A record sized armada of 138 solo skippers set to race in six different classes should be blessed with brisk but very manageable wind and sea conditions when the 12th Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe starts Wednesday at 1415hrs off Saint Malo. After waiting for the start rescheduled from Sunday lunchtime due to a big storm which blew through Monday, the reward seems set to be westerly winds of between 13 and 15 knots.

From the start line to the Cape Fréhel gate it will be almost dead upwind. With the massive fleet starting off the same line, maximum concentration and anticipation will be required. After the gate the objective is to get out of the Channel as efficiently and safely as possible, avoiding the no-go areas such as a large wind farm to the southwest of the main westward course. As they progress toward the tip of Brittany the seas will build to 3 to 4.5 meters. By the end of Wednesday evening the fastest Ultims should already be into the Atlantic in a lifting breeze.

Thereafter the strategic choices are fairly open. The first decision is whether to go south or north of the Ushant traffic separation scheme. As usual the option to head west and north will encounter the toughest conditions through a front set to lie between the Azores and Ireland. The conservative option is going south across the Bay of Biscay, increasingly for the fast foiling boats like the newer IMOCAs and the Multi 50s it is the optimum sea state rather than wind strength which will affect the routing.

Briton Will Harris, weather specialist and normally co-skipper of Boris Herrmann’s Malizia Seaexplorer, explains their team’s view of the first few days: “It will be much more reasonable. The start will be quite chaotic and then there are four knots of current (against) at Fréhel, so that will be tricky. It will be full on. Everyone will need to be extra careful here. Then along the Brittany coast if you can start cleanly then there will be an advantage to get away. The first front will be approached on Thursday evening. Around 200 miles offshore it stops and so rather than it pounding on in, it is stopped by a high pressure over Europe. And then front behind catches up. Then there is a decision where you try and push through it or how much do you skirt around it and get flatter sea states. And so, remember that now we only need 15kts of wind and flatter water and we will be going quicker than if you are in 35kts of wind and 3m waves. After that you have to fight through a messy Azores High which is especially messy on the east side. There is a little low developing there too. And that will all change. So, the basic premise is to get around Ushant pointing west, then re-do your weather strategy there, take a breath and decide. And that could be the big decision that decides the whole race, do you push west, go a bit further south, all depending on what your objectives are. There are three or four features to get through between Ushant and the Azores.”

IMOCA favorite Charlie Dalin (APIVIA) agrees that the final strategy will need to be decided on the race course rather than before leaving the dock: “There are huge differences in the weather models. It looks highly likely we’ll get at least thirty knots of wind. We know that the trade winds are well established with decent conditions, but for the moment, I don’t know which way I’ll go to get there. I hope the models will become clearer, as otherwise we’re going to have to adapt to the weather once out there and that means spending more time at the nav station. I prefer it when things are clear early on.”

Sam Goodchild, skipper of Leyton, one of the favorites in the Ocean Fifty class concurs, saying: “Going through this front will be a big decider straight off. Our type of boat it is not just like you will go faster in the north, there is a big potential to go faster in the south, it is not just about not being boat breaking. But, otherwise, it still looks like a typical Route du Rhum, we will go upwind there will be big winds and big waves. Just because we avoided the ex-hurricane does not mean it will all be cool and easy. The strategy initially is just about getting through the first bit of bad weather with the boat in one piece, everyone has to decide where you set the limit – how far north do you go, how far south do you go – the same question is there. The full southern route is not open, there is a southerly route which is a little less boat breaking. It is evolving all the time.”

It’s a relatively straightforward sequence for the Ultim 32/23 even though the three-meter swell forecast off Ushant on Wednesday evening and a southwesterly wind will be a point of sail that is not perfect for these giant boats. They should be able to keep up speeds of 25 to 30 knots, allowing them to reach the front by midday on Thursday. Four years ago, some of these trimarans were too fragile to withstand a battering, but the skippers agree that progress had been made. Upwind in the uncomfortable conditions does play to one of the strengths of favorite Maxi Edmond de Rothschild which has developed a fast, relatively comfortable and controllable upwind mode.

Once they have dealt with this front that the Ultim multihulls will be able to move further south and look forward to the trade winds. The corridor to reach the edge of the Azores high is however quite narrow. If all goes well, the first boats should pick up the trade winds by Saturday evening.

There will be two fronts rather than one for the Ocean Fiftys. It would appear that the skippers will try to move further south of the theoretical route once they reach the tip of Brittany around midnight on Wednesday, forcing them to tack through the Bay of Biscay. “It’s not going to be easy to find any opportunities,” said Armel Tripon after this morning’s briefing, “but there are still possibilities. Once past Brittany, there will be a choice to make between two options.”

Wednesday’s start can be watched on all the official social media for the twelfth Route du Rhum – Destination Guadeloupe, from 1325hrs CET until 1600hrs. There will be a live English feed of the start on the website and on the social networks: Facebook (live broadcast of the start): https://www.facebook.com/routedurhum.officiel Twitter (live broadcast of the start): https://twitter.com/RouteDuRhum Live tweets with photos Instagram (Live stories): https://www.instagram.com/route_du_rhum/ YouTube (live broadcast of the start ): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0h7XNXNzA8D7RlobIRa-3A and TV: There will be direct coverage of the start from 1325hrs CET until 1600hrs in more than 120 countries around the world.

The post Delayed Route Du Rhum Start Sets Up Fast Edition appeared first on Sailing World.

New boats in the IMOCA class are coming out of the sheds thick and fast on the Atlantic coast of France, many of them at the old German World War II U-boat base at Lorient in Brittany. These days, in the fleet made famous by the solo nonstop Vendée Globe round-the-world race, there’s a lot of pizzazz on these occasions. Boats no longer appear and then get quietly lowered into the water. In a class in which millions of euros are being spent on new designs, promotions and messaging, first launches are now previewed by the release of sophisticated video treatments, and the reveals take place with theatrical precision.

It is an astonishing fact in a world teetering on the edge of recession that no less than 14 new IMOCA yachts are hitting the water in the summer of 2022 and into the early months of next year as the arms race in solo offshore sailing gets underway in the buildup to the next Vendée Globe starting in November 2024.

The sorts of ­commercial partners that are paying for these vessels and their skippers range from French banks to alcohol retailers, meat-products ­suppliers, chocolate manufacturers, insurance companies and companies organizing behind charitable causes. International sponsors include software businesses, watchmakers, hotel chains and global-­logistics ­multinationals. Unlike the America’s Cup, there’s not a ­billionaire in sight.

Some of these projects are being done on the cheap, using existing designs, hull molds and other shortcuts. But the top-end packages are now consuming initial budgets in excess of 7 million euros, with average annual operating costs coming in at more than 3 million euros. It’s not for nothing that many observers believe we may now be at “peak IMOCA.”

The class is chock full of interesting personalities, and not all of them are French, in line with the IMOCA policy of trying to broaden its appeal internationally. If you look at the skippers page on the class website, you will see that 19 of the 47 sailors listed are not ­flying the red, white and blue.

While many of the top performers are based on home soil—stars like Charlie Dalin (Apivia), Jérémie Beyou (Charal 2), Kevin Escoffier (PRB) and Thomas Ruyant (LinkedOut)—the growing echelon of foreign skippers includes some serious customers, like Germany’s Boris Herrmann, Britain’s veteran soloist Samantha Davies and the American yachtsman Charlie Enright.

The presence of the latter, the skipper of 11th Hour Racing based out of Newport, Rhode Island, reminds us that IMOCA is expanding on two fronts. Forty sailors will take on the Vendée Globe and many of the solo and doublehanded races in the annual IMOCA Globe Series that lead up to it. But there are up to six boats, 11th Hour Racing among them, that will compete for the first time in the Ocean Race starting next January.

Again, this diversification into fully crewed racing has been led by the class organizers who believe the growing family of commercial partners backing IMOCA sailors will come to see the Ocean Race as a viable option alongside the Vendée Globe in each four-year cycle. The word on the dockside in Lorient is that the class will have taken over the Ocean Race entirely by the next competition by one edition.

