It may never happen again.

What we’re talking about is The Ocean Race’s monster of a stage through the southern Indian and Pacific. What was originally a solution to the impossible challenge of trying to organize a round-the-world race with stops through Asia in the time of COVID-19 may have manifested itself as a new classic course—the new Everest peak for fully crewed ocean-racing teams, starting in Africa and ending in South America.

It was always going to be one hell of a ­challenge, this great distorting marathon sitting among six other standard-size Atlantic-based stages in the 50th anniversary edition of The Ocean Race, formerly the Volvo Ocean Race and the Whitbread. And it looked to have disaster written all over it because there were so many unknowns: Would the foil-assisted IMOCA 60s, with their delicate appendages and lightweight hulls, be able to cope with the violence of being pushed full-pelt for 35 days through the most inhospitable seas on the planet? How would their four-strong sailing crews survive in their spaceship-size capsules, on a platform with a ride quality ranging from uncomfortable to unbearable? And how would the race’s credibility survive this challenge, with only five boats on the starting line under Cape Town’s Table Mountain? What if three—or worse, none of them—failed to complete the course? This later concern weighed heavily on race organizers and fans alike.

In the end, we were treated to an epic sporting story too deep and expansive for this space. And it was one that proved that even if there were only four boats on the racecourse (Guyot Environnement-Team Europe dropped out with structural issues), if they are good boats, then it can be a compelling watch. And these were good boats sailed by some of the world’s best solo and fully crewed yachtsmen and -women.

Leg 3 had everything: big downwind racing in towering seas and storm-force winds, and long periods of atypical calm for the Southern Ocean, even in summer, and remarkably close racing. How close? While passing the most remote spot in the world’s oceans at Point Nemo, all four boats were within hailing range of each other. And there was some serious record-breaking pace at times, with the IMOCA 24-hour distance record smashed, jumping from 539 miles to 595 miles, courtesy of Kevin Escoffier and his crew on the Swiss-flagged Holcim-PRB.

The leg captivated a ­hungry social media audience with compelling stories of resilience, determination and resourcefulness by each and every crew as they battled rig and sail damage, hull and appendage structural failure, and personal injury in one case to keep their race on course. And all of it was vividly recorded and shared by the onboard reporters (OBRs) forbidden from taking part in crew work. What the OBRs gave us was a fascinating Big Brother’s-eye view of everything that went on for over more than a month at sea, plus compiling some of the most spectacular drone footage of foiling yachts in the Big South, the likes of which had never been captured in such high definition.

Of all the subplots that played out over 36 days, the most compelling was that of the eventual leg winner—and a surprise winner at that: Team Malizia, skippered by the charismatic German Boris Herrmann. Alongside him was the young British sailor Will Harris, the experienced French navigator Nico Lunven and the Dutch sailor Rosalin Kuiper. The team’s 2020-vintage VPLP-designed boat was tipped by many to come last in this race because it is big, heavy, and slow to get up on its foils in marginal conditions. Indeed, in Leg 2, from the Cape Verde islands to Cape Town, Malizia lost 200 miles to the fleet in just three days.

On Leg 3’s long eastbound highway, however, the hope for Herrmann and his crew was that their beast of an IMOCA would show its true pedigree in the South, and so it proved. But long before it could do that, their race almost came to an end after three days when the Code Zero halyard lock failed and the halyard carved a 30-centimeter trench in the front of the mast, 90 feet above deck.

At this point, the temptation to return to Cape Town was almost overwhelming, but the crew decided to try to repair it. “We thought about going back to Cape Town. That would be an easy reaction. But now we have all agreed to try and continue—it takes even more mental strength to do this than such an endeavor takes anyhow. The day we stand on the dockside in Itajai, I will be super proud,” Herrmann said at the time.

Little did he know.

With Harris and Kuiper taking turns at the top of the rig, they managed to complete a decent patch-up of the spar during a light spot in the weather and got their race back on track, albeit more than 300 miles behind the early leader, Holcim-PRB. The Swiss boat would extend its advantage to more than 600 miles before being reined back in—such is the nature of ocean racing, where being too far ahead can be a curse.

Alongside the US entry and pre-race favorite, 11th Hour Racing Team Mãlama skippered by Charlie Enright, and the French-flagged Biotherm skippered by Paul Meilhat, the game was now all about hunting Holcim down by diving south toward the ice exclusion zone, looking for stronger winds.

If times were tough on Malizia, they were arguably even worse on Mãlama, where Enright and his team, which included veteran British navigator Simon Fisher, British-Australian sailor Jack Bouttell and Swiss soloist Justine Mettraux, were contending with cracks in both their rudders. They repaired one and swapped the other for the spare and crossed their fingers.

The first goal for everyone was the midleg scoring gate under southeastern Australia, where Holcim added to its wins in Legs 1 and 2 by taking maximum points. But it was behind them that Malizia first started to show its qualities in this part of the world. On the way to the imaginary gate—situated at longitude 143 degrees east—Malizia simply sailed past Mãlama in sight of her, as Amory Ross, the OBR on the American yacht, memorably described.

