Lunch at Le Club 55 and a close-up view of Motor Yacht A… life is good for Eddie Jordan.
It’s unseasonably warm in the South of France and I’ve just come back from the most amazing weekend on board my Sunseeker 155 Blush. It is magnificent motor yacht weather – flat calm and warm enough to hang out on the sundeck.
The highlight was lunch at Le Club 55 in Saint-Tropez, which was absolutely heaving due to the weather. We went there on a Saturday and I’ve never known it to be so hard to get a table this early in the season. I even had to make a call to the owner Patrice, who took care of me.
I always order the same thing – the massive basket of crudités. It has artichokes, huge tomatoes and all these vegetables that are just so fresh. The combination of this, the sea air and a few magnums of their local rosé make it such a special place. Nothing finer.
I got back to my apartment in Monaco and woke up the next morning with a new boat on the horizon – Motor Yacht A, the star of the May issue of Boat International. It’s a stunning boat and always reminds me of a submarine, with its inverted bow.
I’m looking forward to seeing Sailing Yacht A around these parts. The engineering that goes into making a boat that big sail is mind-blowing. I see the masts on these huge sailing yachts and can’t get my head around how they can carry that much sail and not come to grief. I would want to make sure the capstans are seriously high quality before I went charging round with all that cloth up.
Carbon has made all this possible – the weight savings allowed by this material has changed the game. But sailing is trailing motor racing. I remember my designer Gary Anderson building what must have been one of the first all-carbon racing cars for my Formula Three team back in the early 1980s and everyone thought he was mad.
It’s great to see a J Class yacht in Boat International. They are the sexiest boats on the water and it’s encouraging to see new ones being built. I’d love to race on one. The nostalgia of them is just intoxicating.
Yacht racing has come a long way since these boats were competing for theAmerica’s Cup. The foiling cats they raced this year are like the Formula One cars of sailing and require a very different skill set to race than these old boats.
Eddie Jordan’s fee for this column has been donated to charity.