So, what’s the secret of all this expansion and growth? One observation would be that IMOCA is prospering at the head of an entire supporting ecosystem of mainly French shorthanded offshore racing. It starts with the Solitaire du Figaro and Mini classes and continues with Class 40s; taken together, they provide a thriving breeding ground for up-and-coming young IMOCA skippers.

Antoine Mermod, the IMOCA class president, says shorthanded offshore sailing is doing well in any case and cites the big growth in doublehanded offshore racing in Europe as evidence for that. But he says IMOCA is also surfing a wave that started during lockdown, when the class hit a sweet spot. Just as the world stopped with the COVID-19 epidemic, its boats were getting ready to take on the Vendée Globe, and they had a captive audience, with up to 20 million people in France alone following the 2020-21 race from home.

“We managed to tell a very nice story, and we saw more people than ever before following the race, so our partners were very happy, and now they are continuing their involvement, and more are arriving to make the class even stronger,” Mermod says. He believes the return on investment for sponsors underwriting IMOCA projects is currently very attractive, and the class is benefitting from its growing international reach.

Top-end packages are now consuming initial budgets in excess of 7 million euros, with average annual operating costs coming in at more than 3 million euros. It’s not for nothing that many observers believe we may now be at “peak IMOCA.”

“We have worked on three different aspects of our communications,” he explains. “One for the public and fans who follow the race. Second is our hospitality program, where we organize events in which people can sail on our boats and live the reality of the sport. And the last aspect is about values. I think our values—sustainability, resilience and ­teamworking—are very appealing in the corporate world of today and for people generally.”

Mermod is delighted to see America-based partners coming into the class—like 11th Hour and the California company Medallia, which backs the British sailor Pip Hare—but he would like to see more. “Within the next two years, we will be at Newport for the stopover of the Ocean Race and then at New York for the prologue of the Vendée Globe in 2024,” he says. “The US is very important to us as we look forward.”

IMOCAs are governed by a class rule that standardizes some elements, like masts and keels, to keep costs down while allowing development in other areas, like hull shapes and foils. In this latest generation of boats, the emphasis has been on trying to improve downwind performance in big weather, a critical aspect of Vendée Globe racing on the Southern Ocean.

“They have all concentrated on the bows, with various solutions to try to stop the boats ploughing into the back of the wave in front,” explains former LinkedOut team manager Marcus Hutchinson. “When they do that, the old ones can decelerate from 30 knots to 12 to 15 knots in a few seconds, requiring the sailors to retrim and relaunch the thing every time.”

The scow bow favored by French naval architect Sam Manuard, designer of Jérémie Beyou’s Charal 2 and Bureau Vallée (the former L’Occitane En Provence skippered by Louis Burton) is one solution. “The ones with scow bows, or missing bows, are trying to organize it so that the bow knuckle and everything below half-height of the bow isn’t held back by ploughing into the next wave and slowing the boat down,” Hutchinson adds.

The bottom line is that the top speeds of these wild machines, which can hit 35 knots, are not going to change, but average speeds should be significantly higher. The upshot being that, all other things being equal, including the weather and each boat’s reliability, the 74-day record for the Vendée Globe set by Banque Populaire in 2017 should be ­broken next time round.

The newest boats also ­continue the trend of trying to protect the sailors, often incorporating enclosed cockpits to help them exist on super-light and super-powerful platforms that become violent, noisy and wet in full-on weather offshore.

The class is always in flux as new boats come in and the older ones get handed down, producing races within races and different divisions. But it has never been more congested at the top end, with the most aggressive and competitive sailors set to fight it out for supremacy over the next couple of years.

The 38-year-old Frenchman Charlie Dalin, skipper of Apivia, is currently top dog after taking line honors in the last Vendée Globe and winning a series of shorter offshore races, where he showed his consummate skill as both a soloist and fleet racer. But the battle to get ahead of him is going to be fascinating. Dalin will have a new Guillaume Verdier-designed boat of his own to bring up to speed next year, but so will his main rivals—among them Beyou and Kevin Escoffier, a hugely experienced, technically minded offshore racer. Also in the mix will be the winner of the last Vendée Globe on corrected time, Yannick Bestaven, on a new Maître Coq.

But there will be plenty of others to keep an eye on, not least Frenchman Maxime Sorel, a former winner in Class 40s, who has a stunning-looking new V and B-Monbana-Mayenne, and Sam Davies in her new Initiatives-Coeur, another Manuard design.

The coming big race is the solo Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe from St. Malo to the Caribbean, starting in early November. This will see many of the latest boats make their debut on the transatlantic course. It’s going to be an interesting watch as the newest foilers are tested in the heat of battle for the first time. Past experience suggests some of them will complete the course, but some may well encounter early teething troubles as they begin their long march to the Vendée Globe starting line.

The post The New-Generation IMOCA 60s appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s like Russian roulette for the Transat Jacques Vabre fleet as all the competitors are stuck in a ridge of high pressure from Madeira to Dunkirk. As most head south across the Bay of Biscay the race is on to be the first crew to find an easterly and accelerate away first. Here’s a roundup of the night’s action from each of the fleets.

Ultime: time for a laugh

For the past thirty hours the five giants of the seas have been struggling to make headway in very light conditions that have tested the sailor’s patience. The end should come in a few hours with an easterly wind that will help them escape towards the Spanish coast. In the meantime, some are choosing to enjoy the time rather than suffer the wait.

For Thomas Coville it’s all about attitude “If you live in the moment, there are many beautiful things to see. When there’s no wind like this, you either go crazy or you try to have a sense of humour.” We caught up with the skipper of Sodebo Ultim 3 early this morning. “It seems that the wind has disappeared from the planet. We’re trying to catch the slightest breeze. We spend hours and hours scanning the water. The slightest breeze is so precious that we do everything to get it. When the boat is making 5-6 knots, it’s a thrill for everyone”

Ocean Fifty: hunting in the Bay of Biscay

The ridge of high pressure was a chance for the Ocean Fifty fleet to catch the Ultimes – David has caught Goliath. Koesio continues to hold a slight advantage at the head of the fleet, just 15 miles ahead of Leyton co-skippered by Sam Goodchild.

The British sailor told us, “The fleet is quite spread now – 150 miles east to west – which means it can go either way fairly quickly. But what makes us feel good is we are going at five knots which is more than we have done for a while. We are finally getting some sleep again. The light winds may not be good for racing and sailing but they are good for sleep.”

The Ocean Fiftys still have about 200 miles to sail to Cape Finisterre on the northwest corner of Spain where they hope to find fresher breeze.

Imoca: Leader reeled in

Just forty miles behind the multihulls, the first Imoca boats are facing the same lack of wind. Apivia continues to lead but mile after mile the gap is closing. While Charlie Dalin and Paul Meilhat held a comfortable 35-mile lead last night, very light winds have allowed the American crew, 11th Hour Racing Team – Mālama, to catch up. This morning, only 4 miles separate the two 60 footers. The light conditions mean a lot of more manoeuvres, as Charlie Enright said this morning, “Anyone can catch up with anyone”. Fortunately, they should be out of the ridge by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, everyone is trying to find the best possible options and take advantage of the breeze and currents.

Class40: Close contact sport

The 40-footers continue to battle it out as close to the Breton coast as possible. With so little wind, you have to play the currents along the coast to make headway. No boat is breaking away from the fleet at the moment and the rankings are constantly changing. The crews are immersed in the weather data to find the best way of escape. La Manche #EvidenceNautique tried a northerly option last night, Nicolas Jossier, explains their decision, “We wondered about the passage of Ushant where the data told us there was more wind, more current, but it wasn’t as significant as we expected. So we had to go back on that decision and turn around.” This proved costly with the pair losing ground on their rivals. “We didn’t get much sleep with all the maneuvers and contact with the other boats. We’re going to wait until we get out of the tip of Brittany where we’ll be able to get into a different rhythm. A new part of the race is about to begin!”

