61Antigua Classics came out of a realisation that the number
of vintage boats in Antigua Sailing Week was dwindling due to
classes being mixed in with more modern, easier-to-manouevre
yachts. They needed their own event. Yacht skipper Uli Pruesse
and Julian Gildersleeve, of Antigua Yacht Club, were key in
getting the idea going and it wasn’t long before eight boats
became 50 and the community began to see the benefi t too.
“It brought people to the island and we were making a
diff erence,” says Jane. “All we did was on instinct but it turned
out to have quite a following. It has come to have a great
aff ection in people’s hearts. When you totally commit to
something and have a passion for it, people get swept along
and all sorts of magic starts to happen.”
In 1991 Jane went ashore to start a business in soft
furnishings – she’d trained in design at college in the UK –
joining Kenny over the summers as cook on his charter yachts.
“It was a nice mix,” she says. The shop was busy, doing yacht
and villa interiors, canvaswork and alterations. The regatta was
established, they had built a home and life was good. Then out
of the blue Kenny fell ill and died just weeks later in October- His death was greeted with an outpouring of emotion
from friends and admirers across the world and many could not
imagine the regatta without him.
“Kenny was exactly what a regatta like
this needs,” says Jane. “He was very open
and amicable, he’d always fi nd the time to
sit down and talk with people and he had
an amazing memory for names. You have to
be positive and say that Antigua was lucky
to have him for nearly 30 years.
“It was a diffi cult fi rst two years and I felt
really saddened by the naysayers in the
local community, although I understood on
some level. But this was Kenny’s life’s work
and I wanted to keep it going as a legacy
for him. I encouraged new people to get
involved and bring new energy. Nothing is
forever. This is a new chapter.”
She is now regatta co-chair with local photographer and
fi lm-maker Alexis Andrews (director of Vanishing Sail), who she
says has been a “huge asset” along with race co-ordinator
Clare Cupples. After a fruitful 12-year run with Panerai as main
sponsor, a title sponsor is now sought, but the regatta’s future
looks assured with key support from the Herreshoff Marine
Museum, Mount Gay and Newport Shipyard.
“The biggest problem is having the amount of money you
need without becoming too commercial. It’s diffi cult to balance
that,” says Jane. “There is pressure now to bring in old
fi breglass boats to the regatta, but if you do that you change
the look of things on the water and the pure classics become a
minority. We’re still choosing to be an elite, smaller regatta and
there is still much to tap into. We have a fascinating Spirit of
Tradition fl eet that is growing and we always welcome new
traditionally built boats. And people are still fi nding plenty of
old boats to restore.”
When time allows, you’ll fi nd Jane out on the water sailing
Cora along the south shore of Antigua. And meanwhile, she still
ships out as chef on transatlantic deliveries, as she did in her
twenties. “It’s still my preferred mode of travel,” she says.
Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta takes place 18-24 April.CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2018L
ooking around the owner’s party at the 30th
anniversary of Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta last year,
Jane Coombs allowed herself a quiet moment of
refl ection. The party was taking place at the island’s
prestigious Clarence House, in the Historic Naval Dockyard,
attended by the great and the good of Antigua as well as the
owners of many of the great classic yachts of our time, each of
whom was toasting the regatta’s extraordinary success since it
was launched in 1987. “I just wished Kenny could have seen it,”
Jane says of her late husband, with whom she founded the
event. “The setting was so incredibly perfect, it was really
moving. He would have loved it.”
When do you know you’ve got a successful regatta on your
hands? There was a moment Jane says she’ll remember for the
rest of her life, sailing her 26ft Harrison Butler Cora (pictured
left) in the regatta with two J-Class yachts roaring up on either
side. “It was so tempting to look round and completely lose it
in the following sea!” she recalls.
An achievment with long-term signifi cance came when top
naval architects began to contact the regatta on behalf of
clients who wanted a yacht specifi cally for Antigua’s fast-
growing Spirit of Tradition class. Antigua was the fi rst to
embrace the Spirit of Tradition concept in
1986 with a dedicated modern classics
category. “I was proud of Kenny for
having some infl uence on yacht design,”
says Jane. “People wanted to make sure
their new yacht would be accepted.”
In the early days Jane was press
offi cer, social secretary, creative director,
accountant (“on one A4 piece of paper”).
“I loved working in the background and
cooking up ideas, the embellishments
around the regatta, part of what made it
more of a festival. Being the focus of
attention was never my natural forte, but
that’s okay, you have to learn new tricks.
Kenny felt the same in the early days.”
At the outset, they made the regatta an Antigua Yacht Club
event, to ensure its longevity even when Kenny and the original
team had moved on. The hard work has always been as good
as voluntary, something not many people realised.
“It’s been a hobby all these years, but it does begin to run
you, rather than you running it,” laughs Jane. “We all have a
chance in life to do something useful that isn’t to do with lining
your own pockets. You can say ‘I’m too busy’, or you can roll
with it. We were a good deal younger when it all began, with
boundless energy!”
She and Kenny met in Ibiza in 1980. Jane was a deckhand in
her twenties, he was a yacht skipper, both with a passion for
wooden boats. Jane’s father had built wooden boats in their
back garden and she had grown up sailing the family Contessa
26, and then a Contessa 32, in Chichester Harbour on the UK
south coast. Aged 18 she joined tall ship Sir Winston Churchill
for the USA bicentenary voyage in 1976. “That was it, really. I
was hooked.” She joined various boats as crew and ended up
sailing with a Hillyard to the Med, where eventually she wound
up in Ibiza. She and Kenny sailed to Antigua in 1983, running
charter boats – classic ones when they could – including the
75ft (23m) Herreshoff schooner Vixen II, the 61ft (18m) Alden
yawl Lucia and 85ft (25m) Fife schooner Adventuress.“When you
commit to
something and
have a passion
for it, people get
swept along and
all sorts of magic
starts to happen”