The Transat Café L’Or – formerly known as the Transat Jacques Vabre – has got off to a dramatic start with three Ocean Fifty trimarans capsizing in the first night of racing.

Four classes compete in the double-handed transatlantic race from Le Havre to Martinique: Ocean Fifty trimarans, Ultim trimarans, Class 40 monohulls and IMOCA monohulls.

A series of fronts in the Channel and North Atlantic have made conditions difficult, with the race village closed on Thursday 23 October. The scheduled start for the Ultims, Class 40s and IMOCAs was delayed from Saturday 25 to today, Sunday 26 October.

However, the 10 trimarans in the Ocean Fifty fleet started on Saturday afternoon at 1630hrs, aiming to get out of the Channel before the biggest winds hit on Sunday night.

The Ocean Fifty fleet at the start of the Transat Café l’Or on October 25, 2025 in Le Havre, France. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot / Alea

Three trimarans capsize

The first capsize was reported on the first evening at 2027 UTC (1027 pm local time) when the Ocean Fifty Lazare X Hellio flipped off La Hague, the first peninsular after the start at Le Havre. The trimaran had set off just four hours previously. Both skippers, Erwan Le Draoulec and Tanguy Le Turquais, were safely airlifted to shore.

French coastguard services (SNSM) marked the boat’s position, which was later recovered.

Weather conditions in the area were reported as rough, with steady winds of 22 to 25 knots, gusts up to 30 knots, and 3m waves.

The Ocean Fifty Lazare x Hellio being towed by the French SNSM rescue service after capsizing off Cherbourg, during the Transat Café l’Or race on October 26, 2025. Photo: Lazare Sailing Team

Skipper Tanguy Le Turquais posted on social media today: “Emotionally I can say that it was a bit shocking to see Erwan get in the helicopter from the central hull, then my turn [to get into the] chopper and see Lazarus x Hellio, with its white crossbeams and hulls half underwater… These are quite shocking images.”

The capsized Ocean Fifty Koesio washed up off a beach on Guernsey. Photo: Guernsey Coastguard

Around four hours later at 0025 UTC (0225 local time), the race management team was informed that a second Ocean Fifty, Koesio, had capsized north of Guernsey. At the time, the boat was in 8th position and sailing in a 25-knot northerly wind with 2.5m waves.

Co-skippers Erwan Leroux and Audrey Ogereau were both safe and unhurt, and rescued by helicopter. On Sunday morning the wreck of the trimaran had washed up on a shingle beach at Perelle on Guernsey.

Next to capsize was Inter Invest, skippered by Matthieu Perraut and Jean-Baptiste Gellée, which was reported as having capsized off the coast of the Abers, the north-west the tip of Brittany at 0405 UTC. Co-skippers Perraut and Gellée were also both safe and in good health, and airlifted from the trimaran around 0600. The boat was later salvaged by the 35m/115ft trimaran Merida.

Ocean Fifty Inter Invest, skippers Matthieu Perraut and Jean Baptiste Gellée at the start of the Transat Café l’Or on October 25, 2025. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot / Alea

Ocean Fifty: on the red line

The Ocean Fifty fleet is notorious for racing ‘on the edge’. In 2018 six of the 50ft trimarans started the TJV, with only three finishing.

“The vigilance level is a little higher than for the other [classes],” commented Elodie-Jane Mettraux before the race. Mettraux is racing ​​with Anne-Claire Le Berre on Upwind by MerConcept.

“We know there’s a red line that we mustn’t cross, otherwise we’ll capsize,” added her co-skipper Anne-Claire Le Berre. “It adds extra nervous tension and forces us to be even more focused.”

Co-skipper of the capsized Koesio Erwan Le Roux had told race media before the start: “It’s easy to put the foot right down hard on the accelerator, but capsizing is the problem if you push too hard.”

Ocean Fifty Koesio, skippers Erwan Le Roux and Audrey Ogereau at the start of the Transat Café l’Or 2025 on October 25, in Le Havre, France. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot / Alea

Tanguy Le Turquais, a recent convert from the IMOCA and co-skipper of the capsized Lazare X Hellio had also spoken of the risks before the start, saying: “On board, you realize that you are slowly getting used to it, to increasing the threshold of fear.”

Transat Café L’Or start

The remaining three classes got underway at lunchtime today. They include four giant Ultim trimarans, 18 IMOCAs and 42 Class 40s. The course lengths of the Transat Café L’Or vary to try and have the four classes arrive in Martinique at approximately the same time between 5-7 November.

The Ultims have been set a 6200-mile course that takes the fastest ocean racing boats in the world into the Southern Hemisphere to a waypoint south of Ascension Island and sees them cross the Doldrums twice.

