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David Harding has been testing boats for more than 25 years. He is also a marine photographer and runs his agency Sailing Scenes
Mark Heseltine’s sailing career spans everything from dinghy racing and Olympic keelboat campaigns to offshore events including two Round Britain races. He has also cruised widely, from Norway to Egypt.
The Sigma 33 is known for many things. She’s the boat that was to have been called the Skua 33 until an existing Skua class complained and her name was changed. She’s the boat that missed out on selection as one of the three ‘official’ one designs following the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s one-design conference in 1978, but which went on to outsell all those that were chosen. She’s the boat that was known as the ‘six-knots upwind and six-knots downwind’ boat – rather unkindly, perhaps. But above all she’s known as one of the most outstandingly successful one-design racing yachts the world has ever known, fielding fleets of 70+ boats at Cowes Week in the early 1980s.
Of a total of 364 Sigma 33s built between 1978 and 1991, that’s a remarkably high percentage making the start line. It proved how precisely she hit the spot. Her designer, David Thomas, had done it again. He said to me on a number of occasions that the trick wasn’t just to design a boat that people wanted to sail; you also had to design a boat that people wanted to buy. He was very good at that.
GROWING POPULARITY
As a racing boat, then, the Sigma 33 was an unqualified success. She wasn’t the trendiest boat of her size, and today, 45 years on, she’s widely seen as perhaps a little staid and pedestrian in racing circles.
Thomas wanted a boat that was modern yet not extreme; that looked reasonably racy and. It wasn’t just as a one-design that the Sigma excelled, however. Designed towards the end of the International Offshore Rule era, she also proved to be competitive under IOR. What’s more, though conceived as a race boat, she wasn’t so flighty that leisurely sailing was out of the question, or that sailing from the Solent to Cork Week with a small delivery crew would be a major challenge. In fact the cruising potential was recognised when, in 1981, Marine Projects started building a cruising version, the 33C, with a shorter masthead rig and longer, shallower keel. Even this de-tuned Sigma was no slouch. After a double Atlantic crossing, a 33C won the two-handed class in the breezy 2011 Fastnet. A Sigma 36 finished second and a 38 came fourth.
