A challenging and memorable 5th edition AEGEAN 600
by Hellenic Offshore Racing Club 13 Jul 16:40 PDT
At Saturday night's Awards Ceremony of the 2025 AEGEAN 600 the bright lights and gleaming trophies were not the only indication of a successful 5th edition of this challenging offshore race organized annually by the Hellenic Offshore Racing Club (HORC). The best measure of success was among the large crowd of smiling faces among more than just the winning teams who were poised to win their trophies.
Their beaming smiles were knowing that they had just completed one of the most challenging - yet rewarding - 600-mile races in the offshore sailing world.
This was the 5th edition of the AEGEAN 600 organized by HORC with co-organizers being Olympic Marine and Region of Attica. Rolex is the official timepiece, and other sponsors include the Greek National Tourism Organization, D. Koronakis SA, and this year Mercedes-Benz joined the AEGEAN 600 as the event's Official Mobility Partner.
One of those winners, Kay-Johannes Wrede who raced his Swan 441 BEST BUDDIES IV (GER) to the overall win in both IRC and ORC scoring, explained this well. Wrede raced with a crew of eight men and women on his team, all from Germany.
"This is the first time we have been here and we were a little surprised by the wind conditions," he said. ""We learned here is very different than in the north where you can have a lot of wind but when it changes it happens slowly. Here it is sudden, it's very difficult. The entire team was fighting day and night so we changed our shift schedule from 6 hours to only two hours so that we always had fresh people on deck."
Wrede also reflected on how this this style of racing was better suited for an older design like his: the Swan 441 is a heavier IOR-style boat designed by Ron Holland and first launched in 1978.
"The newer modern boats are much faster downwind, and we normally lose them ahead of us. But here when we had those light air areas we had the chance to catch up and be clever to equalize their advantages."
Another key equalizer for this team was their navigator Christian "Chriggel" Heermann, who used a variety of modern digital tools to keep them pushing hard.
"We made a lot of use of AIS to keep track of our rivals and the progress they were making," he said. "This was tactically really important in some areas of the race, such as on the leg from Rhodes to Kandelousa, where we determined there was actually a lot of current that was not described in our routing tools."
Yet he said the tools did help them when it matter most toward on the final legs west of Mykonos.
"Here the grib files suggested we stay on rhumb line along with our competitors but instead we chose to take a wider more northerly approach into better wind as suggested by the isochrons. This was successful and helped us catch them at the north end of Kea before making the final leg to the finish."
Other overall winners celebrated at the Awards were Doublehanded Division winners Michalis Antis racing with Alexandre Cote on their Pogo 50 EROS (FRA), the X-Yachts Class was won by the XP 44 ANTELOPE (GRE) skippered by Patroklos Tottas, the Maxi Class was won by George Procopiou's Volvo 70 AIOLOS (GRE), and the MOCRA Division was won by Adrian Keller's 86-foot catamaran ALLEGRA (SUI), repeating a win earned in 2022.
"It is important to us that we as organizers of this race provide the best balance of challenge, safety, camaraderie and fun," said HORC Commodore Ioannis Maragkoudakis. "This edition of the race has delivered on this in every respect. We congratulate the winners but also all participants who have come from around the world to join us for what we think is the very best in offshore sailing."
From start to finish, the tracks of the entries can be found on the YB tracker system found at this link: aegean600.com/tracking, and offshore race commentator Dobbs Davis has used this for daily race analysis video shows published during the race on the event's YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/@aegean600.
There is an abundance of media resources - photos, videos and news stories - made available at aegean600.com/media-services. High resolution photos from this year's as well as past editions of the AEGEAN 600 are also found at www.flickr.com/photos/aegean600/albums.
Complete results and other information on the race can be found at aegean600.com.