“They seem to be able to carry more sail and keep their bow up, and while we struggled in the waves to keep from nosediving, they were able to sail at the same speed but lower,” he wrote.

In an interview after the finish, Enright was a bit less diplomatic. “It was kind of at that point in the race that everybody realized that Malizia was this Southern Ocean downwind machine—right before the scoring gate—and we were like, ‘Oh f—,’ you know…”

While the first half of this Southern Ocean drama was dominated by Escoffier’s boat, the second act in the Pacific saw a restart at Point Nemo and then a dogfight at the front between Holcim and Malizia in the run down to Cape Horn in big weather. It was a battle that continued up the South American coast, when three depressions produced the roughest weather, with the breeze topping 50 knots on three successive days.

And it was on the run to the Horn in big breaking seas that Malizia crewmember Kuiper was thrown out of her bunk when the boat spun off a breaking wave. She landed on her head, inflicting a concussion and a nasty wound, an incident that only underlined just how dangerous these platforms are in heavy weather. But the tough 27-year-old Dutchwoman, who was one of the brightest stars of the OBR show on this leg, just laughed it off, comparing herself to a pirate with an eye patch.

The weather pattern after the Horn was a gift for Malizia and just what this band needed to hold Holcim off all the way to the finish. Herrmann and his jovial squad crossed the line in the early hours of the morning after 35 days at sea, having sailed 14,714 miles and with Holcim still 80 miles out.

“It’s taking a few days, to be honest, to really realize what we’ve achieved because the last few days were really intense, trying to make sure we stayed ahead of Holcim and just really guaranteeing that we were really going to win this one,” Harris said after the finish. The 29-year-old Englishman couldn’t help but look back to the mast damage early on and marvel at how they turned things around.

“It was such a big comeback,” he says. “If we think back to week two of the leg, it didn’t seem like winning was even possible, so I am very happy that we’ve managed to get there, and we’re all slowly realizing it.”

Harris was candid about Malizia’s performance woes in light air, but he reckoned the crew had mastered its weakest link: marginal foiling conditions in winds of 10 to 16 knots, when the boat is sluggish and won’t get up and fly. The secret, he explained, is to sail with as much heel as possible and load the leeward quarter with all the movable weight to take advantage of a flat spot in the hull. “For the first minute or two, the boat will feel very slow, and then suddenly, it builds apparent and it starts taking off,” he says. “We call it semi-foiling.”

Malizia’s performance in this leg moved them one point ahead of Mãlama into second place overall, five points behind runway leader Holcim. It was a bitter pill to swallow for Enright and his crew, who held off Biotherm all the way from before the Horn to the finish to secure the final podium position. They managed to do so despite trashing their mainsail when the autopilot dropped out, causing a violent crash jibe off the Argentinian coast. Biotherm was also wounded, having hit a submerged object and damaging a foil, and the Americans kept their mainsail damage secret while they effected a Herculean repair.

“We knew it was going to be tight with Biotherm at the finish by virtue of them being in the same weather system as us, so anything we could do to gain an advantage and get a jump on them we had to do,” Enright said in Itajai. “We knew that they were facing adversity too, and if there was a chance that by them not knowing the news of our mainsail damage, they would be complacent, even for just a few hours, they were hours that we desperately needed.”

Fisher, on his sixth circumnavigation, has experienced his share of challenges, but the bleary-eyed and unshaven faces of him and his teammates were all one needed to see to understand the toll this leg had taken on them, as well as their spares and tools.

“We always said it was going to be tough, but I don’t think we ever imagined it was going to be as challenging as it was,” Fisher said in a team statement after finishing. “As much as we would have liked to finish in first place, the fact that we’ve managed to get through this in spite of all the issues we have been dealing with over nearly 38 days is a great achievement.

“Jack has done a fantastic job as boat captain keeping the boat together, but there came a point in the leg that it wasn’t about winning, it was about getting to the finish line. We knew it would be difficult and long, but we all agreed that we should make the most of it. It was about setting the mindset and enjoying it; you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.”

Arriving in Brazil, Enright knew the pressure was on, but he was feeling confident the scales would turn back in his team’s favor now that the race had returned to the (supposedly) calmer waters of the Atlantic. For his sake, one would hope Harris’ new-found confidence about Malizia’s performance in medium conditions would prove misplaced.

“We definitely have a boat that is more comfortable, shall we say, in the Atlantic, and we are happy to have turned the corner,” Enright said. “If you could pick a boat for [Leg 3], you probably wouldn’t have picked our boat, but I’m happy with where we are at for the rest of the race.”

Enright placed a lot of emphasis on competitiveness at the end of an Ocean Race, not its early or middle stages, and he certainly wasn’t ruling out winning this edition with four legs still to go, including a transatlantic from Newport, Rhode Island, to Aarhus, Denmark, in late May.

“We’ve always maintained that we want to be the team that is sailing best at the end of the race and improve the most from day one until the finish, and we still have that opportunity,” he said. “No one here is ­worried; we’re just going to keep chipping away, and when you chip, you get chunks.”

