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Sailing 6 min read

What We Learned at the Rolex Fastnet Race

The centenary edition of one of the world's premier offshore races: what breaks, what holds, and how it shapes the work.

In 2025 our founder was invited aboard Osprey, an 80-foot Farr maxi, for the hundredth edition of the Rolex Fastnet Race: Cowes, around the Fastnet Rock, finish in Cherbourg. The mainsail went on at four in the morning the night before the start.

A race like that is a compressed lesson in failure modes. Everything on a boat that size is loaded beyond what any spec sheet imagines, and the gear that survives has a logic to it: generous radii, no stress concentrators, materials matched to their job, and maintenance access that lets problems be found early.

Every one of those lessons is baked into the parts we print. The full story, including the testimonial from a crewmate, is on the stories page.

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