Newport-Bermuda Race 2024 Starts Friday

The 2024 Newport-Bermuda Race starts Friday and the start is going to be a little different around Newport Harbor this year. Race officials have seen fit to move the starting line to be located right off Fort Adams State Park in full view of much of the harbor.

Newport-Bermuda Race. Daniel Forster/PPL Photo

This is a first for the biennial, 636-mile race, and this 53rd running will give land-based fans a chance to see their favorite yachts and good friends cross the starting line up close. Race organizers and sponsors have a festival event planned from noon to 4 pm with a chance to meet world-girdling sailor Cole Brauer, plus food trucks and a Regatta Bar with plenty of Gosling’s Black Seal Rum. The Thrash to the Onion Patch, as the race is sometimes called, got its start in 1906 and the purpose behind it is, as Commodore Herbert L. Stone of the Cruising Club of America wrote in 1923, “In order to encourage the designing, building, and sailing of small seaworthy yachts, to make popular cruising upon deep water, and to develop in the amateur sailor a love of true seamanship, and to give opportunity to become proficient in the art of navigation….” This new starting location is sure to inspire some yachtsmen and yachtswomen to try their hand. Of course, boaters know the best spot to watch is still from a boat on the water, so head to Rhode Island now to see it all unfold. https://bermudarace.com/