Enright, 38, has been around the block in fully crewed ocean racing—this being his third Ocean Race—but he says he has not experienced anything like Leg 3 before.

“It’s by and away the most difficult thing I’ve done,” he says. “That’s not even from a conditions standpoint; it’s from a duration standpoint, but also the platform. There are people that have sailed in the South and people that have sailed IMOCAs in the South, and we are now in that category, and it’s no mystery to me why this class moves in four-year cycles.

“I tell you what,” he adds. “If I was doing the Vendée Globe, man, I’d want to do The Ocean Race. I’d want to get down there two years in advance and know exactly what we are dealing with, with the newest kind of design innovations in the boats and what have you.”

Harris, meanwhile, was hoping to get himself fit and healthy for the next stage from Itajai to Newport in late April. And the young Englishman was daring to dream that Malizia’s performance in Leg 3 could yet herald something even more magical for him and his team. “We’ve proved that we are a really strong team in terms of development, and that’s what this race is about,” he says. “If we can keep developing and learning faster than the others, we can certainly start winning toward the end.”

The post The Ocean Race’s Most Punishing Leg appeared first on Sailing World.

A little over 20 years ago, Swiss sailor Bernard Stamm and three crew blasted across the Atlantic on the front edge of a winter storm, and set a new monohull record for the New York to Lizard crossing: 8 days 20 hours and 56 minutes. They did it in Stamm’s IMOCA 60, beating a record that had been held by Bob Miller’s superyacht Mari Cha III by more than four hours. At 44.7m length overall, Mari Cha was almost two and a half times longer than the IMOCA 60 and the new record spoke volumes for the future.

A possible future: an IMOCA 60 with four crew could have been the replacement for the aging Whitbread 60, the boat then used for the Volvo Ocean Race. The IMOCA 60 could have slashed crew numbers (and therefore cost) and ramped up performance and spectacle. Surely this new record was the harbinger for a remarkable future for offshore racing? Well, it’s taken 20 years, but the future is finally here, with the launch of 11th Hour Racing Team’s new IMOCA 60 – the first to be purpose-built for a four or five-person crew. Personally, I can’t wait to see what she can do – and not just on the water. This boat was built with more than just speed in mind.

“The primary objective of 11th Hour Racing is to change the narrative around sustainability in the marine and maritime industries, and in everyday life. We start the conversation with the springboard of competitive professional sailing, then provide concrete solutions or demonstrations of achievable success, in the hope of alleviating some of what can be a daunting proposition to engage with from zero.”

Those are the words of Rob MacMillan, co-founder and President of 11th Hour Racing, the Newport, Rhode Island based organization which harnesses the power of sport to inspire ocean health initiatives, and sponsors 11th Hour Racing Team. The IMOCA 60 is now used in the planet’s most popular and most visible offshore sailboat races; the fully-crewed Ocean Race (heir to the Volvo Ocean Race), the double-handed Transat Jacques Vabre and the solo Route du Rhum and Vendée Globe. Millions of people watch these races, and that means millions can be impacted by the message of 11th Hour Racing.

Unfortunately, building a boat to the current IMOCA 60 rule has significant challenges when sustainability is your avowed goal. “The carbon is not sustainable, and the resin we use is not sustainable…. a carbon boat made out of pre-preg epoxy is not fantastic in this respect,” said Guillaume Verdier, the project’s naval architect, reflecting on the challenge facing the Team.

“I’d be very enthusiastic,” Verdier continued, “to try to design a boat that is really more sustainable and competitive. If I were free to write a rule, if I was asked to make a wooden Open 60, I promise you it would not be a piece of rubbish. It would be hard to compete [with existing boats]. It would need everybody to have a wooden boat, but…we’ll find the tricks, I tell you. If it was to be specified, we’ll find the tricks. Wood is a beautiful way [to go].”

“Make no mistake, we have to make radical changes to how we work: business as usual is no longer an option,” added Damian Foxall, 11th Hour Racing Team’s Sustainability Program Manager and a previous winner of the Volvo Ocean Race. “There is an urgent need for the entire marine industry to align to the Paris Agreement; a 50-percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and net zero by 2050. This requires a paradigm shift in how and why we build and race boats; a new approach to sailing events and the very structure of our sport.”

After all, the sport of sailing is what we, the participants, say that it is; the boats, the racecourses, the materials used. But while wood would be a vastly more sustainable material, the IMOCA 60 rule currently allows carbon and so, if you want to win races, that’s what you need to build in. This is a fact that Mark Towill, the Team’s CEO is very conscious of: “With the support of our sponsor, our philosophy around the build of our new IMOCA 60 is to construct a competitive boat while working with the marine industry to develop more sustainable solutions and innovative approaches to the way that we build boats. We’ve already seen changes to the IMOCA Class rules including favoring the use of bio-sourced materials for non-structural parts and introducing life cycle assessments for the construction of all new boats, which is a great start and we look forward to working with more race organizers, class owners and teams to push this agenda further. We hope that what we develop and learn with our partners can then be used as a springboard, not only within grand-prix racing, but across the sector as a whole.”