RANKINGS NOVEMBER 09 at 11:00am

CLASS40

1. La Manche #EvidenceNautique – Distance to destination 4296,17

2. Volvo – Distance to destination 4296,94

3. Lamotte Module Création – Distance to destination 4297,42

OCEAN FIFTY

1. Koesio – Distance to destination 5345,31

2. Solidaires En Peloton – Distance to destination 5363,76

3. Primonial – Distance to destination 5364,3

IMOCA

1. Charal – Distance to destination 5410,52

2. Apivia – Distance to destination 5410,75

3. LinkedOut – Distance to destination 5411,44

ULTMES

1. SVR – Lazartigue – Distance to destination 7479,36

2. Maxi Edmond de Rothschild – Distance to destination 7480,96

3. Sodebo Ultim 3 – Distance to destination 7489,62

The post Patience and Nerves Mark Early Days of Transat appeared first on Sailing World.

I’m training in San Francisco in the 49erFX with my new teammate, Lucy Wilmot, when the phone rings. On the other end is Charlie Enright. Yeah, that Charlie Enright, and as if asking to pass the salt at the dinner table, he starts the conversation by casually asking me if I have any interest in coming to tryout with the 11th Hour Racing Team on their IMOCA 60, the one they’re using to train for the Ocean Race, which starts in 2022. My heart likely skipped a beat. Why me? An Olympic dinghy hopeful from Fort Lauderdale, someone who’s never been at sea past sunset.

Well, of course, I’m interested, I tell him. Tell me more.

Three weeks later, I board a flight to Newport, Rhode Island, excited to take on an opportunity of a lifetime.

Having never slept overnight on a boat, and knowing close to nothing about offshore racing, I did my research: pouring through videos and articles about the IMOCA 60. But what I read online does not do justice to the boat. When I step over the lifelines and onto the black-and-white honeycomb deck for the first time, I feel like I’m stepping onto a spacecraft. It must look like a ghost ship as foils across the ocean in the dead of night.

The cockpit is tiny and lines spill into the pit like a waterfall. Below is crammed with gear, sails, food, equipment and Fat Boy beanbags. It’s meant for a coed crew of four, plus an onboard reporter, to race around the world, with a few stops along the way.

After two days of getting to know the team and the boat’s systems, we set out for an overnight training session. With no clue what to bring, and having a dinghy sailor mentality, I’ve packed my wetsuit. When I confide in one of the crew, Kyle Langford, on my gear selection, he jokingly replies that I don’t need a wetsuit and hints that I should probably keep it to myself that I brought one. He grabs me a proper offshore kit from a plastic tub, and before I can find my bearings, we are flying downwind into the night.

The crew shifts are four hours on and four hours off for 48 hours. To my surprise, the shifts are not so bad. It reminds me of the workouts I’ve done during my Olympic campaign where the work time and rest time are equivalent, always allowing adequate recovery time. When I’m on watch, I try my best to soak in everything, learn, and work efficiently. I also take time to sleep and eat when I’m off. Each crew member will cycle through this schedule like clockwork to constantly keep the boat ripping along on its foils.

My shift is 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., and when I wake up, I’m sprawled out over the bean bag. I put on my foul weather gear, and make myself instant coffee in the galley. Sticking my head out into the cockpit, I feel like a deer in the headlights. The sky is immaculate with stars shining clearer to my naked eye. I’ve never seen anything like it. The moon is beaming, the water kissing the hull, the wind rushing across our sails. There’s not another boat, or a hint of land, in sight.

Up until this point, our practice and my experience is glamour. Everything seems too good to be true. Just too perfect. It’s around 1 a.m. and Charlie and I are on watch. Charlie climbs down into the galley to put on a few more layers, leaving me at the tiller. Trying to find my mug for a few more sips of coffee, I put the boat on autopilot for a brief moment while I reach into a sheet pocket in the cockpit. When I grab the tiller again and disengage the autopilot, the tiller feels light. I look out the window above me and up at the sail. Sure enough, the boat is in irons. Totally embarrassed, I try sculling the rudder to one side, as if it were a dinghy, and to try to get the boat back onto a close-hauled course.

My efforts fail.

“Uh…Charlie…”

The two of us try to the boat out of irons, but even we can’t do it alone. Charlie has to wake-up the rest of the crew. I am mortified. Here I am, a decent sailor, and I drive the IMOCA 60 into irons in the middle of the night. After the incident, I learn the autopilot can get “lost” when the hull gets a little too flat because it gauges its steering angle off the load in the keel. When the load goes light, the boat can spin up into irons. Knowing this, of course, makes me feel a bit better, but I still can’t remember the last time I was stuck in irons. All I could think was “tiller towards trouble.”

Over the next two weeks, we continue offshore training sessions and a few day sailing sessions. I am well past my comfort zone now and amazed at all the things I didn’t know about the sport. Every day, I’m eager to be more involved on the boat. I want to put my hands on everything so I could learn faster and help the team where I can. Often, I find my hands gripping the grinding pedestal because I know—physically—I can push hard and I’m unwilling to quit.

Our “off days” consists primarily of team meetings. At one, ideas bounce back and forth between the sailors and the engineers about hull manufacturing and foil shape. The language is so foreign to me, and not just because of all the different accents in the room. But sitting in on these meetings, I’m eager to understand foil designs and why one shape would outplay another. Each night, I type up pages of notes to absorb the material and follow up with questions. Surrounded by such experience and talent, I’d be crazy to waste a second of schooling. Sure enough, my learning curve accelerates upward at a rapid rate.

The experience and the exposure to offshore sailing opens my eyes to the greater areas of sailboat racing that I have been missing. Sailing the Laser Radial for 11 years of my life, I have forgotten what it feels like to reach higher levels of comprehension in the sport. I’m reminded that the feeling is exhilarating, the same rush that made me fall in love with sailing.

Thank you for the call Charlie. Sign me up.

Ed.’s Note: US Sailing Team member Erika Reineke recently launched an 49erFX campaign with skipper Lucy Wilmot; follow their campaign at www.wilmotreinekefx.com and on their social channels.

The post Foiling Into a New Comfort Zone appeared first on Sailing World.

A defining portrayal of America’s greatest living bluewater adventurer can be found in a self-made video in which Rich Wilson — framed like a newscaster — braces for a storm south of Australia. He’d been at sea for 49 days in the Vendée Globe Race. One eye behind his oversize Poindexter-style glasses droops with exhaustion. Judging by the speed at which he unabashedly wolfs down his freeze-dried dinner on camera, he is either starving or vying to catch up to his 6,000-calorie-per-day minimum. It’s Christmas Eve, so he wishes happy holidays to more than half a million students in 50 different countries who are following his progress at sea — but you can scarcely hear him.

Wilson’s narration on this four-minute satellite-­transmitted footage is mostly drowned out by Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture booming from the ship’s stereo. At the climactic entrance of the horns, Wilson looks up from his bowl, stops eating and begins swaying his head in time to the music — lost in rapture, obviously happy to be alone at sea.

To understand his motivations for a lifetime of punishing voyages, his raw at-sea videos speak volumes. So do his logs: “We just got clobbered through the night, with 30 knots of wind, upwind, into the big building seas,” ­Wilson writes a month later, “and crashing and ­crashing and crashing.”

Employing the singlehanded sailor’s “we” for the boat and himself, his January 25, 2017, entry about the race continued: “We’re hard on the wind. You just have to be holding on at all times, with all four limbs.”

This was Wilson’s second Vendée, 28,000 miles around the blue planet, without resupply or outside support, and on a gray afternoon on February 21, 2017, 48 minutes into his 107th day into the race, the 66-year-old skipper finished off Les Sables d’Olonne. His finish position, 13th, the result of 27,480 miles at an average speed of 10.7 knots. His plain white-hulled boat, Great America IV, observers noted, was in fine shape, a testament to seamanship gleaned over thousands upon thousands of miles.

Wilson never felt handicapped as the oldest man in the world’s most grueling ocean race. He figured the other racers had to suffer just like him through gales, loneliness and repairs performed on the go.

