Thirty-five years after 16 boats started the first ever Two Handed Round Britain and Ireland Race, Sunday, June 7 will see 46 entrants start from Plymouth embarking on the 1865-mile race which takes place every four years.

By tomorrow, the whole fleet, ranging in size from the lightweight, twice winning 30-footer Modi Khola, to a pair Open 60 footers and Dark Swan, a #2m Swan 60, should have assembled at Queen Anne's Battery Marina for a week of scrutineering.

Run by the Royal Western Yacht Club of England and devised by Blondie Hasler, the wartime Cockleshell Hero who also dreamt up the Singlehanded Transatlantic Race, the race clings to a Corinthian spirit and a pioneering ethos which has long since sunk below the horizons of modern commercialised, media-friendly offshore yacht racing.

In times when stopovers for a major race fleet are determined by the particular haven's ability to pay a fee to the race owners, or the hinterland's relevance to the marketing strategy of the race sponsors, this contest has its course divided into approxim-ately equal bite-sized chunks, governed principally by the need to pass ''all islands and off-lying rocks to starboard''.

The 230-mile passage to Cork from Plymouth is just a taster for the ensuing 440-mile dash to Castlebay on Barra then 420 miles, leaving St Kilda and the Flannan Isles to starboard, into Lerwick. After Shetland the longest leg is the 470 miles south to Lowestoft. By the time the final 305 mile sprint back to Plymouth arrives the race is often won or lost.

In that it is a truly open round Britain race with no handicaps to be exploited, it is unique. The first boat to finish wins. Determined only by the length overall of the craft, there are five basic divisions increasing in five-foot intervals from 30 to 50-oot and one class for 50 to 60-footers.

Also contrary to the trends to create a public and media spectacle as a race restarts after each port, each Round Britain yacht must spend 48 hours in port after crossing the finish line before restarting. While this bows to the logic of preventing the fastest 60-footers having to endure days docked awaiting the slowest to catch up, it does make for some lonely arrivals and departures.

''I can remember in 1982 feeling like we were in a different race when Chay Blyth was reporting to be finishing in Plymouth, just as we were in Lowestoft,'' recalls Largs based Paul Jeffes who has competed in the race three times.

Over the years most of British sailing's household names have raced - Blyth, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Clare Frances, Sir Peter Blake - and the leading edge of the competition has fluctuated with the economy. At its peak in 1982 there were 85 boats competing from 12 different countries.

This year's race has seen a slight swelling in the numbers of smaller boats entered, and Class 5, with 20 entries alone, will be be the toughest.

At the other end of the scale, in Class 1, two globe-girdling Open 60 monuhulls - specifically designed to be easily sailed single-handed - are tipped to slug it out around the coast.

On the Open 60 Musto Performance Partners, Nigel Musto, a newcomer to this style of long distance short-handed racing, has paired up with Andy Hindley who has two circumnavigations of the globe to his credit - skippering Save the Children into third place in the BT Global Challenge. In the other corner, Victoria Group, co-skippered by race regular and marina owner Mark Gatehouse and Adam Littlejohn.

For Nigel Musto, whose longest offshore races to date have been three 650 mile Fastnet Races, just as for many other participants, the attraction of the race is to pack as much genuinely testing racing into a comparatively short space of time: ''Like many I've got a family at home and a business to run and so I can't just go and do an ''Around Alone'' race or the likes. This will be hard and competitive but it will take a month all in,'' he explains.

His co-skipper Hindley is using the race to maintain his profile as he seeks #130,000 sponsorship to fund his entry on an Open 50, the former Aqua Quorum, into the Around Alone race.

''As well it's just a good chance to get out on the race course and do some racing,'' concludes Hindley.

The Open 60s should take around 12-14 days of racing.

The quickest multihulls this time should be the 43 foot trimaran Spirit of England co-skippered by owner Peter Clutterbuck and Brian Thompson.

Embarking on a hoped for career as a professional sailor, to follow in the wake of Pete Goss, Mike Golding and before them Blyth and Knox-Johnston, Alex Bennett, 22, and Dave Barden, 18, are the youngest crew competing (the lower limit is 21 for skipper and 18 for co-skipper) and have already sailed almost twice the length of the race since last summer - sailing to France and Spain in preparation.

Their water ballasted Modi Kohla was bought by them for its record, having won the race twice, and their whole campaign has cost them #40,000 including the purchase of the boat and a new set of high-tech sails and a carbon-fibre bowsprit.

Their stiffest competition may be the new Greg Young-designed Bull 9000.

Meanwhile, the pool of competitive Scottish sailors prepared to do the Round Britain at a serious level seems to have run dry.

This year there appear to be no home-based Scots competing.

''Perhaps there's a belief that it's beyond the capability of most people, when in fact it's not, and until you've tried it you won't know,'' suggests renowned Scottish short-handed, offshore sailor Jon Fitzgerald.