“We’re only going to be able to do that [50% reduction] with real collaboration, making sure that we’re working in targeted areas and working together,” said Sustainability Officer Amy Munro, an oceanographer by training who works with Foxall. Together they implement sustainability measures throughout all operational elements of the Team. The goals have been set by international agreements (currently the 2015 Paris climate agreement). “The UN Sustainable Development Goals are not just for the marine industry, it’s everyone who needs to get to that point… And a lot of countries have ratified those targets. So, it’s going to involve not just offsets but really looking at how we’re making things and how we can radically rethink to reduce our footprint,” added Munro.

Public opinion is inexorably shifting and sailing needs to shift with it. It may not be long before a sport that flouts climate targets will find itself as handicapped commercially as those that were – in an earlier era – reliant on tobacco sponsorship when public opinion and lawmakers turned against it. Sailing can do more than just keep up though, as Rob MacMillan explained. “The Ocean Race is an opportunity to carry this narrative message across the world and engage on local terms with many different communities. Especially now with the introduction of the IMOCA fleet into The Ocean Race, there is an exciting development opportunity as well, where teams can embed sustainable choices from day one.”

Changing the narrative is going to require more than just building a boat in the most sustainable way possible – that boat is also going to have to be successful in a harsh and highly competitive environment. To put it brutally; no one will be listening to the message if the boat is slow. So, in the first two stories in this three-part series we’ll look at how the Team went about designing a fast boat. Then we’ll turn, in the third article, to the challenge that the Team faced building it as sustainably as possible.

Bearing much of the weight of the responsibility for these twin goals are two men, the first of which is 11th Hour Racing Team’s skipper Charlie Enright, who told me; “For better or worse, the design and build process stops and starts with me.” Enright grew up sailing in Bristol, Rhode Island, U.S., and the sport runs in his family; his grandfather was a boat builder. He followed a path through junior sailing, interscholastic sailing, and then got into offshore racing through Roy Disney’s Morning Light project and, “never turned back. We did a lot of our own sailing in 2011, which is what introduced me to The Ocean Race. Mark [Towill] and I have done two laps of the planet now, and are very much looking forward to our third.”

The second person in the hot seat is the naval architect commissioned to come up with the design of the team’s new IMOCA 60, Guillaume Verdier. If you follow the French offshore scene then you may well know all about Verdier’s Vendée Globe-winning IMOCA designs, but if you don’t then you probably know of his collaboration with Team New Zealand over the last three America’s Cup campaigns, two of which they have won. After studying naval architecture at Southampton and Copenhagen Universities, Verdier joined Groupe Finot, designing Open 60s when he was 27 years old. He worked on the boat in which Michel Desjoyeaux won the Vendée Globe, before going out on his own and modifying PRB for Vincent Riou, who also then went and won the Vendée Globe.

There were lots more winners, until recently designed in collaboration with another famous French design office, VPLP. Both François Gabart’s Macif, Vendée Globe winner in 2012-13, and Armel Le Cléach’s Banque Populaire, which won in 2016-17, were designed in collaboration with VPLP. “Yannick Bestaven was the one that won the last Vendée Globe, [that] was a boat we did with VPLP, but Apivia [sailed to second place by Charlie Dalin] is a boat I designed on my own,” said Verdier.

It was Verdier and VPLP that got the IMOCA 60s foiling, and the experience that Verdier gained in the last three America’s Cups (all of which have featured foiling boats) has played into his hands as the IMOCA 60 rules have continued to allow foiling to develop. There are very few yachts that are built with no constraints, and for racing boats the primary parameters are the rules that define the type of boat. The IMOCA Class Rule started out simply enough back in the mid-1980s, but these days the designer of a new IMOCA 60 faces significant constraints.

There are obvious limits, like hull draft and length, along with an air draft and an overall length that includes the bowsprit. There are also one-design elements; a mast and keel fin that limit the amount of righting moment the boat can develop, so there’s a point beyond which more power will simply break the boat. There are also limits on appendages, water ballast and canting keels along with all important self-righting tests. So, it would have been simple enough to discourage foiling with a rule change if that’s what the rule makers had wanted. This hasn’t happened, but nor has it been encouraged by allowing elevators on the rudders. While these add complexity and cost, Verdier feels they would significantly increase the boat’s fitness for purpose and safety.

“The fact that you don’t have the elevators on the back of the boat is making the boat very brutal in deceleration. It’s an incredible damper [shock absorber] to have an elevator on the rudder. Maybe draggy sometimes, but it is the safety element…” The extra control the elevator provides for the trim angle of the boat would make it safer.

“I tried to explain that to the IMOCA but they didn’t vote for [it]. That’s the way it goes. I’m not a good lobbyist,” he explained, with a wry smile. All these rules provide a hard edge to the design envelope, while all the boats built – particularly the 14 foiling boats from the past two Vendée Globe races – provide a softer envelope, a wealth of knowledge on what works and what does not. There is no shortage of history to draw on, but in one important respect, the new 11th Hour Racing Team boat is a very different one to all that have gone before because it was designed for a crew, and not just for solo sailing. A fully-crewed boat can be pushed much harder, so it needs to be stronger. There needs to be more space to live and different systems to allow the extra hands to work at sailing the boat.