Reflecting on the race, he remarks that his years aren’t a detriment: “The younger sailors have no better coping tools to withstand this sort of stress.” Objectively speaking, being older than one’s competitors and surviving more epics at sea should also confer an ­experiential edge to a shorthanded racer — but even if ­Wilson ­subscribes to such a theory, his modesty ­prevents him from admitting it.

There in the South Atlantic, he cinched the seat belt tight at the chart table before pressing the record button, in effort to not repeat past mistakes. In the beginning of the 2008 Vendée, a rogue wave caused him to go airborne, throwing him 6 feet across the cabin and against a grab bar, breaking his ribs. The injury made sail changes and winching an excruciating existence.

Once secured at the table, Wilson begins answering satellite-transmitted emails. Not just a sailor, Wilson sees being an educator an important part of his mission. One student wanted to know about wave height: “Up to 20 feet”; another student asked about the last time he’d seen land: “Only once while rounding Cape Horn.” He spends two hours a day answering questions, writing an essay, shooting videos or talking on the sat phone with a student — as if his hands weren’t already full preventing bodily injury, keeping the boat on course, and readjusting his temperamental autopilot.

SAILING – VENDEE GLOBE 2017 – MISCS ARRIVALS

Wilson’s girlfriend calls Great American IV “the Monster.” She was horrified by the radical canting keel, the noise belowdecks and the dizzying speed during a Massachusetts day sail. Wilson says the name has nothing to do with him or his politics. Despite the fact that thousands of French Vendée fans have nicknamed Rich Wilson the “brain” for his time at Harvard, MIT and as a Pentagon analyst, and do consider him a great American by virtue of having the sangfroid to compete alongside their own heroes.

Still, Wilson is virtually unknown, except in his Marblehead, Massachusetts, home waters.

He baptized his sleek machine the Great American— along with his three previous boats — after similarly named clipper ships. Pressing huge sheets of canvas into the sky, 19th-century behemoths like Great Republic, Flying Cloud and Young America set transoceanic speed records that Wilson and friends systematically crushed (still, with characteristic humility, he doesn’t mention beating any clipper-ship records on the video) while piloting his 60-foot trimarans Great American I and II in the 1990s.

The first Great American performed a “­double somersault,” he said, 400 miles west of Chile in 65-foot seas while trying to beat ­Flying Cloud‘s time from San Francisco to Boston. The only record Wilson mentions on camera is that after being submerged upside down, Great America remains the only ship in maritime history to right itself in an even bigger wave after the first somersault. Without his ­improbable tanker rescue in high seas, along with the Great American’s bombproof hull, he reckons he’d be dead.

Several days after his Vendée Globe clobbering in the South Atlantic, Wilson sat becalmed 900 miles east of Rio de Janeiro, frustrated and hammering Great American IV‘s deck anew—this time with his fists. A sensitive man, his eyes misty even during his newscasts at sea, Wilson wanted to somehow vent, but all he could do was continue thumping carbon fiber. Although he knew he couldn’t win the race, it bugged him that half of his competitors were hundreds of miles ahead, clocking 12 knots, and smelling the champagne while he spun 2-knot circles in the doldrums.

Wilson, a teetotaler at sea (who’ll drink on land only for certain celebrations), also abstained from cocoa, tea and coffee. Once in a while, he allowed himself a cup of soup. Otherwise, as a sparely built ectomorph, he had no choice but to snack continuously. His larder included 540 Fig Newtons, more freeze-dried food than any health-conscious AARP member should consider eating throughout their golden years (let alone in three months), and 96 boxes of raisins. Despite his ­6,000-calories-per-day regimen, he would still lose 10 pounds.

Wilson was in the race to stretch his “mind, body and spirit combined” (as he concludes in his book Race France to France), and even more important, to engage schoolchildren about the wonders of the sea. While he has won a few races — including the overall title in the 1980 Bermuda Race, in his father’s wooden ketch, beating out 159 other boats, and set more than a few transoceanic records — he’s not interested in foils (only six of the 2016 Vendée entrants used the high-speed daggerboards) or running at 30 knots. He’s a bluewater salt, more Joshua Slocum than Dennis Conner, sentimentally adapted to the albatross and moved by porpoises in his bow wake. While he can be induced to chat on the phone about his online educational curriculum or his French connections, Wilson is a reserved loner, disinclined to talk about himself or his lifestyle (a Boston Globe reporter once described him as a monk).

SAILING/THE TRANSAT 2004/START

Three months after finishing the Vendée Globe in 107 days (he placed 13th of 18 ­racers, with 11 dropping out), I find him at the Atomic Café on a brick-cobbled street in downtown ­Marblehead. He’s focused on a copy of the Financial Times held over his tuna-fish sandwich. Given his penchant for classical music, he’s oddly unperturbed by rock music blaring out of the cafe’s speakers, but soft-spoken enough that lip reading comes in handy as he speaks wistfully about the Vendée.

His shoulders are still sore from winch ­grinding, so much so that it hurts to lift his arms above his head. Demure and pleasant, with gray hair and a gentlemanly moustache neatly coiffed, his striking black eyebrows frame his long face.

Brian Hancock, a seasoned bluewater local and author, likens Wilson to Mr. Rogers. Wilson shows up for Vendée Globe events in a suit and tie as if he’s the race bookkeeper, standing alongside his French competitors in sailing attire.

Today he’s dressed in docker pants, with an oxford shirt and a V-neck cashmere sweater beneath a puffy vest and a thick sailing jacket. Although he’s just survived another transit of the icy Southern Ocean, he is the only person seen this last day of May in Marblehead still dressed for winter.

After strolling to the nearby Boston YC — Wilson gasping as if we’re running uphill — we sit on an enclosed dock porch, bouncing in the harbor wake. Here, connected with the ocean, he gets excited, gesturing with his hands as he repeatedly describes the students and ­educational campaign he set up for the race.

Wilson financed Great American IV through his own resources, and sailed on a shoestring budget compared with his competitors. Money and winning are sore subjects. Wilson bemoans the America’s Cup as this country’s only mainstream sailing event. “It sucks up all the press coverage,” he says. “People are astounded that the [Vendée] race even exists because they’ve never heard of it.”

Armel Le Cléac’h (40, winner of this year’s Vendée) collected a purse of 160,000 euros ($182,000 USD) — with smaller awards parceled out to each finisher, showing the French philosophy that every entrant is a winner. Still, Wilson believes, “That’s ludicrous compared with baseball [players’ salaries].”

Wilson’s insight is that no one understands the French-dominated race because sports in this country — even the America’s Cup — are all about winning. As for the Vendée, “You do it for the experience and to share,” he says. The idea began with Bernard Moitessier in the first nonstop Golden Globe race in 1968. After rounding Cape Horn, disinterested in winning or in the commercialization of sailing, ­Moitessier famously slingshot a message onto a passing ship to notify race officials he was quitting “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul.” The French still embrace Moitessier’s spirit, hence today’s branding ­surrounding the race.

As a Francophile, albeit a lifelong New ­Englander lacking a Boston accent, Wilson remains unassuming. He has no trace of the pedigree that private schools and yacht clubs would’ve given to sailors who hadn’t suffered half as much. It’s hard, in fact, to remember that this correctly dressed, shy academic has spent at least several years of his life at sea — often alone, sometimes in a survival suit and usually far from terra firma — as he avoids speaking of his own accomplishments so he can praise his mentors or speak about how important sailing is for kids.

SAILING/VENDEE GLOBE 2008/2009/GREAT AMERICAN III

“Once you leave the dock, you’re on your own,” he says. “You have to make decisions, fix things, and you’re suddenly in positions you’ve never been in before.”

Since he’s talking about his own beginnings, I ask if he always wheezes. But he waves away the question — presumably it’s another handicap he refuses to be limited by.

