Somewhere in the marina at Olympic Marine, just south of Athens in the shadow of Cape Sounio, a 9.12-metre Dehler 30 sits quietly among a fleet of much larger machines. Maxis, JPKs, Pogo 50s, ocean racers from 21 nations. At the short end of the dock, flying both the Greek and New Zealand flags, is Aether.
The boat belongs to Evi Delidou, a Greek architect and competitive sailor who has started every edition of the Aegean 600 since the race began. Her co-skipper for this edition is Andrew Hall, New Zealand sailmaker, sail designer, and founder of SailIQ Ltd. He is the only Kiwi in the race. They are, by every measure, the smallest team in the biggest challenge most people in this fleet have ever attempted.
The non-stop race starts Sunday, 5 July, from Cape Sounio at 2pm Greek local time.
The Aegean 600
The Aegean 600 is organised by the Hellenic Offshore Racing Club (HORC) and is now, in just its sixth year, firmly established among the elite 600-mile offshore races in the world. The course covers 605 nautical miles through the Greek island archipelago, starting and finishing at the ancient Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounio.
From the start line, the fleet heads southwest to Milos, the island home of the Venus de Milo, before driving down through the caldera gate at Santorini, the still-active volcanic island whose whitewashed walls rise from black rock above the racetrack. From there, the course pushes south to Kassos and Karpathos, then east to Rhodes, before winding back north through Kos, Kalymnos, the small islands of Pharmakonisi and Agathonisi, on through the Icarian Sea to Patmos, then to Mykonos and Delos, past Giaros and Kea, and finally back to the finish at Sounio. Over 25 turns. Over 600 miles. Non-stop.
It was a blank slate in 2021, when 37 teams set off from Sounio for the inaugural edition, and Carlo Alessandro Puri Negri’s Italian monohull Farr 70 Atalanta II crossed the line in just under three days, setting the first course record. The race manager from that winning boat called it one of the most beautiful tracks he had ever done in his life, and that sentiment has been echoed by fleet after fleet since.
The 2022 edition saw multihulls join the race. Gregor Stimpfl’s mono Scuderia 65 Hägar V took overall honours on corrected time, beating the German boat Rafale by just 15 minutes after over two and a half days of racing, despite Rafale setting a new monohull elapsed record of 63 hours and 2 minutes. By 2023, with 45 boats and nearly 500 sailors from 16 countries, the monohull record was obliterated when Chris Sherlock’s Farr 100 custom Leopard 3 from Monaco crossed the line in 1 day, 21 hours, 5 minutes, and 25 seconds. That monohull record still stands. The 2024 fleet reached 69 entries from 24 countries. That year, Erik Maris’ Mod 70 Zoulou finished the race in under 37 and a half hours setting the multi-hull record.
This year, for the sixth edition, 74 monohull and multihull teams from 21 nations are assembled at Olympic Marine, the largest fleet in the race’s history.
The race has, as its organisers quietly predicted, the makings of a legend.
The forecast for the start day looks promising. The Meltemi, the Aegean’s defining seasonal wind, is predicted to fill in to its customary 20-plus knots for Sunday and Monday, which should make for a fast and spectacular send-off from the cliffs at Sounio.
The boat and the skipper
Aether (GRE016) is a Dehler 30 One Design (OD), designed by Judel/Vrolijk, 9.12 metres on the waterline with a 2.17-metre fin keel, twin rudders and tiller steering. She weighs under 3,000 kilograms. Optimum 4, another Dehler 30 OD lines up in the 2026 fleet, but at 9.12 metres the type sits at the short end of a 74-boat entry list that stretches all the way to a Reichel/Pugh 90.
Her owner and skipper is Evi Delidou. Originally from Thessaloniki in northern Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, Evi moved to Athens a decade ago to pursue sailing. She is an architect by profession and, by record, one of the more tenacious shorthanded racers in the Mediterranean.