Verdier has an edge on the competition in thinking about these issues. The first time I met him was in Lisbon, when the Volvo Ocean Race design team that he led were working on the Super 60, the brainchild of then-CEO Mark Turner. “When Mark Turner decided to make a new kind of boat after the Volvo Ocean 65, he made a giant competition,” Verdier explained. “We won that one, and started working with Nick Bice, Neil Cox and Mark Turner on this Super 60 program, and right away it was like an Open 60 that was adaptable to a group of five people on board. That’s where we are more or less today with this boat for The Ocean Race.”

When Verdier says ‘we won that one’ he’s referring to the team of people that he has gathered around him since he first went out on his own. “The original people are still here. It grew up a little bit, but we are more or less five or six in France.” The collaborators on this particular boat (and it varies from project to project) were Hervé Penfornis in project management, Romaric Neyhousser, designer, Véronique Soulé and Romain Garo doing computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Morgane Schlumberger working on structures and stability, Loic Goepfert working on performance and design and Jeremy Palmer working on structures. “And there’s the Pure Design and Engineering office for structural calculations in New Zealand. Matrix Applied Computing is also in New Zealand, doing the double check of the structure I’m doing for the foils,” added Verdier.

The team has always worked in a way that a lot more of us are now familiar with, thanks to Covid-19. “I sign the contract and so on, and it’s my name and I take the risk, but all these guys have their own design studio, in a way, like me, and they all accept to collaborate with me. It’s a very nice setup we have and very rare, where people are all independent. We all work from home. There’s no office. You don’t open the door of my office, see a secretary and 20 people working. Everyone is on their own, but we collaborate at a distance.”

This is a lot more sustainable way of working than maintaining a big design studio and getting everyone to travel there every day. The team also understood that the digital design process has its own environmental impact. “The thing we did on this project, and it has been the first time I’ve seen it, is to fully evaluate the carbon footprint right from the beginning, including the computer time we used for the process,” said Guillaume Verdier. “It’s not easy to work out how much time we spend, how many machines we have, how many clusters we use and so on, but we did better on this one.”

“There’s a growing impact of the digital sector worldwide,” pointed out Damian Foxall, “estimated at 3.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions or the equivalent of the entire aviation industry. More importantly, the global impact of digital use is set to increase by up to 14% by 2040, underlining the importance of understanding these impacts and using these tools and the associated energy needed responsibly.”

Simulator Training

One of the first problems that Verdier and his team had to tackle was the one big difference between the Super 60, and the IMOCA 60 that they were now designing for a full crew. “The Super 60 originally was designed to have elevators on the rudder,” said Verdier. “Again, I often say when you don’t have the elevator on the rudder, it’s a bit like trying to make your plane fly without the tail wing, which is very difficult.” The fundamental instability that this produces in the boat’s balance had to be resolved in other ways. Verdier and his team have built up a significant toolset to apply to the problem, most notably the development of simulation codes. “A boat is a lot more complex than a plane though,” said Verdier, “because it’s got to go through an incredible change in pitch, an incredible change in displacement through the waves. It’s jumping waves and going down the troughs. It’s very unsteady. A plane is much steadier. It’s much easier to make a simulation for a plane or a car.”

It’s a double whammy really, not only is an IMOCA 60 in the Southern Ocean harder to simulate than a plane, it’s also less controllable without the rudder elevators. “We are progressing,” continued Verdier. “We have a simulator, and we can train on the simulator. We can add waves, but you always keep in mind that if the simulator is not answering the question perfectly, then reality is still driving the bus, you know? It should not be the tool that drives the bus, but your understanding of the environment. That has always been our job. Otherwise we’d be replaced by machines.”

Charlie Enright had the same take on the problem. “We have used the simulator a lot in the development program for the boat. The simulator’s definitely a useful tool because it highlights areas you might not otherwise be thinking about, and it allows you to make a lot of changes rapidly in a cost-effective way. It points the arrow toward things that could be investigated further. That said, it’s a lot easier to simulate flat water behind Rangitoto than it is the waves of the Southern Ocean, so it’s a constant back and forth between sailor input and the naval architecture simulation tools. It’s definitely a give and take, because we feel like we have the smartest guys in the world helping us design this boat, but at the same time, no two waves are the same. So, the sailor input is very important, and I feel like we’ve struck that balance well to date.”

Striking that balance has led to some innovative solutions to the performance challenge, with a new look to the bow shape and foils, the aerodynamic treatment of the hull and the sail handling solutions just some of the more obvious changes. We will look at all these and much more in the second part of this three-part series.

For more team updates:

The post New Challenges for a New IMOCA 60 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.

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It might be the first time I’ve laughed from absurdity, with uncontrollable amusement at my surroundings and the general state of things.