Several months before the last edition of the race, his next-door neighbor, sailor Amy Drinker, observed him lifting weights at the gym, wheezing disconcertingly. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack,” Drinker says. His trainer whispered to Drinker: “He’s fine. When he breathes hard, it doesn’t sound like you and me.” Then trainer turned to trainee — known to work out so hard that he’d run into the bathroom to puke — and exhorted, “C’mon, one more set!” Recalling those workouts, he says, “You can’t train yourself out of being 66.”

Wilson is referring to how endurance athletes of his age have 15 percent less lung capacity of middle-aged athletes — and in addition, severe asthma gives him 75 percent of the lung capacity of normal sailors. Any grinder who has experienced anaerobic breakdown in service to the winch can only imagine the strain of offshore shorthanding, with a 60 percent lung capacity, averaging 1,200 turns a day for more than three months.

Like his competitors in the Vendée, Wilson got little sleep, mostly grabbing half-hour catnaps. Unlike his competitors, he takes four different asthma drugs, which adversely crank up his metabolism and limit the shut-eye.

Diagnosed as a severe asthmatic while still a toddler, long before albuterol inhalers, his parents learned that their middle child would not be destined for conventional sports. But one day in the mid-1950s, sailing on the family ketch outside Marblehead, Dorothy Wilson observed a change in her son while riding in the offshore breeze: “Richie” was healthy, running around the boat. When the wind turned and blew from the land, carrying invisible particulate matter and pollens, their son bowed over, crippled with wheezing.

Betsy Hoffman-Hundahl, Wilson’s girlfriend, is a director of the local art museum. Wilson’s asthma, she says, “is the private struggle of his life.” He doesn’t mention this debility during his public lectures (events at which his sailor friends become frustrated because Wilson’s humility underplays the difficulties of his voyages). “It’s a personal goal,” Hoffman-Hundahl says, “proving to himself that he can do things like the Vendée with asthma.”

Clearly, Wilson overcame this lifelong ­land-borne handicap by going to sea. Sailing in Marblehead junior races as a polite 10-year-old, he won his first race, a quarter-mile out and then back around the cans. While focused on trimming the sail and avoiding a “snake wake” that would slow his Sea Sprite’s hull speed, he pulled into the lead, won, and would remember the details of that day for the rest of his life. It was obviously the mastery versus the winning that spun Wilson’s clock.

Childhood friend Robbie Doyle — a Marblehead sailmaker and Sailing Hall of Famer — also remembers those races and his frail competitor. “Out of the 10 kids we sailed with,” says Doyle, “Richie would’ve been the last who I would’ve picked for competing in the Vendée Globe.”

Loathe to partake in “pass the sandwich and open the beer” cruises, Wilson remains the bluewater eccentric among Marblehead yachting circles. Still, he’s incredibly respected. Consequently, there’s considerable chatter about whether he’ll take on the quadrennial Vendée in his 70s.

“He’ll do it again,” says Hancock. “He’s too proficient not to.”

Hoffman-Hundahl keeps probing on this ­likelihood, and while she looks forward to his taking time off, she can’t imagine him without a new project.

When put directly to Wilson, who gets asked this question routinely, he answers, “I’m not going to do it again.” “Are you sure?” I ask.

“Well,” he hesitates, looking longingly out to sea, “pretty sure.”

The post One for the Sea appeared first on Sailing World.

Surrounded by an armada of spectator boats and helicopters overhead, thousands of fans enduring frigid temperatures to cheer from the shoreline, with countless more watching an online live stream, skipper Armel Le Cléac’h completed the final few miles into Les Sables d’Olonne harbor, culminating a record-breaking singlehanded round-the-world Vendée Globe race.

Usually a steely-faced professional, Le Cléac’h dropped his guard, choked with emotion at the huge reception and the successful culmination of 10 years spent chasing Vendée victory. The Banque Populaire skipper finished runner-up in both the 2008-09 and 2012-13 editions, the win eluding him last time by 3 hours and 17 minutes. “I am somewhere between wanting to jump for joy and crying,” he says of the finish. “I’ve had two good second places, but only winning is beautiful.” Thanks to the new-generation foiling designs and being able to cut the corner around the South Atlantic high, Le Cléac’h set a new race record of 74 days, 3 hours, 35 minutes and 46 seconds, nearly four days less than François Gabart’s time four years ago, and a time that only multihulls were achieving a decade or so ago.

Despite predictions he might arrive as ­little as two hours behind, Hugo Boss’ Alex ­Thomson cruised home 16 hours later, also to a rapturous welcome for which Les Sables d’Olonne is renowned.

The race for Le Cléac’h was a supreme demonstration of composure and preservation. Unlike fully crewed racing, which is limited by a boat’s top speed, in singlehanding the limit is that which the skipper can squeeze from their boat, given they are alone, have limited energy, and must find time for sleep. During a two-and-a-half-month slog around the planet, a full understanding of risk versus reward and limiting potential for breakage is vital.

However, even the impeccable Le Cléac’h came painfully close to being derailed when passing Cape Verde headed south, Thomson split from the pack, pulled into the lead and extended away down the South Atlantic. The golden opportunity for Le Cléac’h arose when Hugo Boss’ starboard foil broke in the South Atlantic, but it wasn’t until the end of the Indian Ocean crossing that Le Cléac’h finally managed to shake off the tenacious Brit.

Getting into the weather system ahead, as Thomson repeatedly shed miles on his foilless port jibe, Le Cléac’h was two days and 800 miles ahead at Cape Horn. This should have won him the race, but returning up the Atlantic, the weather gods repeatedly dealt Thomson a better hand, and just six days later, they were neck and neck again, leading to one of the tightest battles to the finish line in the race’s history.

While Hugo Boss was newest of the VPLP-Verdier designs and slightly narrower with substantially bigger foils, Banque Populaire was one of the first of the new generation semifoiling IMOCA 60s. “She is the not the fastest boat but has been very versatile, particularly in the transitional phases,” says Le Cléac’h. “She is a boat I am at home with. She has never let me down.”

Upon his arrival, Le Cléac’h confessed to having lost his J1, Banque Populaire’s biggest upwind headsail, in the Southern Ocean due to problems with a halyard lock. But this, and damage to an engine mount, were his boat’s only significant technical issues.

For both teams, reliability was paramount, and both had focused more on this than other teams. Aside from a collision that destroyed one of its foils in the 2016 IMOCA Ocean Masters New York-Vendée, Banque ­Populaire finished every race it entered, including the 2015 Transat Jacques Vabre, when all of the other new-generation boats retired with ­structural problems or damage.

The new foils were also vital to the speed of the new-generation boats, but Le Cléac’h said he didn’t deploy them constantly. “I used them only in situations where I thought it was good to accelerate or to boost the speed, like a turbo,” he says. Banque Populaire’s foray in the IMOCA class is now over, their boat sold to Frenchman Louis Burton. Meanwhile, their new 100-foot foil-assisted trimaran is due for launch this summer with a view to competing in the only event likely to upstage the Vendée Globe — the singlehanded nonstop round-the-world race for the Ultimes in 2019.

The post Third Time’s the Charm appeared first on Sailing World.

SAILING – VENDEE GLOBE 2017 – MISCS ARRIVALS

After being dismasted late on the evening of Friday 10th February, when he was in tenth place and some 250 miles west of Lisbon, Portugal, Colman constructed and stepped a remarkable jury rig which has allowed him to sail the final 740 miles of the 27,440 nautical miles race which started from Les Sables d’Olonne on November 6th 2016. Since he was dismasted in what should have been his last big storm of his race, only three and half days from the finish line where he seemed assured of an impressive 10th place, Colman has run out of food and lasted out his final days on the survival rations from inside his life raft. On Wednesday he confirmed by radio that he had only two biscuits left.