Evi came to sailing later than most top-level competitors, describing herself as a twelve-year sailor rather than someone who grew up on the water. Before sailing, she was a member of the Greek National Gymnastics Team, a background that translates surprisingly well to life on a small and physical offshore racing yacht. Before this campaign, she sailed Aether from Greece to Barcelona, a passage of some 1,800 miles, to compete in the Mixed Crew Double-Handed World Championship, then turned around and sailed it home.
She has started all five previous editions of the Aegean 600. In every edition she finished, Aether was the smallest boat in the fleet to cross the line, a distinction claimed four times. In the shorthanded division, she has stood on the podium in three editions, with two second places and one outright win. In 2023, when the Meltemi turned the fleet inside out, Aether was the only shorthanded team to complete the course, winning the double-handed category under both IRC and ORC. Her personal best time for the 605-mile circuit is 112 hours. Her target this year, racing alongside Andrew Hall, is to break the 100-hour mark.
“We want to go 100 hours,” she said in the days before the start. “So whatever that means, I don’t know, but we will try.”
The co-skippers
Andrew Hall and Evi Delidou did not know each other before 2024. They met as rivals at the Mixed Crew Double-Handed World Championship in Lorient, France, Andrew sailing for New Zealand and Evi for Greece. They got talking, and somewhere between Lorient and Athens, the idea of racing Aether together in the Aegean 600 moved from conversation to commitment.
Andrew brings a career built on understanding what makes boats fast. As a professional sail designer and the founder of SailIQ Ltd, he approaches offshore racing with a technical eye that complements Evi’s intimate knowledge of this course and this boat. Boating New Zealand readers will know him from the Round North Island Two-Handed Race, where he sailed as co-skipper aboard the Sun Fast 3300 Indis, a boat purpose-built for shorthanded sailing. More recently he was onboard Nick Roberts’ Dehler 41 Ākonga as navigator in the fully crewed 2026 Three Kings Offshore Yacht Race, a race that delivered its own share of offshore education: a roller furler failure just miles from the turning mark, a J1 on the deck at the worst possible moment, and a night of repairs in 30 knots that included patching a gennaker while it was still flying.
He arrived in Athens early, deliberately, to get ahead of the jet lag and give himself time to adjust to the heat. Athens in early July sits at 33 degrees Celsius, dry and relentless, and after flying in from a New Zealand winter, the difference is immediate.
“It’s like getting the hairdryer out as soon as you get out of the air conditioning,” Andrew said. “And that tends to, when you’re not used to it, suck it out of you.”
Preparation through the week before the start was methodical. Evi went up the mast for a thorough check. The pair have had days on the water together before the gun. On the navigation side, Andrew is running Expedition with PredictWind data feeds, though even the best models struggle with an archipelago this complex. Early routing software returned a figure of three days and sixteen hours for the course. Neither Andrew nor Evi believed a word of it.
Andrew also brought Starlink connectivity to the campaign. Full communications capability through a race of this length and complexity is now close to a necessity, and it also means the team can relay updates and images from the boat as the race unfolds.
The Aegean 600 course
The Aegean 600 is not simply a long ocean race. It is a navigation and seamanship test that happens to be 600 miles long, and the distinction is useful to note.
Over 25 waypoints thread through islands that each generate their own local wind. Conditions shift every two or three hours. The Meltemi accelerates through gaps between islands, meaning a boat sailing in apparent calm in the lee of a headland can find itself in 40 knots within minutes of clearing it. The reverse is equally true: strong breeze disappears behind a large island and boats slow to a crawl in the flat water of its shadow. Sailors call these patches parking lots, and the Aegean 600 course has plenty of them.
Rhodes in particular creates a significant wind shadow in the southern section. The island is large and high, and the lee it throws extends well into the race track. Navigating that stretch efficiently, especially two-up, requires careful sail management at exactly the point in the race when fatigue is already biting.