The instruments have us consistently zooming at 30-something knots, but it’s blowing only 20-something outside our vomit comet. We’re not surfing waves. The Atlantic is flat, and our performance is 100 percent by design. We are foiling through a dark, moonless night at optimal speed in optimal conditions somewhere off the coast of Brazil, bound for France.

It’s 2 a.m., and I’m lying on top of a pile of unclaimed gear bags and a thin foam pad that is supposed to be used on a bunk. But there is no bunk on this vessel, and there is nowhere else to go inside this 60-footer designed for one sailor. There are six of us, caged in a loud and crowded space not much bigger than a cargo van. For the past seven days, we’ve all tried every nook. This is where I’ve landed, sliding around on the top of a ballast tank like a puck on ice. Sleep is impossible. I start giggling. I can’t help it. The absurdity of it all is laughable.

Charlie Enright—lying next to me in the leeward bilge, nestled into a beanbag—is awake too, staring at the coachroof.

I’ve been through a lot with Charlie, but this is entirely new. The high-pitched whine of the foil next to my head echoes around the boat. It’s turbulent, like a jet engine, the hull violently slamming around as if driving on a potholed road back in Rhode Island. I wonder what exactly we are doing, how offshore sailing has evolved so quickly and so aggressively that we are now foiling across oceans. Only a few years ago, we were doing 19 knots in a Volvo 65 in these same conditions. And that felt fast.

Charlie, who had previously raced the boat doublehanded to Brazil during the Transat Jacques Vabre—for 14 days—must have heard my laughter because he grins, presumably familiar with my disorientation.

“The polars for the new set of foils show us in the 40s,” he says nonchalantly.

I stop laughing and shake my head, ­wondering what that actually means.

The new foils Charlie referred to will be fitted to the team’s current training boat, while the new boat that he and five other teammates will enter into the 2021 Ocean Race is being built. This edition of the round-the-world race will be contested with two fleets: Volvo 65s and IMOCA 60s. Charlie and his co-skipper, Mark Towill, twice sailed the Volvo Ocean Race with the 65—once with Alvimedica and once with Vestas 11th Hour Racing. This time, they’re gunning for the win with a state-of-the art IMOCA 60.

We’re on 11th Hour Racing’s 11.1, an older-generation IMOCA 60 purchased from singlehander Alex Thomson. Other than learning how to sleep, everyone on board is here to soak in the experience for the first time—to learn how to survive, how to push and how to exist.

This is a new style of boat requiring a new set of skills. Each of us, regardless of how many high-speed sea miles we have or don’t have, must now contemplate the foiling part of the equation: Angles and speeds are vastly different. Shorthanded sailing requires a new set of talents; everyone has to learn a lot about a lot—there are no traditional roles. We serve a new title sponsor requiring new priorities, and everyone feels an obligation to the larger global implications of sea and sustainability. We have an opportunity to make a difference in this world.

Besides the faces of my teammates, nothing feels familiar. We were in the midst of significant change, and the curve is rapidly shifting beneath us. Outside of a handful of French solo sailors, few people have come to terms with the sheer audacity of foiling across oceans. It is understandably difficult to comprehend—and even harder to achieve. But we have to start somewhere. We’re on a delivery of discovery.

Food is fuel, it’s as simple as that, so while it might seem mundane, the question of how much to have is taken seriously. Offshore sailors burn through insane calories, and nutrition goes hand in hand with performance. As a “media man,” food and supplies fall under my jurisdiction. I pick, pack and prep the meals because it’s a job nobody else wants. Fine by me—it gives me a “watch partner,” something to keep me honest and invested. It holds me to a routine. But this IMOCA 60 has no galley, sink or cooler, just a spigot and a few small containers. All of my old quantity-planning spreadsheets from previous races are for crews of 11 or nine, accounting for a full galley. Six people and a minimalist setup is all new to me.

For this delivery, we use freeze-dried meals, remnants from a past campaign, and each sailor decants each meal for him- or herself. This, however, produces a lot of waste, and we can’t be wasteful, so we must try to find another way forward. By the end of the delivery, I will have a much better understanding of how much food six people consume and, more important, what this group of individuals likes and dislikes. We are aiming to work with brands to eliminate extraneous packaging or, even better, eliminate plastic entirely. In the future, we will be trialing reusable silicone bags that hold one meal for six.

Supplies are handled in a similar way. We’ve brought far more toilet paper, baby wipes, toothpaste, butane, etc., than we will need, but knowing how much we use in 15 days will allow me to understand how much of everything we will need come race day. It’s important to start building a food and supply list for a typical race leg.

Another great unknown is how much ­foul-weather gear we will need. Extra gear is slow, but so too is being cold, wet and tired. The Volvo 70s were light. The less you brought, the lighter the boat, the faster you could go. The Volvo 65s were heavy and needed righting moment. The more you brought, the more you could stack, the faster you could go. The IMOCA class is back to situation light. The foils provide so much righting moment, and flight is so essential, that being light could be everything. This means scrutinizing the necessity of things such as spare clothes and foul-weather gear. During this delivery, I put on my dry top only a few times, just to go out and take photos on deck. We can do most of the sailing from inside the cockpit, which is totally covered. Gone are the days of being pelted with water and slammed with waves. We seriously consider having communal gear, used in those possibly rare occasions where one or two of us has to venture outside our igloo. If we don’t absolutely need it, it stays off the boat.