Colman, a trained sailmaker and rigger, set one of the most efficient jury rigs seen in the history of ocean racing, working diligently and smartly to the end to improve the sheeting angles and hence efficiency of the rig which is constructed from his boom, part of his mainsail and his storm jib. Two other skippers have finished their Vendee Globes under jury rigs. Philippe Poupon in the 1992-1993 race was close to the finish when he dismasted and Yves Parlier famously repaired his rig, but he finished with a mast which was effectively half its original height, while others, like Stéphane Le Diraison and Loïck Peyron had to set up jury rigs to bring their boats back to shore. He achieves his goal of becoming the first ever skipper to race solo non stop around the world completing the Vendée Globe using no fossil fuels, only renewable energies, his electrical power generated by an innovative electric motor, solar and hydro generated electricity and stored in a bank of high tech batteries. Before leaving Les Sables d’Olonne he explained: “The objective is to have it as a reflection of my philosophies. Growing up in New Zealand I was aware of the hole in the Ozone layer there. I converted to become a vegetarian not especially because I care about cute lambs but because I was more concerned about the global impact of the chain, of food production and consumption. And so the project is a reflection of my ideals.”

He also is first New Zealand born skipper to finish the epic solo round the world race, concluding a remarkable storybook adventure which has captivated race watchers from all around the world since long before the start. His finish reflects his incredible tenacity, drive and talent, the culmination of a dream which saw him move from the USA to France over 10 years ago to pursue his goal of competing in the legendary solo round the world race. From pursuing an academic and business career in the USA, where his late father was from, Colman worked different marine related jobs to expand his skillset to a level where he could achieve a competitive finish in the Vendée Globe. Before the start he spoke of how he had staked his financial future in taking part in the race. He found an unloved IMOCA 60 designed by South African Angelo Lavranos which to date had a chequered, limited racing history where he lived in Lorient, where it was being used for day charter hires, and set about refitting and re-optimising the boat in order that he could realise the boat’s true, untapped potential. Even a matter of ten days before the race start Colman did not have the funds to compete at what he considered to be the very minimum level of participation. But he was determined to go anyway. An absolute last minute call found support from the London based Foresight Group. His boat was only branded two days before the Sunday 6th November start.

On start day he said: “I feel great. How could I not. It is the start of the Vendée Globe and it is a sunny day. It is a dream I have been chasing for years and years and I have it here in my grasp. It was hard to say goodbye to my wife. I hang my wedding ring in the cockpit so she is always with me.” His spirit and skills have been tested in equal measure and on many occasions he has overturned situations which would have ended the Vendée Globe of lesser sailors. Even just days into his race he found an innovative way to repair a keel ram problem which jeopardised his race. An electrical fire damaged the wiring on his Foresight Natural Energy which sent his autopilots haywire. In one incredible 12 hour period he climbed his mast three times, spending hours aloft to repair sails. The 33 year old has made mast climbing an almost commonplace skill among his extensive personal armoury of abilities required to compete in the Vendée Globe, despite the fact it was a fall from the top of a mast which took the life of his father whose legacy Colman holds dear.

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, near to the most remote point on the race course, Colman was caught in the path of one of the biggest storms of this race. His forestay, which holds up the mast, became detached when a pin failed. His IMOCA was knocked flat and stayed over for some hours in huge seas and winds gusting to 40-45kts. He took four days to recover, replacing the forestay, finally losing touch with Nandor Fa, the Hungarian skipper with whom he raced the 2014-2015 on Fa’s Spirit of Hungary who went on to take eighth place.

SAILING – VENDEE GLOBE 2017 – MISCS ARRIVALS

Conrad Colman’s remarkable Vendée Globe

9th November Conrad Colman is a Political Sciences graduate of the University of Colorado. He reacted to the news of the election of Donald Trump. “It is a bit of a shocker. I thought my uncle was playing a joke on me when the news came through. It makes me happy to be out here.” Colman, 17th, conceded a place to Louis Burton after sailing close to him approaching Madeira. “It is great being at sea, getting to know the boat after three weeks not sailing together. It took a little while to get into the groove. It’s good to be able to learn against Louis who has a slightly newer boat.”

11th November He ended up closer to Madeira than he had hoped. “The local effects of the island really slowed me down. I had been trying to pass over the top of Madeira and really got stuck there. I got sucked in by the shifting winds.”

12th November I hoisted my heavy weather furling spinnaker (which means it’s rolled up around a flexible cable). Just before I finished hoisting, the sail started to unfurl. I had to continue hoisting quickly otherwise I risked breaking the rope and losing the sail into the water. The time that it took to top of the sail however, all hell had broken lose at the bottom. Because the sail had unrolled prematurely, the furling unit blocked and wrapped itself up in a collection of tack line, furling lines and sheets to create a thick bar tight multistrand cable with an angry sail on the end of it. It took me over four hours of non-stop work to rig another line to secure the sail.

15th November It is very much a course of learning by doing. That is one of the advantages of ocean racing is that you have plenty of time to sort things out, to learn and try different scenarios. So I have been trying different sail set ups, different ways of trimming. The boat is good upwind and downwind, reaching is not so good.

16th November Leak in the hydraulic system

18th November Out of the Doldrums. “It was easy in the Doldrums – I never stopped, my strongest squall was about 30kts.”

22nd November Four rookies in this part of the fleet put the pressure on the more experienced rivals around them – Frenchmen, Fabrice Amedeo and Stéphane Le Diraison, the Japanese sailor, Kojiro Shiraishi and the New Zealander, Conrad Colman are only a few miles apart.

25th November Climbs the mast to replace some lashing. “Going up the mast is the worst job to do onboard the mast. It’s really scary, it’s really dangerous. You’re 100ft or 30 metres up in the air, so the slightest movement of the boat or the smallest wave sends the tip of the mast swinging through an enormous arc and the thing that’s really tricky is there’s no-one here to help us climb to the top. Every time I come down I’m heavily bruised because of the violent movement at the top.”

Duel with Nandor Fa.

28th November At the latitude of Porto Alegre, struggling in light winds sometimes down to below six knots. “I’m fed up with the highs.” 2nd December Conrad celebrates his 33rd birthday. “I’m celebrating my birthday by doing the Vendée Globe. I’m also celebrating by eating salad. It’s made up of beansprouts, and I’m really excited to have fresh salad onboard. My wife also made me a special birthday food box containing some crusty dehydrated astronaut ice cream, which actually tasted terrible.

4th December Knocked flat. “An electric bypass destroyed one of the solar charge controllers and it damaged the electric cables next to it. It stopped the electronics and thus the pilot, and I lost control of the boat as I wasn’t at the helm. By the time I got there the boat was on its side and the gennaker in the water.”

“I saw black smoke and yellow flames leaping from behind the chart table. One of the solar charge controllers was burning and was in the process of taking down the entire electrical system. When the flames were gone I heard one beep from the autopilot and my world turned upside down. the boat bore away from the wind and did a crash gybe with me still inside, hands full of molten plastic.”

8th December “I feel a little like I’m sitting on death row and my fellow competitors have already been taken to have their last meal. It’s emotional and shocking to hear about Kito’s rescue and to think that for the third time in a row he won’t make it back to Les Sables under his own steam.”

Losing oil from hydraulic ram. Electronics problems. Had to climb the mast again to repair damaged solent.

16th December Pacific storm. Two reefs and small jib and still reaching peak speed of 27 knots.

18th December Crosses the longitude of Cape Leeuwin. “As a Kiwi I cannot going celebrate going past Australia too much. I always think Cape Leeuwin is the runt of the litter when it comes to the three Capes. It does not belong in the same company as the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.” 27th December After working on his autopilot problems, Conrad had to prepare to face a storm. 36 hours of violent winds and the need to be quick to remain ahead of the worst conditions. His boat was knocked down and he ripped his J2.

2nd January 60 knot gusts. Damage to standing rigging. (forestay pin) Had to wait for quieter weather to carry out repairs. 3 days of work. Exhausted after doing that in 40 knot gusts and then continued towards the Horn. Boat knocked down during the storm and another sail shredded. “Physically I am shattered. Emotionally I am very disappointed I felt like I was doing everything right, I was sailing very conservatively at the time, I was let down by a technical failure.”

12th January Colman rounded Cape Horn in 10th place at 0416 UTC after 66 days, 16 hours and 14 minutes

21st January Slow climb back up the coast of South America due to weather conditions and lack of sails.

