There are a few days a year when the Real Club Náutico de Barcelona travels back in time. Its headquarters on Espanya dock fill with wooden hulls, sails from another era, and a smell of varnish, salt, and old canvas that has no substitute. On the pontoons, the cream of classic world sailing has gathered, convened by Puig and the club for the XIX edition of the Puig Vela Clàssica Barcelona, and the modern port, for a few days, stops looking like one.
Forty-five boats from half the world turn the waters of Barcelona into a floating museum, a museum with engines, sails, and crews on deck, not in display cases. The program, until Saturday, is the usual one and it works because it hasn't changed since the first edition: registration and welcome, races at sea on Thursday and Friday starting at noon, and awards ceremony on Saturday afternoon. Centenary hulls, lines that are no longer designed this way, except in very specific replicas. On board, crews as passionate as they are impeccably uniformed, and sailing recovering for a few days the manners of another century.
The heat this year is intense, although the weather has not been unkind to the regatta. Blazing sun and the usual script for summer thermal breezes: very light wind in the morning that picks up to 8-15 knots past noon, just enough for these boats to shine without suffering. The heat did leave some curious scenes, like on Wednesday with the firefighting seaplanes sharing the north entrance with some classics while loading water. Two completely different nautical worlds crossing paths due to the forest fires in the municipalities surrounding the city.
Sailing among legends
Yesterday we had the good fortune to go aboard one of the great protagonists of this edition: the Eilean, a Scottish ketch from 1936 owned by Officine Panerai. I don't exaggerate if I say it was one of those mornings you don't forget. It's one thing to see a museum piece and quite another to feel it move under your feet with the same elegance with which it was conceived ninety years ago. And on top of that with the scenery set: dozens of classic sails unfurled over the blue Mediterranean, wooden hulls cutting through the water with style, and the Barcelona skyline as a backdrop, a perfect setting because a beautiful city also serves that purpose.
The spectacle, moreover, was a round trip. While we watched the fleet mesmerized from the deck of the Eilean, the Eilean itself had become the center of many other gazes and cameras. There are few boats that generate such admiration wherever they go. And it has more than earned it.
Built in Fairlie, Scotland, in 1936 by commission of the Fulton family and launched the following year, the Eilean belongs to that very small elite of classic sailboats that have survived whole and pampered. In 1982 it experienced its moment of pop glory: it was chartered by a British group that was then beginning to conquer the world, Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon, John Taylor and company used it as a stage, in the waters of Antigua, for the music video of Rio, one of the icons of the eighties imaginary. By the way, musical curiosity: the group is still alive and these days is on tour in Italy and Switzerland.
After the Eilean went around on televisions in half the world thanks to the promotion of the music video, the opposite of glamour arrived: years of abandonment in a Caribbean port, battered and without one of its masts, on its way to being scrapped. However, in 2006 the then CEO of the watchmaker Panerai found it almost by chance, fell in love with it, bought it and gave it three years of exhaustive restoration in Viareggio, in Tuscany.
In 2009 it returned to the water exactly as it was in its best days. Today it is the floating embassy of the Italian brand, and I dare say that probably the most beautiful thing Panerai has right now is not, precisely, a watch.
The city as a grandstand
The best thing about these days is that you don't need to step on a classic boat to enjoy them. Barcelona becomes a grandstand: Barceloneta, Port Vell, the Port Olímpic breakwater, the southern beaches or the Rambla de Mar are prime boxes to watch this fleet, which seems straight out of a movie, parade. Among the guests of this edition is, no less, the Manitou, the sailboat that President Kennedy used in his leisure time, another chapter of history with hull and keel that some summers can be seen in Barcelona.
Whoever was lucky enough to experience it from the water, as we did yesterday aboard the Eilean, got the full version of the spectacle: to see and involuntarily be seen. For a few hours, the Barcelona coastline transforms into the best room of a maritime museum, one that instead of being still, sails, creaks, lists and, yes, excites.
So now you know: whoever has a minimum weakness for the sea and for sailing with an old money air from another era, this hot week has an appointment at the Port Vell. You can't always boast of having seen history sail by.