Developing the ideal watch system is one of trial and error. We cheat a bit here. There are always two of us on deck, with four sailors running independent four-on/four-off watches and a single rotation every two hours. Charlie and I float. I obviously won’t be able to float when we get down to racing, so the number of available bodies actually drops to five. The watch system will need a lot of attention, but it feeds directly into the one burning question on everyone’s mind, especially after our Chinese jibe in the middle of the night: How much do we trust the autopilot?

It’s impossible to predict when the aged autopilot will decide to go on break, but it generally happens when you least expect it. Usually, by the time you figure out it’s not “doing its thing,” it’s already too late. This time, it’s a 2 a.m. carve-down that goes well past the point of no return. We jibe, the boom swings across, and the boat is on its side. The major problem is that the leeward rudder, which was our windward rudder, is in its raised position, and the windward rudder, which was in its down position, is useless. Standing in waist-deep water at the back of the boat, we struggle to wrestle the upright rudder to get it down; there are a lot of moving parts in the rudder system that make it difficult to move under load. Plus, we’ve never done this before, so it takes longer than it should. Eventually, Charlie is able to pull on the half-lowered rudder to bear away, it’s a quick reminder that we have lots to learn.

The autopilot is—for now—untrustworthy, at least to us.

Race organizers want to limit autopilot usage to maintain a clear point of differentiation with the rest of the offshore-racing world. The feasibility of that for five sailors is uncertain, however. We spent a lot of time under autopilot during our delivery sprint. Driving when you can’t see is really hard, and the IMOCA 60 is designed with autopilot in mind. Visibility is second. It gets more complicated too when we consider the race’s desire to attract existing Vendée Globe IMOCAs into the event. These boats are already fitted with autopilots, and asking teams to remove or nullify their ­systems—when they were fundamentally built around them—is difficult. There’s no question that the autopilot would be used, but there’s also no question the human hand would be faster, fatigue and visibility aside.

Fatigue is a big deal, by the way, and it comes with a lack of sleep. On this trip, we are scattered around inside like rolling pebbles. Every time I look, somebody is on the move, trying some other place, a different position—nothing works. Collectively, sleep is elusive, and it will be even more of an issue as the foils get bigger. The way the boat moves and the way it sounds when you’re foiling make sleep problematic. The singlehanded guys don’t use bunks, and there’s a decent chance we won’t either. That’s because berths take up a lot of space, and with the IMOCA 60, getting weight outboard is no longer a requirement. It’s more about fore-and-aft trim. I envision beanbag chairs and extreme exhaustion as the new norm, the price to pay for crossing oceans at 40 knots.

Remember, this is a fully crewed ­adventure on a boat made for one. The paradigm has shifted here. We are no longer defined by our position on the roster. We have to do practically everything. With so few people, one must be good at every position. Charlie, for example, can now repair a watermaker, navigate, and hoist a J3 from the pedestal or bow. Everyone needs to understand ­everything in a completely different way.

The IMOCAs might be 60 feet long, but in terms of usable interior, they are actually much smaller. With the high speeds these boats maintain and their unpredictable mannerisms, no one risks going forward on deck or down below. If you must do something out of the cockpit, we must either turn downwind or slow down. Things that were traditionally forward, such as the plumbed head, would be unusable at speed, so it simply doesn’t exist on the boat. Instead, we use a rubber bucket placed in the bilge. Private moments are always in close proximity to someone else. It’s uncomfortable to start, and uncomfortable to finish, but there is no better solution.

We’re uncertain how hard our boat can be pushed, and consequently, we’re just getting to know its potential. In the Vendée Globe, solo sailors spend most of their time throttling back and letting the autopilot lead because they are designed to be ultralight for the midlatitudes and reefed for the extremes. We, on the other hand, will inevitably spend most of our time throttling forward, with both hands on the helm. Class rules state that the rig and keel must be one-design, but their actual limits are largely unknown. We will add fiber optics to our mast and foils to start visualizing stresses in real time. With a full crew pushing the boat beyond known limits, we could be faster, but we also might be at risk of breaking the boat. We are cautious on our way north, but relative to other IMOCAs around us, also delivering to France, we feel fast.

We arrive after 14 days on board. Our bodies are wrecked, on account of little sleep and much discomfort. These boats will be difficult to race and endure, but we have started learning—and acclimating. For a collection of veterans used to having a lot of the answers, there is much uncertainty.

It’s this adventure into the unknown that attracts us to this next Ocean Race. We have a blank slate. What better way to begin than with a 15-day trans-Atlantic bringing us through almost every climate and every condition? Deep summer to deep winter. Sailing upwind, across the wind and downwind. Through the trade winds, the Doldrums and the Bay of Biscay.