30th January At 0845UTC Colman returns to the northern hemisphere

31st January Happy to be out of the Doldrums

5th February Looking forward to the final straight. Hard to find the route back across the North Atlantic. “My route to the finish in Les Sables d’Olonne looks like a dog’s breakfast, a smorgasbord of options. I can either get hit on the head really hard, or get hit on the head really, really hard. I can go upwind in 40kts or downwind in 50kts. It is not an easy choice.”

7th February After passing Madeira, back in European waters.

10th February 2200UTC dismasts 300 miles off the coast of Portugal. Waited for calmer conditions before inspecting the damage. Had to repair his boom to use it as a jury rig.

24th February Takes sixteenth place

The post Colman Sails to Vendée Globe Finish Under Jury Rig appeared first on Sailing World.

Louis Burton secured seventh place in the Vendée Globe this Thursday morning when he crossed the finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne at 07hrs, 47 mins, 49 seconds. For the young solo skipper who lives in Saint Malo, completing the legendary solo non stop round the world race today represents a major triumph.

‘Get Lucky’ by the Grammy Award winning French dance act Daft Punk was the booming soundtrack to his morning arrival back at the race pontoon in Port Olona. No musical backing to any of the finishes so far in this eighth edition has been more appropriate. Burton did get lucky with a succession of prolonged, beneficial weather systems during his first time in the Southern Ocean and experienced neither big storms nor prolonged calms. But his result is equally the product of steady consistency aboard a boat he knows intimately, that he has had for six years and on which he has completed all of the major French classic ocean races finally including the Vendée Globe.

At 31 years of age Burton, who was the youngest skipper to start the last Vendée Globe, sailed a mature and smart race and his team built strength and reliability into the Farr design and have been rewarded today. His elapsed time is 87 days 19 hrs, 45 mins, 49 secs. He sailed 27,477 miles at an average speed of 13 knots.

Seventh in this epic Vendée Globe is his swansong with a boat he loves. A clear signal of his aspirations to finish on the podium of the next edition of the Vendée Globe is that his team have already taken delivery of Armel Le Cléac’h’s foiling VPLP-Verdier Banque Populaire VIII, the outright winner of this race. Not only does Burton realise an excellent overall position in the fleet of 29 starters on an ‘older’ 2008 generation boat, but he finally lays to rest memories of his all-too-short 2012-2013 attempt when he was forced to retire after damaging his rigging in a collision with a trawler. The race of the 27 year old ended prematurely, on only the fourth day.

Burton’s seventh place comes as the hard earned result of a measured, regular high average paced race around the world by a partnership between skipper and boat that dates back to 2010. No other solo skipper among the 29 who started from Les Sables d’Olonne on November 6th has raced his boat for longer. It is the first full circumnavigation for the IMOCA which was built and launched as Jérémie Beyou’s Delta Dore but which never finished an IMOCA ocean race before being taken on by Burton and his loyal sponsors, a giant French office furniture and supplies company which has nearly 300 depots.

All of the boats which are placed above Burton have a greater performance potential. The only IMOCA of the same vintage is Jean Le Cam’s Finistère Mer Vent, which started life as Michel Desjoyeaux’s winning Foncia, a close Farr designed sister to Burton’s Bureau Vallée, which finished one place ahead this time. The skipper who grew up in Paris and has a Welsh father finishes with the third non-foiling IMOCA. According to Servane Escoffier, who co-manages her partner’s project, the only structural changes have been to remove the original moustache spray rails and build in additional strength and structure. Last winter a substantial sliding coachroof was fitted to improve protection. The keel was replaced and a full new electronics system and wiring change made for this race. Burton sailed many training miles solo prior to his Route du Rhum and before his 2012-13 Vendée Globe. After racing the 2009 Route du Rhum in Class 40 in Bureau Vallée colours, Burton and his brother Nelson debuted in the IMOCA class in the 2011 Transat Jacques Vabre. A dream debut, staying in the top three early in the passage from Le Havre to Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, saw them finish seventh. His first solo race was the B2B return back across the Atlantic in which he finished eighth.

Louis Burton’s seventh place finish in the Vendée Globe is underpinned by durability, reliability and knowledge of his boat backed up by sailing fast but within his limits in the south. Since stepping clear of the chasing peloton just after the Cape of Good Hope, Burton has raced very much on his own. At the finish line today, Nandor Fa on Spirit of Hungary is about one week behind, while Jean La Cam finished one week ahead of him.

He was unfortunate to lose touch with the leading group on the initial descent of the Atlantic and was then slowed by with a posse of eight or ten closely matched soloists when South Atlantic high moved south and east with them. The leaders had jumped on successive low pressure train rides east while Burton was left to lead the chasing group. In the Indian Ocean especially he hooked on to the leading edge of a low pressure system which worked for more than two weeks for him. Once in the top ten he then outlasted the successive retirals in front of him of Sébastien Josse, Thomas Ruyant and Paul Meilhat.

SAILING – VENDEE GLOBE 2017 – BANQUE POPULAIRE VG FINISH

Louis Burton’s Vendée Globe

Louis Burton started steadily, taking time to find his race rhythm. Mid-fleet at Cape Finisterre he made the same early tactical error as Alex Thomson, routing east towards the Portuguese coast and paying the price by losing two places to 18th. But as the fast trade wind sailing kicked in, Burton showed his pace and mettle gaining at the Canary Islands. By the Cape Verde Islands, Bureau Vallée was racing closely with Bertrand de Broc before he had to retire. The leading group had a relatively easy Doldrums crossing but Burton and his nearest rivals were slower on approach. By Rio on the southbound descent he was 11th but 550 miles behind Thomas Ruyant.

Thereafter, their passage was slower as they tried to exit the South Atlantic high pressure system. But by staying east of the group Burton found a narrow corridor of breeze to wriggle down which was enough to give him a little gain on the acceleration to the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope. Here he was 220 miles ahead of the next skipper Kojiro Shiraishi, the Japanese skipper on the similar Farr designed ex-Hugo Boss. He rose one place to tenth on the distressing, unfortunate demise of Kito de Pavant’s Bastide-Otio west of the Kerguelen Islands. By Campbell Island he was eighth and it was on Christmas Eve he took over seventh place which he has never been challenged for since. He passed Cape Horn on January 4th and enjoyed a relatively direct initial climb of the South Atlantic, one of the few boats to pass west of the Falklands and cut miles.

Louis Burton suffered successive small problems, his most significant being a fight with his autopilots. On the third day of racing he fixed ballast and hydro-generator problems, but nothing serious. In the third week of racing he had to slow to make starboard rudder head repairs. They had been making a noise since the start after a collision with a UFO in the first 24h of racing. In the fourth week the autopilot problems peaked. He admitted he was uncertain if they were linked to wind instruments or compass. He suffered a diesel spillage and slipped bruising his elbow and knee. In the second month, around Day 40, he had laminate repairs to do, as the ballast system seemed to be weakened. His port daggerboard housing also weakened and he recalled a slight ingress of water. He also reported two broken stanchions. Twice he was fastest in the fleet, setting his personal best record in the race of 447 miles on 10th December.

Read more about: Armel Le Cleac’h Victory | Record Setting Finish |

The post Lucky 7th Finish for Louis Burton appeared first on Sailing World.

Over the past 24 hours, Maître CoQ has only covered 96 miles, because for long periods yesterday, he was completely stopped. This morning a light easterly breeze is allowing him to advance at eight knots. He has between twelve and eighteen hours of sailing left before reaching Les Sables d’Olonne. The wind may strengthen slightly to the south of Belle-Ile to allow him to accelerate, which explains why it is hard to predict his time of arrival. At the moment, he is 40 miles SW of the Glénan Islands, his regular training ground.

