Les Voiles de St. Tropez occurs the first week of October each year, and has taken the place of the Noulargue. This year, the New York Yacht Club in concert with the Royal Yacht Squadron had celebrated the 150th anniversary of the America's Cup by holding the Silver Jubilee regatta in Cowes with racing for about 200 yachts on the Solent. Some 50 vessels including a number of vintage 12 meters represented the club. The "Grand Tour" continued to Sardinia in early September, and on to Monaco and Cannes before arriving in St. Tropez by way of a feeder race from Cannes on Sunday the 30th of September.
What a sight! From Alden Schooners to beautiful Fife's mixed with some 20 traditional 12- Meter sloops, the array of fine sailing vessels (all pre -1950) numbered 120. Of these some 40+ were American vessels proudly flying the red white and blue ensign. All of us there had, with some difficulty, pulled ourselves away from our desire to hole up at home and be with friends
and family. Somehow we have prevailed on wives and children to let us go on a trip that had been planned for nearly 2 years and which had we not gone would have only let the terrorists win.
Ultimately we had no choice. We had to go and we did. Getting on the direct Delta flight from JFK to Nice was a little weird. The whole airport nervousness, searches, etc. is so different for us. We welcome the extra vigilance, but hate the need for it. It fundamentally is so boring, just the old "few bad apples" theory in scary practice. Never the less, once on
the aircraft, I felt completely at ease and began to feel the old familiar travel anticipatory feelings as I reflected on the reasons for the trip, the expectations and the sense of returning once again to the warmth of Southern France.
The flight was without incident and arriving Nice, I picked up a little diesel "Beamer". Heading out for St Tropez was a joy. Roads were relatively quiet, it being about 9:30 on a Saturday morning and the countryside's splendor once again cleared away any feelings of guilt for having left the family at home. It simply was too beautiful. It was also too early to
call my wife to tell her how beautiful it was and how I wished she was with me. The simple fact was that we were both nervous about both of us being away at the same time in the event something else happened. (A new feeling and thought for us. We simply hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about "something else happening" before. We had grown up with the Soviet/US
threat of mutual assured destruction, but we had never thought that the Russians wanted to die any more than we did, so somehow that threat seemed more like Khruschovian brinkmanship than possibility. The shadow of this fear was more ominous.
Les Voiles de St. Tropez
Tim Warburton
