Aspiring young offshore sailor, 19 year old Henry Bomby, who will be sailing solo around Britain this summer has recently received an extra boost by attaining lead sponsorship from the Seahorse restaurant in Dartmouth, run by celebrity restaurateur and writer Mitch Tonks. His voyage will start and finish in his home port of Dartmouth in June. Henry will sail his Contessa 26 ‘Seahorse’ anti-clockwise, along the way competing in the Round the Island Race, the J80 European Championships as well as climbing the three peaks. Henry said he is delighted to have such an enthusiastic partner for the project in the Seahorse restaurant.

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Just to let you know we are definitely planning to hold an "Invitation Race" for Contessa 26s at Hoo Ness YC on 23rd May. This will be a relatively low-key affair consisting of a 2 hour pursuit race from Chatham down the Medway to Stangate Creek where we will have a picnic lunch rafted up at anchor. The race will be shared with our club racing fleet and some multihulls. There is no entry fee and just a bottle wine for the winning Contessa 26. The the Notice of Race is below.

We used to have an active fleet of racing Contessa 26s and now have 3 in the club (Simona, Dulali and Birgitta) but we are aware of several others based on the Medway: Contessa of Mell, Kazbek, Misty, Kintyre and others. I will attempt to contact the owners directly or though the Medway Yachting Association. Several nostalgic former Co26 owners in our club have also volunteered to help.

Jeremy Rogers Ltd has put a super new section about the Contessa 26 on their web site, it's well worth a visit! Just click the link below to go straight to the Contessa 26 pages. 

contessa26

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Extract from Nick Jaffe's blog dated 1st December 2009

Nearing Australia, I saw another sailing vessel and radioed to ask if they knew whether Customs ran 24hrs or not. The radio crackled, “Customs? Where are you coming from, over?” … “Tonga” … “Tonga? Please repeat, over”, “Tonga, in the south Pacific” … “Oh.”