The course runs roughly in three phases. The first third, south from Sounio past Santorini toward the southern islands, is predominantly downwind in strong Meltemi and can be fast and exhilarating. The middle section, threading through the islands near Rhodes and along the Turkish coast, is where the parking lots cluster and races are decided. The final third, back north and west toward Sounio, can deliver another run of Meltemi or can go light and tricky, depending on the system.
Past editions have shown both extremes. In 2023, record-breaking speeds under a powerful Meltemi. In 2025, light and difficult conditions stretched the winning time out past four and a half days. Andrew put it plainly: “It’s gonna be challenging.”
There is also the question of traffic. Tankers working close to the Turkish coast and day-charter boats near the island ports require steady vigilance through every watch. The good news is the racing fleet largely has the Aegean to itself at this time of year. The Meltemi keeps most cruising yachts in harbour. As Evi observed with some affection, only the crazy ones are out there.
Two people, 600 miles
Shorthanded offshore racing has a long tradition in New Zealand. The Doyle Sails Round North Island Two-Handed Race, run by the Shorthanded Sailing Association of New Zealand over 1,200-plus nautical miles, sits at the top of the local calendar. Below it a healthy circuit of qualifying races feeds the pipeline, among them the Cavalli Islands Race, a 275-nautical-mile offshore run north from Auckland and back which, like much of the New Zealand offshore calendar, caters for both fully crewed and shorthanded fleets. The discipline builds a particular kind of sailor: self-reliant, conservative with energy, practiced at solving problems alone in the dark.
Those qualities will be tested on Aether. With the course changing character every two or three hours, a rigid watch system is largely theoretical.
“It’s an ocean race, but I think it has quite a bit of brutality to it because there is something happening every couple of hours,” Andrew said. “Because you change islands every two or three hours, the local wind is different, and it’s not something that will keep going for a lot of miles.”
Sail changes are the measure of that brutality. In past editions, Aether has logged around 25 changes over the full course. Each one demands time and physical effort from both co-skippers. At the back end of a five-day race, that adds up. The strategy, as Evi described it, is to be deliberate: think twice before each change, weigh the gain against the cost, and above all, keep both of them in a state to keep sailing.
“We have to be really thoughtful of the moves we are going to make, especially at night,” she said. “To keep hydrated, to remember to eat, and to try to get some sleep.”
The autopilot handles the steering in moderate conditions, but in strong downwind sailing, where the boat is least forgiving, hand steering becomes necessary and quickly drains both co-skippers. Across five days and 600 miles, the cumulative effect is the real opponent.
Evi knows this better than most. “Every time I go to the start line, I’m thinking, what am I doing here?” she said. “And after I see the finish line, I say, ah, that’s why I was here.”
She is already thinking about the finish, about passing beneath the columns of the Temple of Poseidon after four or more days at sea. For someone who has done this five times before, it still moves her.
New Zealand’s flag in the Aegean
Andrew Hall is the only New Zealander in the 2026 Aegean 600. Aether races under the Greek flag, which makes sense given the boat, its owner, and its club affiliation. But the New Zealand flag flies at the top of the mast, and both names appear on the hull alongside their respective national flags. Two countries, one boat.
For Evi, the choice of co-skipper was not taken lightly. The people around her wanted to know who she was sailing with before they would clear her to go. When they heard the name, the conversation was short.
“Here in Greece, when I told them that I’m going to race double with Andrew from New Zealand, everybody told me: you found one of the greatest sailors around the world,” Evi said. “We believe here that New Zealand has the best sailors.”
For Andrew, turning up at a race like this, at a start line on the other side of the world, is part of what keeps the New Zealand shorthanded tradition alive. It requires Kiwis to enter, to show up, and to race hard in fleets that are increasingly competitive and increasingly international.
He is the only one here. That is, in itself, a statement.
“When it all goes down,” he said, “it’s just absolutely going to be great.”