As we debrief in Lorient, following the long and varied trip with an unfamiliar craft, it really feels like a wildly new chapter in a repetitive book. Exciting, revolutionary adventures are ahead.

The post IMOCA 60 School appeared first on Sailing World.

Sail Newport and The Ocean Race announced today that for the third consecutive edition of the competition, The Ocean Race will make its only North American stopover in Newport, Rhode Island, in the spring of 2022.

The Rhode Island stopover will be one of ten stops during the eight-month 38,000 nautical-mile race around the world, which begins in Alicante, Spain, in October of 2021 and finishes in Genoa, Italy in June of 2022.

“This is terrific news for our state, again bringing global attention to Newport and Rhode Island as premier tourist destinations and promising to generate tens of millions of dollars in spending and economic impact,” says Governor Gina M. Raimondo, Governor of the State of Rhode Island.

“I am grateful that The Ocean Race recognizes the value of coming back to the Ocean State and equally grateful to our partner and the official event host, Sail Newport, which has worked hard to ensure this successful event returns,” she adds.

Sail Newport, Rhode Island’s Public Sailing Center, will organize the event and Executive Director Brad Read says, “This is the pinnacle event of the sport of ocean racing. These athletes are spending 24 hours a day for weeks on end transiting oceans in storms and calms and as a community we have the privilege of welcoming them to the only stop in North America. Our entire community will greet them as we have greeted seafarers for generations. We will welcome them and celebrate the human victory of overcoming monumental challenge,”

“Newport remains an iconic venue for generations of sailors,” said Richard Brisius, Race Chairman of The Ocean Race. “It is a town built around the water, and people here hold the race close in their hearts, which makes it a stopover to look forward to for all of our sailors and stakeholders.

“When you walk through Fort Adams State Park and down the streets of Newport, you feel enthusiasm and passion for The Ocean Race, and that’s something we take pride in and want to return by bringing a great event to Fort Adams again in 2022,” he adds.

“Fort Adams State Park is the ideal venue to host sailors and fans from around the world and highlight Rhode Island’s extraordinary combination of history, natural beauty, wind, and world-class public parks,” says R.I. Department of Environmental Management (DEM) Director Janet Coit.

According to Read, the event had a wide-ranging economic and tourism impact on the community. Organizers released a detailed economic impact report that showed that the 2015 stopover generated an estimated $47.7 million to the Ocean State’s economy. Both events were huge draws for visitors, with over 137,000 people in the race village in 2015 and over 100,000 visitors in 2018.

“The Ocean Race is one of the three pillar events in the sport of sailing, alongside the Olympic Games and America’s Cup, and as such, it provides inspiration and motivation to sailors and sailing fans of all ages,” Brisius added.

“Even beyond that, The Ocean Race, along with Newport-based partners like 11th Hour Racing, demonstrates that sport can have an impact beyond the playing field. With a comprehensive and innovative sustainability program, together, we are leading the way in making a positive difference in our community,” he says.

The 2015 stopover in Newport marked the birth of the sustainability program for the global Ocean Race, an initiative that subsequently expanded to all stopovers in the 2017-18 race.

Coit adds, “The 2015 and 2018 race stopovers exemplified how to make large-scale, public events sustainable and also educated visitors about ocean health and the need to reduce the plastic pollution that fouls our seas. DEM looks forward to our partnership with The Ocean Race, Sail Newport, and all stakeholders in continuing to model green practices and confront environmental problems at the local, state, and global levels.”

During the 2018 stop, for example, at the Newport Ocean Summit, Rhode Island became the first state to sign the UN Environment Clean Seas Pledge, leading to a Governor’s task force on plastic pollution and a forthcoming state-wide ban on plastic bags.

Also, 14.8 tons of greenhouse gas emissions were avoided through the use of a biodiesel fuel blend for generators. At the same time, an alternative transportation campaign inspired 7,561 visitors to use bikes and water taxis instead of cars to visit the race village.

Charlie Enright (Bristol, RI), who grew up sailing locally on Narragansett Bay, has led teams in the past two editions of the event and has his sights set on taking on the challenge of a third race in the new, foiling IMOCA 60 class, with the support of 11th Hour Racing. He takes pride in seeing an event of international stature come to his hometown.

“The Ocean Race is a worldwide sporting event, and to host a stopover in Rhode Island is no small undertaking. I’d say it takes a village, but it certainly takes more than that,” Enright said.

“A successful event takes an active State Government that provides the infrastructure to host something like this. It means the City of Newport expanding its tourism season into late spring and the organization of Sail Newport – a small non-profit on Narragansett Bay – taking on the world,” Enright adds.

“It’s humbling and for me it’s a big point of passion and pride. It’s great to be sailing in and out of Newport, seeing all the spectators, and really having a home-field advantage in an event as international as this is a very special thing,” says Enright.

“At Sail Newport, we have seen the desire of the Rhode Island community to pitch in and help. The most emotional part of this event is watching our community embrace the race, the sailors and the excitement of the race village. That’s what keeps us coming back to host this international race,” Read says.

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