. A graveyard of swirling, dying air gathered under the power station, the kind of place that quietly ends people's afternoons, the breeze going round in circles with no obligation to anyone. They clung to the Merlins through it until the final bridge, where the wind swung to a fetch and a reach and the faster boats slipped away at last. But the river is not done punishing the comfortable: a hundred and fifty yards short of the line, the Merlins sailed straight into a great hole of dead wind. Office Dibble, having watched it swallow the boats ahead, braced for the stickiness, feathered through it, and crossed the line, thankfully, blessedly, still in front.
We can still barely endure
They felt, crossing the line, as though they had half the Thames behind them. They did not. The rest of the fleet came in hard and breathless, one after another, in the space of a few minutes; the gap that had cost so much sweat measured, in the end, in seconds. That is the river for you.
And here is the joke the day saved for last. Angus, having fought - with Lucie of course - from the very back of the fleet to the very front, through a thousand tacks and a dozen groundings and one half-built pleasure boat, took in almost none of it. He confirmed that there was no Battersea, no golden Buddha, no second look at the old gold front of Westminster.
His whole world had shrunk to the trim of the sail, the set of the burgee, the water immediately around the hull. The beauty that the rest of us had drunk in on the way down went past him entirely on the way up, unseen, while he and his crew, who had come all the way from Scotland, won the entire thing.
Which is, of course, the only possible reason to go back next year: to do it all again, and this time to look up. Rilke was right, as poets irritatingly tend to be. Beauty really is only the beginning of terror. And we, fools every one of us, will reach once more for the slightly damp wetsuit, and carry on.
For the Fleet, along with Angus and Lucie, what an achievement. The entire fleet finished within 15 minutes of each other after 3.5 hours of sailing. A testament to the skill and quality of us all. Many of us are still feeling the effects of the tacks in our legs and, in general, on our psychological well-being, but we surely, overall, wouldn't have it any other way.
For the day, we graced the Thames, and what a privilege that was.
With Thanks
None of it would have been possible without Ranelagh Sailing Club. The welcome on the bank, the organisation on the water, the warmth waiting for us at the finish, thank you, sincerely, for all of it. On behalf of the entire Firefly fleet, we want to thank a great many people.
Richard and the team at Ranelagh, who could not possibly have made us feel more welcome.
All the corporate donors, who gave so generously.
The Port of London Authority for allowing it to happen, and the police for marshalling us down the river.
To UEA for lending the association a RIB, and to Rachel and Lucy for driving it on our behalf.
Lou and Ed, for comms and PR.
Mark Jardine and YJA/GCA media support Loreto.
Pip Hare, for giving us her time, for competing, for the prizes.
Isla, on the bagpipes.
Fleur Anderson MP, for a rousing speech.
Photos: Mark Jardine has done an outstanding job of putting the album together: The images are there for you to enjoy and, as he suggested, it would be wonderful if you felt able to make a personal donation to Scaramouche, directly supporting the youngsters from Greig City Academy we met on Saturday, and the many more still waiting for their turn on the water.
Donations: around £2,000 came in during the 24 hours immediately before the race, from friends and supporters, which is hugely appreciated. Please share with anyone else who might wish to support: www.justgiving.com/page/ranelaghdinghyderby
The Firefly fleet knows full well that we were part of something special this weekend, something genuinely beautiful and in our 80th anniversary year, we could not be more thankful to have shared in it. Best of all, we get to do it again.
Next Up: Itchenor
From the Thames to Chichester Harbour. The Itchenor Open Meeting is the next stop for the swarm, and this one has rather a lot going for it.
Our fabulous Hon Sec, Jason, has negotiated a DEAL for us!!
Itchenor is now £40 for the weekend, which is the same as last year.
We have 20 school boats joining in the bun fight on Sunday!
Dinner is planned for approximately 5 pm and a DJ is booked in for the night.
Plus, free camping care of Hermione & Doug.
Get your entries in team: www.itchenorsc.co.uk/event/1250649