Antigua Racing Cup Opens With HH66 Catamaran Blazing Past 20 Knots

The first real clue about this new Antigua Racing Cup came from the waterline, not the scoreboard. In high-teens easterly trade winds, with gusts topping 20 knots off Antigua’s south coast, Adrian Lee’s HH66 Lee Overlay Partners III stretched out at more than 20 knots and looked every bit the boat to beat in the island’s new racer-only format.

The race committee gave the smaller CSA 2, CSA 3 and CSA 4 boats technical courses, while CSA 1 got a 24-nautical-mile run that kept the big boats busy for nearly five hours. That mix mattered. It forced crews to sail fast, but also clean, because there was nowhere to hide in full trade-wind conditions and plenty of room for mistakes to snowball into lost miles.

Lee Overlay Partners III is built for exactly that kind of day. The HH66 carries ultra-high modulus C-Foil appendages and a rotating wing mast, a setup that turns raw breeze into pace with far less drama than most people expect from a 66-footer. Pre-race chatter had the boat as the quickest entry in the fleet and capable of approaching 30 knots, and day one gave that reputation real weight. For catamaran fans, that is the whole point: this is not just a pretty multihull spreading canvas, it is a machine that can turn Caribbean wind into a genuine performance gap.

The opening day also showed that Antigua’s new event was not a one-boat parade. Across the CSA classes there were close battles, and in CSA 1 Dan Gribble’s Tripp 65 custom Prevail took line honours and the corrected-time win in 3 hours 17 minutes. That gives the regatta immediate credibility. The HH66 may have owned the speed conversation, but the monohulls were still making crews work for every tactical advantage on the long leg home.

That is what makes this opening day important for the rest of the Cup. The Antigua Racing Cup has been set up as a four-day, performance-focused regatta with up to three races a day, and the inaugural fleet ranges from 82 feet down to 24 feet. With entries from North America, Europe, Scandinavia and the Caribbean, it already looks like a serious addition to the spring calendar, arriving just ahead of Antigua Sailing Week’s April 22 to 26 dates. If day one is the template, the boats with pace, polish and the nerve to make the right call in heavy breeze will keep setting the tone. Lee Overlay Partners III has already put its hand up.