Coming up!

November 10-14, 2025

Barbados offers up some of the best sailing conditions in the Caribbean in a spectacular environment! Sunshine, wind, waves around the corner on the south coast or flat water in Carlisle Bay… racing in Barbados is picture perfect and provides a premium sailing experience.

The J24 fleet will be ready and waiting on moorings, right off the perfect white sand beaches of Carlisle Bay. Each day will involve a morning and afternoon training session on the water, bookended with educational on shore briefings from our superb coaches. At the end of each day we’ll wrap up with a high quality debrief supported by advanced performance analytics… and a cheeky sunset rum punch!

One of the best parts of this immersive race training, is you get to share it with other sailors. Whether you come on your own or with the usual suspects from your pre-made team, you get the chance to meet and race with or against sailors from all over the world. This opens so many doors to more racing in the future with new friends, in new places, and on different boats!

A cornerstone of the Sea to Sky presence in the Caribbean and It’s Not About The Boat in particular, is we do whatever we can to support local youth sailing. The islands are filled with talented young sailors, hungry for the opportunity to grow, learn and take their racing to the next level. We’re very happy to be supporting youth sailing in Barbados by providing one spot on each J24 to young top level racers, giving them exposure to exceptional training and skill development. This also gives all our international sailors the opportunity to gain some local knowledge on the water- a key advantage in sailing anywhere.

Program Overview

It’s Not About The Boat will take sailors 5 days of hands-on training, helping build and refine every sailing skill towards sailing faster and smarter around a race course.

Throughout the week, sailors will race with a set team, learning how to work together effectively and becoming a lean mean racing machine. Each day, the teams will rotate through the boats in the fleet, getting the opportunity to learn under each coach (who are each assigned to a specific boat) and levelling the playing field if there are any discrepancies between boats.

Sailors will have some opportunity to try different positions on board, before zeroing in on the skill set they want to focus on improving.

Day 1 & 2 - Skill Building

Sailors can experiment with different positions during these first two days before deciding where they want to specialize. Our focus is on building excellence in the foundational racing skills with on-the-water training in:

• Sail trim both upwind and downwind with a symmetric spinnaker

• Boat handling

• Crew communication

• Efficient maneuvering and process development

• Boat speed, boat speed, boat speed

Shoreside, our briefs will cover sailing theory in more detail, helping you build a deeper understanding of exactly how to get the top performance out of your boat.

Day 3 & 4 - Drill to Perfection

Every team will be put through their paces with a mix of racing specific drills, match racing and fleet racing practice on short courses. On shore, our briefs will lean into tactical decision making, better understanding of the rules, and identifying opportunities to use the weather to your advantage. On board coaching and performance data collection will lead to in-depth debrief analyses to help you see the big picture and the little details that go towards continuous improvement in:

• Nailing the start, every time

• Picking the correct side of the windward beat and playing the shifts

• Tight mark rounding

• Gybing at just the right time

• Winning the race to the finish!

Day 5 - Fleet Racing

The last day of our session is a mini regatta, where teams will put into play everything they’ve learned in a series of short course races.

At the end of It’s Not About The Boat, sailors will have a better understanding of how to build a winning team, perform cohesively on the water, make the boat go fast and in the right direction, identify weather patterns to benefit performance, and apply the racing rules of sailing correctly.

Is this right for you?

This session of It’s Not About The Boat is a great choice if you :

• Love racing!

• Want to build skills on a fantastic training platform (J24s). These little boats are light, responsive and let you know immediately when you are doing things right (or wrong!). Training on small boats prepares you to race just about anything.

• Want to do a deep dive to rapidly improve your skill set across the board:

  • Learn every crew position

  • Perfect your sail trim

  • Improve your tactical knowledge

  • Thoroughly understand the racing rules

  • Bang those lay lines and nail the starts!

  • Master your VMG

• Want to learn how to run your own competitive team for your own boat or perform your best when hopping on with any team

• Enjoy sailing in a gorgeous environment!

To get the most out of the experience you need to:

• Have solid prior sailing experience- this is not for raw beginners

• Ideally have some prior racing experience

• Have a decent level of fitness, in particular agility and core strength are important to get around little boats safely

• Be ready to have an amazing week of skill development, camaraderie and wicked-fun sailing!

$2,000 USD per person

10% per-person discount for a group of 4 booking together

Included in Registration

Registration includes use of the boats and all associated equipment, world class coaching, safety vessels & their operators, multimedia and advanced performance analytics gathered on the water, use of classroom space, morning coffee/tea, lunch and a sunset debrief rum punch each day.

Not Included

Accommodation, flights, travel insurance, dinner each day and other discretionary spending- including tipping your coach if you choose.

Each team will also be required to provide a $200 USD per person damage deposit at the start of the clinic. If any minor damage beyond normal wear and tear is incurred during the clinic, the damage deposit will be applied to repairs / parts replacement and the balance returned to participants at the end of the clinic. If major damage is incurred, the entire damage deposit will be retained and applied to the insurance deductible.

What to Bring

PFDs are provided, otherwise you need to bring all your sailing gear with a heavy focus on sun protection. Check out our Caribbean FAQs for some good ideas on what to bring for tropical regatta sailing.