On my side the regex code is twice as slow as a for loop (2526 ms vs 1149 ms).

Thanks better late than never on the reply :)

I do a foreach loop for 1_000_000 repetitions of the "yacht is the sea with a man in the sky" line discussed above, and compare it to regex.
Results:
1280 ms - for loop
1137 ms - regex
the for loop loses an average of 100 ms. LINQ is slower - 1809 ms

Summary: regex is the fastest and most obvious - really best practice)))