The final chapter of the 2025 RC44 season begins on 19 November, when the fleet heads to Marina Jandía, a new and unfamiliar harbour at the southern tip of Fuerteventura. The class opened its year with a debut in Scheveningen and will now close it in another first, this time in waters shaped by the Atlantic, the trade winds and one of the most distinctive landscapes in the Canary Islands.
Marina Jandía is the newest addition to the Calero Marinas portfolio, developed alongside Puertos Canarios with the support of the Government of the Canary Islands, the Fuerteventura Island Council, Turismo Fuerteventura and the municipality of Pájara. Although parts of the complex remain under construction, the marina is already fully operational, offering more than 300 berths for vessels ranging from small leisure craft to 50 metre superyachts. The ten RC44s will only occupy a small corner of a waterfront designed for long term growth and for a broader nautical audience. For Daniel Calero, who oversees the family’s real estate division and helms the Lanzarote Calero Sailing Team, adding Fuerteventura to the group’s network is both a strategic step and a personal milestone. Even so, he admits that in this part of the archipelago they will be discovering the area at the same pace as the rest of the fleet.
The surroundings give this event a character unlike any previous RC44 stage in the Canary Islands. Marina Jandía sits beside the Jandía Natural Park, a protected stretch of rugged terrain and long beaches that run towards the island’s southernmost point. The trade winds dominate the region for most of the year, shaping the sea state and the light, but the southern coastline enjoys a degree of shelter that may force the race committee to adjust the course in search of stronger breeze. Principal Race Officer María Torrijo will have the option to push the racing area further east if necessary, towards zones where the wind builds earlier and where Atlantic swell begins to form more clearly. The island is a long standing reference point for wind driven sports and has hosted the Fuerteventura World Cup for thirty seven years, originally centred on windsurfing and now equally defined by wingfoil racing. For the RC44 fleet, this mixture of protection and exposure will create a course that demands constant reading of pressure and a careful balance between risk and return.
The Lanzarote Calero Sailing Team arrives with a notable reinforcement. Alberto Padrón, the current J 80 world champion from Gran Canaria, joins the crew as trimmer for the final event of the year. His addition strengthens a team that has been steadily refining its approach and its communication on board. Calero himself continues to attract attention following the widely shared footage of his fall into the water during the Scheveningen event, a moment that unexpectedly reached more than a million views across social platforms. The reactions have been light hearted, and he has treated it the same way, noting with a grin that next time he intends to hold on properly.
The 44Cup Marina Jandía opens with official practice on 19 November, followed by four days of racing from 20 to 23 November. Across those days the season’s final rankings will be settled and the overall champion of the 2025 RC44 season will be confirmed. What awaits the fleet is a stretch of water that none of them fully knows, shaped by a coastline still in development, and by an island that has spent decades defined by wind rather than by spectacle. It is a setting that does not need embellishment, only close attention, as the class prepares to conclude its year in a place where the landscape, the breeze and the rhythm of the Atlantic will play as decisive a role as the sailors themselves.
