The Imperial Icicle 2025 Team Racing at Queen Mary Sailing Club

Last weekend saw Imperial College Sailing Club host its annual team racing competition: the Imperial Icicle at Queen Mary Reservoir.

With twenty different teams from across the country, including two teams from Dublin, filling Travelodge's, Airbnb's and friend's floors on the Friday night, it was set to be the largest competition in the club's history. Our members had spent the last two weeks repairing fibreglass, cleaning our flights' hulls and moving UCL and Brunel Sailing Clubs' boats from their reservoirs to ours. Twenty-four boats and innumerable spare parts were assembled for a weekend of intense racing!

The Imperial Icicle 2025 - photo © Nigel Vick

Saturday saw us get through one hundred races with a start almost every 3 minutes thanks in large part to our alumni, Charlie Lidbury's heroic efforts in streamlining the race scheduling process with the development of imperialicicle.com a web app he hopes will be used at many more university team racing events in the future. Competitors would often hear a drone buzzing overhead collecting valuable race footage and it was a common sight to see competitors crowded around in the club cafeteria reliving their winning conversions. The afternoon brought sunshine and music to the pontoon with ABBAs greatest hits putting teams in the racing mindset.

The forecast for Sunday predicted wind squalls and upon arrival at the clubhouse the red "advanced conditions" flag was flying. Nonetheless, boats were quickly launched and despite the tough weather, teams quickly made their way through another forty races of the round robin. Capsizes and breakages plagued the day with our two bosuns constantly running through the boat park with everything from rudders to sails and masts. The sporting conditions did nothing to diminish morale and it was lovely to see so many smiles on and off the water (even post-capsize!).

The Imperial Icicle 2025 - photo © Nigel Vick

We moved swiftly through to semis as the wind continued to build and breakages forced us to retire twelve boats. Unfortunately, we only got through four races before the wind took its toll and a leaking boat and snapped forestay brought an abrupt end to the day. The winning teams were determined from the results of the round robin discarding the results of semis.

Trinity College Dublin won the event doing an impressive job of drinking their prizes before their flight back to Ireland. Sevenoaks Pirate Hawks and University College Dublin filled out the top three. The overwhelming response from participants was that it was an incredibly well organised event with all our volunteers doing Imperial proud.

Trinity College Dublin win the Imperial Icicle 2025 - photo © Nigel Vick

Like all university competitions, none of this could have been organised without the tireless work of our entire club and we benefitted from the thriving community of sailors across London with assistance from UCL, Brunel, the London Castaways and Queen Mary Sailing Club. We are also ever grateful to the umpires who give up their time every weekend to make sure the ever-competitive team racers do their spins and in this case Nigel Vick who also managed to snap some incredible photos of the event.

As the popularity of university sailing continues to grow, events like this need a streamlined system for scheduling and results. This weekend we were able to do away with the crumpled schedules and complex results spreadsheets of years gone by with Charlie's new yet-to-be-named system available at imperialicicle.com. At the moment he is offering this service for free as he irons out the wrinkles so if you're running an event soon make the most of it and reach out to him at !

The results of the Icicle are available below and if you're interested in participating next year contact us at !

Overall Results: