THE MIGHTY SKORPIOS
It’s tricky to gauge speed and scale against anything else when you have to sail a few miles offshore to avoid dredging the English Channel. Nevertheless, I could tell that great stretches of the UK’s coastline, passages that would normally drag by over hours, were ripping past at a velocity that made me question my knowledge of known landmarks.
Aboard Skorpios, the imposing new ClubSwan 125, we’re not talking outright silly peak speeds, but more the sheer unrelenting consistency of the high speeds. At 140ft including bowsprit, Skorpios is, by any scale, a beast which, under its substantial sail area, becomes an uncompromising, fiendishly powerful mile-muncher.
Standing at the windward helm when powered up feels so high above the water it’s akin to leaning out of a second storey window. And with over 20 top professional crew sitting on the rail in front of you it is a awesome, slightly terrifying and utterly captivating experience. However, this is not a Swan built for helming pleasure, rather with a ruthless brief to be the first monohull home in the big offshore races and to rewrite ocean records.
The adrenalin of sailing Skorpios is perhaps heightened by the fear of the unknown: everything about this yacht seems to be on another scale altogether. This is, by some margin, the biggest offshore racing monohull, and certainly the largest ever racing Swan. It boasts possibly the deepest draught non-lifting keel (7.4m) and the largest sailplan combination ever conceived. In short, Skorpios is a seemingly limitless source of superlatives.
is the largest monohull to enter the Fastnet Race to date, and, as its designer Juan Kouyoumdjian pointed out with a certain glee, it has been issued with the highest IRC rating ever awarded.
