If you’re going to learn how to sail a foiling Moth, you’d want to do it in warm water, right? And if you were going to have someone teach you how to do it, could there be a better instructor than the reigning World Champion?

Warm water and a World Champion are two ingredients in the mouthwatering package that Alan Hillman has put together for Moth Fest. This is a seven-day package of coaching, training and fun-racing at Pro-Vela, his sailing centre in Mar Menor in the south-east corner of Spain.

Alan told me all about his forthcoming Fest over lunch at the Dinghy Show in London recently. He even offered me the use of one of his Bladeriders, but race reporting work at the Louis Vuitton Trophy in Sardinia will have to come first. Not exactly a terrible alternative, but still gutted! Hopefully I’ll get a chance to visit Alan’s place some time later this year.

After emerging from the most heinous of British winters, the prospect of sailing somewhere a long way South seems like a sensible way to spend precious sailing time. With Pro-Vela just 5km drive from Murcia Airport and only 75km from Alicante, there are plenty of cheap flights just two hours away from the UK.

Alan points out that Mar Menor enjoys more than 2,800 hours of sunshine each year with an average annual temperature of 19.3 degrees Celsius. That means approximately 325 sunny sailing days per year. Not only that, but he claims the wind even blows too! Sounds too good to be true.

While in Valencia at the America’s Cup a couple of months ago I bumped into Ian Walker at the BMW Oracle base. Ian, these days best known for his Volvo Ocean Race and America’s Cup exploits, has always been an excellent and naturally-gifted dinghy sailor. Ian had just driven up from Mar Menor to Valencia for the day to witness some of the craziness of the 33rd America’s Cup first hand, and just the day before he had taken his first sail in a foiling Moth. His first gybe he attempted, he completed, but in lowrider mode - ie not foiling. The next gybe he crashed and burned, and the third gybe he pulled off a fully-fledged foiling gybe. Alan Hillman was hopping mad, it took him months to get to the foiling gybe, and Alan has a pretty good sailing pedigree in his own right. Then again, Ian has won two Olympic silver medals, an International 14 World Championship, etc, etc, so maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised.

Anyway, a bit more about Moth Fest. The event will consist of three days of coaching and tuition from Simon Payne, followed by two days of slalom racing, culminating in two days of “Grand Stand Short course racing”. Alan says any protests will be handled with minimum bureaucracy, although in my recent interview with Simon Payne (soon to appear in the pages of Y&Y) he points out that there has been no protest at a Moth World Championships since 2004. This seems to back up my theory that I wrote about last year, that the faster the boat the fewer the protests.

Alan’s philosophy is about maximum fun for minimum fuss, and I think he is on to a winner here. Go to www.pro-vela.com to find out more. Of course there’s a lot to take away from this format for any class, not just foiling Moths. For example, I hear the Phantom class, even though it’s very much a British class, is starting to hold regattas overseas, and then RS has been doing this for years. This summer’s RS excursion to Europe is to Lake Garda and within days of opening the website for entries, all 200 spots for the Zhik RS Eurocup had been booked up sailors in RS200s, 400s, 600s, 700s & 800s.

What Alan’s event and also RS get right is realising that the off-the-water apres-sailing is just as important as what goes on out on the water.

But tinkering with the racing format is a good experiment too. If you race in a class that is religiously locked into windward/leeward races, then maybe it’s time to mix it up a bit.

Perhaps a long distance racing is one idea worth trying. The multihull community has been doing this for years, but what about us dinghy sailors? Well here’s your chance, because Weston Sailing Club has organised an event for multis and fast monohulls. It’s called the Solent Slog. There is a short practice distance race on Saturday 5 June, followed by the main event on Sunday the 6th. While the multihulls will be charging out of Southampton Water and up Hurst Castle at the far end of the Western Solent and then back to Weston, the monohull course is not quite so daunting.

Dinghies faster than PN 952 will sail out of Weston, to Gilkicker Point near Hill Head, over to Cowes and back to Weston. Richard Thoroughgood and the rest of the Weston team have been working hard to make this a special event. All boats will be fitted with GPS tracking units with the positions displayed online and inside the club house for spectators. The GPS is partly for entertainment and interest, and partly for safety reasons so the race committee can keep track of sailors’ whereabouts.

The Solent Slog is sponsored by Wildwind Holidays, and the £75 entry fee includes event entry, camping, evening meal on Saturday, and after-event meal on Sunday.

If that sounds like too much slog and effort for you, then get a load of this. Mexico’s Laser Radial representative at the last Olympics, Tania Elias Calles, recently sailed 300 miles across a stretch of the Pacific Ocean from Los Cabos to Puerto Vallarta. It took 65 hours of non-stop sailing, and while she had an escort boat to keep an eye on her, Tania took all her own food and provisions.  “There were also moments in which exhaustion almost overcame me and I fell asleep while sailing,” she said at the press conference afterwards. “It seemed as if I slept for hours but my team told me that it never was more than ten minutes.”

Tania’s exploits bring to mind the passage across the Bass Strait from Tasmania to mainland Australia, which former Laser World Champion Michael Blackburn completed a few years back, except that Michael’s effort was just over a hundred miles and now Tania has done three times the distance. So, do you think you can manage a sail up to Southampton Water and across to Cowes and back? You could do that. Me? Maybe I could do that too, except I’ve got that excuse of being in Sardinia writing about big boats, so you can tell me how you get on in the Solent Slog. To find out more, go to www.weston.org.uk or look for ‘Solent Slog’ on Facebook.

It would be great to see a return to some long distance dinghy racing. The idea of sailing across the English Channel seems ludicrous, but I’ve heard stories of Uffa Fox and his chums sailing across to France in their International 14s - in the days before trapezes, gennakers, and drysuits for that matter! They would race across to France, moor their boats, change into their dinner jackets, enjoy a good French meal with some good French wine, rest up for the night, and sail back to Blighty the following day. James Bond eat your heart out.

I’d love to know the truth of these old sea yarns. If you know any more of such stories, then please do get in touch, because it would be wonderful to share some great dinghy exploits with other readers of Roll Tacks.