Fortunately for him, he has a big enough lead not to feel threatened (more than 630 miles). He is set to become the fourth sailor to complete the race in less than eighty days after Armel Le Cléac’h, Alex Thomson and François Gabart back in 2012. Behind him, the speeds are much higher for the three boats in fourth to sixth place. In a 20-25 knot SW’ly, Jean-Pierre Dick (StMichel-Virbac) is averaging over 23 knots, sailing 446 miles over the past 24 hours. The other two racing aginst him, Yann Eliès (Quéguiner-Leucémie Espoir) and Jean Le Cam (Finistère Mer Vent), are not quite as fast and are further south. Jean-Pierre has regained ground from Yann, who has won back some ground from Jean. All three are expected on Wednesday afternoon. They may not finish within the eighty days as that clock will stop ticking at 1202hrs UTC on Wednesday, but there is still a tiny chance they will make it. In any case, the battle is raging, even if Jean-Pierre’s option seems to be paying off and Yann appears to be that little bit better placed than Jean.

Around 600 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, Louis Burton looks like he is heading for seventh place, unless there is a major upset, as Bureau Vallée is around a thousand miles ahead of the Hungarian Nandor Fa (Spirit of Hungary). Louis has around a week of sailing left and is expected to arrive in Les Sables d’Olonne on 31st January or 1st February. Nandor Fa, eighth, is 470 miles from the Equator and is due back in the Northern Hemisphere tomorrow evening. The Doldrums are not looking very active for him. Close to the coast of Brazil, less than 200 miles from Rio, Eric Bellion (CommeUnSeulHomme) is struggling to make headway towards the north, but is still 200 miles ahead of the New Zealander, Conrad Colman (Foresight Natural Energy). Arnaud Boissières and Fabrice Amedeo, 600 miles further back and further east are in with a chance of catching them. During the night, La Mie Câline overtook Newrest-Matmut to move into eleventh place, but the group of four in this zone (Boissières, Amedeo, Wilson et Roura) still have to get away from the claws of the St.Helena high. The steady trade winds are still a thousand miles north of them. To the north of the Falklands, Didac Costa (One Planet One Ocean) has extended his lead over Romain Attanasio (Famille Mary-Etamine du Lys), after the latter had to deal with very light winds early in the night. Costa is 130 miles ahead of Attanasio this morning. Dutch sailor, Pieter Heerema (No Way Back) is 440 miles from Cape Horn, while Sébastien Destremau (TechnoFirst-FaceOcean) in 18th place still has 1500 miles to sail to round the tip of South America.

The post Vendée Globe: Maître CoQ Nears Finish Line appeared first on Sailing World.

In May 2012, CAMPER helmsman Roberto ‘Chuny’ Bermudez found himself nearly face to face with a whale in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. In a pretty extraordinary video from a rainy day on the Miami to Lisbon leg of the 2011-2012 Volvo Ocean Race, you see Bermudez swing the boat, which had been hurtling through the ocean at over 20 knots, into the wind and just narrowly avoid what would have been a catastrophic collision with a marine mammal.

“It would have been a bad day for both the whale and for us,” said Media Crew Member Hamish Hooper afterwards. “With reflexes like a cat [Bermudez] narrowly missed what would have been the equivalent of a runaway freight train colliding with a truck.”

Another video dated May 2016 from the Canadian Ocean Racing team highlights what happens when a sailing vessel collides at night. “We were doing 15-20 knots and there was this loud smack,” says a crew member into the camera. “Everyone came on deck because we weren’t sure what happened, and then afterwards we saw the whale surface.” For Canadian Ocean Racing and their IMOCA Open 60 O Canada, the incident left them without a starboard rudder. For the whale, its fate remains unknown, but it’s assumed by some scientists that a collision with a large enough vessel going over 10 knots can easily be considered a lethal encounter.

Incidents like these illustrate a growing problem within the sailing community that needs to be addressed by sailors, regatta organizers, and anyone directly responsible for determining where boats will be sailing. With sailboats becoming more numerous and faster, the potential for more ship strikes is expected to increase unless we change something.

“Overall, we think that the planning needs to be more proactive,” says Fabian Ritter, Ship Strike Data Coordinator with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the global intergovernmental body charged with conservation of whales and the management of whaling. “The most precautionary actions to reduce ship strike risks will be at the planning stage rather than at the stage where the timing and route has already been decided.”

In 2012, Ritter published a study finding that, over the last 60 years, 81 reported collisions and 42 near misses of whales and sailing vessels were reported, and a greater proportion of these were from more recent years.

Damian Foxall, veteran ocean racer and Recreation Education Manager at the Canadian Wildlife Federation, is confident that this number is only the tip of the iceberg.

“There’s a problem right now in that the vast majority of sailors do not even know that there is a duty to report these incidents,” says Foxall, who has spent the better part of a few years working to raise attention on this issue. “At the Canadian Wildlife Federation, one of our roles as a national conservation organization is to ensure that everyone going afloat is aware of best practices to apply while in the vicinity of marine mammals. In the case of a collision, mariners have an obligation to report this type of incident to the Coast Guard as a safety notice to other mariners as well as to the Ship Strike Database hosted by the International Whaling Commission.”

One race Foxall brings up as a perfect example is the 2016 IMOCA Ocean Masters Transat from New York, NY to Les Sables d’Olonne, France. Fourteen singlehanded IMOCA 60 monohulls departed New York, bound for Les Sables-d’Olonne on May 29th. After leaving New York, all sailors took care to avoid a Right Whale Exclusion Zone and a Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) off of Nantucket designed to create distance between ships and a sensitive habitat area.

However less than 24 hours into the race sailors began reporting collisions with unidentified floating objects. First to report was the French skipper Yann Elies, who reported damage to his boat’s daggerboard. Then Armel Le Cléac’h hit an unidentified object and turned around. In the end, eight boats would report over 15 collisions with floating objects. Six boats turned around and returned to port, and one boat dropped out of the race entirely.

A statement was released after the collisions occurred by the race organizers stating:

“We are very saddened that this could happen when we worked to protect marine life which would possibly cross the course of our race. The sailing community is very concerned about protecting nature, especially within the seas, which is our playing field. In our commitment to trying to resolve this issue we will assist other race organisers to find ways to work together with scientists around World Sailing’s Major Oceanic Events commission to improve safety of all races, both current and in the future.”

For Foxall, who studied this race in depth, this is a troubling story.

“There were reports from skippers of sunfish and basking sharks in the area, but much of the damage to the trailing edges of appendages and surrounding structure was consistent with marine mammal strikes,” says Foxall. “However since all of the boats were singlehanded and the collisions occurred at night, this makes reporting details much harder for the skippers.”

Both Foxall and Ritter urge race organizers to apply care towards the timing and route planning of offshore events and to inform sailors of where they are most likely to encounter whales, dolphins, and other vulnerable marine life. They also encourage organizers provide general advice on the species most likely to be encountered along an intended route. Whales, for instance, tend to aggregate so if sailors report one whale, there’s a very good probability that there are others in the area.

“Despite due diligence and correct procedure followed by the race committee and skippers in the case of the Transat-Vendee Globe, we are seeing an increase of incidents,” says Foxall. “While many nations are now realizing the real value of their marine resources, the legislation behind creating marine protected areas is often very prolonged. As a community, we must self-regulate and promote good stewardship when it comes to avoiding collisions with marine mammals.”

If an accident between a sailing vessel and a whale takes place, both Foxall and Ritter urge sailors to take the time to report the incident, not only as a notice to mariners in the area, but also to the International Whaling Commission’s global database on ship strikes located at https://iwc.int/ship-strikes.

Take Action

• As a sailor, get to know the waters you’ll be sailing through. As a regatta organizer, take care to avoid sensitive areas and to integrate key marine wildlife information into your event.
• Report any and all collisions with whales to the International Whaling Commission with as many details as possible. These reports are confidential and are used to better understand migratory whale behavior. https://portal.iwc.int/login
• Working with information from the International Whaling Commission, Sailors for the Sea and the Canadian Wildlife Federation added a new best practice to the Clean Regattas program that helps race organizers protect Wildlife and Habitat. To learn more contact robyn@sailorsforthesea.org.

The post When Whales and Sails Collide appeared first on Sailing World.