The Ocean Fifty fleet was set a 4600-mile course, rounding the island of Sal in the Cape Verdes before turning right for Martinique.

The 18 IMOCAs are racing on a 4350-mile track that leaves the Canaries to starboard.

Because of an incoming frontal system with an expected deterioration in weather conditions at theentrance to the Bay of Biscay, the race management team has decided to alter the Class 40 course. The 42 boats will stop in La Coruña (Spain) to seek shelter, and a second start will then be given as soon as conditions permit.

The overall ranking of the Transat Café L’Or Le Havre Normandie in the Class 40 fleet will be calculated based on the combined times of the two legs.

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French ocean racer Charlie Dalin has revealed that he was diagnosed with cancer in 2023, and completed – and won – the gruelling 2024/25 Vendée Globe while continuing treatment for the illness.

Dalin, skipper of the IMOCA Macif Santé Prévoyance had withdrawn from the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre transatlantic race for unspecified medical issues. He confirmed in his autobiography La Force du Destin (‘The Force of Destiny’), released tomorrow, that he was in fact diagnosed with a gastrointestinal stromal tumour that autumn.

Despite this, Dalin went on to qualify for the Vendée Globe, completing the Transat CIC and return New York Vendée-Les Sables Race in the summer of 2024.

An emotional Dalin crosses the line to win the 2024 Vendée Globe. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli / Alea

Dalin then delivered one of the most impressive winning performances in the solo non-stop around the world Vendée Globe race’s history, pushing his IMOCA to blistering speeds and maintaining a ferociously relentless work rate throughout – famously riding a low pressure system in the South Indian Ocean to pull ahead of his close rival Yoann Richomme on Paprec Arkéa.

He finished the race in 64 days, 19 hours, 22 minutes, and 49 seconds, demolishing the previous course record by 10 days.

Charlie Dalin cancer diagnosis

Dalin reports that he first noticed symptoms in late 2023 during a training sail, and received his diagnosis after emergency scans.

The skipper, who sails for MerConcept, did not publicly announce that he was going through cancer treatment, though he and his team adapted his training due to the weight loss and fatigue he suffered.

Dalin was first to finish in the previous 2020/21 Vendée Globe, but fellow competitor Yannick Bestaven was awarded the race win following receiving time in redress for his part in the search and rescue of Kevin Escoffier, whose boat PRB broke up off South Africa.

Before the 2024 race Dalin had spoken about how he came to terms with the unique emotional rollercoaster of crossing his first ever Vendée Globe in first place, but knowing his victory wouldn’t last.

Dalin’s 2024 Vendée Globe

With a purpose built Verdier-designed IMOCA and – outwardly at least – apparently perfect preparation until the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre, Dalin was a hot favourite for the 2024 Vendée Globe.

But privately, his participation was in doubt until the last minute, when a scan in November 2024 confirmed that his tumour had not grown and he was able to join the record-sized fleet on the start line in Les Sables d’Olonne. During the race he managed the illness with daily medication, and prioritised rest when possible.

“I stuck to my strategy, sleeping an average of six and half hours per 24 hours, which is more than on my first Vendée,” he told French news agency AFP, in one of several interviews ahead of Thursday’s publication of his book.

“I had stomach pains, but I just told myself: you don’t have time to worry about that. The pains went away as quickly as they had come,” he added. “By the time I got back to shore, I had almost forgotten about them.”

Macif was custom-built and designed for Dalin. Photo: Ronan Gladu/Disobey/Macif

Speaking about his race post-diagnosis, Dalin revealed that he felt very relaxed during his second Vendée.

“On November 10, 2024, the day of the Vendée Globe start, I was incredibly relaxed. We often hear that taking part in the Vendée is already a victory. In my case, that was exactly it! Because a year earlier, I didn’t even know if I would survive,” he told French sailing magazine Voiles et Voiliers.

“In fact, during a chat during the trip up the Atlantic, when I was neck and neck with Yoann (Richomme), I said: ‘In the end, it’s just a game.’

“Many people thought it was a bluff, thinking it didn’t correspond to my usual state of mind. But no, I was really relaxed, happy to be on my boat, battling for the final victory.”

Incredible story

Dalin had considered going public with his diagnosis during the media frenzy after winning the Vendée Globe, but when offered a book deal decided that would be the better way to tell his story.

“Frankly, if a screenwriter had imagined a script around the Vendée, he would never have dared to write the story of a sailor with cancer, who returns to the race of his dreams and wins it after crossing the line first, but finishes second in his first participation…

He would have been told that it was too much, that it didn’t make sense. And yet, that’s exactly what happened,” Dalin told Voiles et Voiliers.

Dalin (left) 2nd second placed Richomme in Les Sables d’Olonne after the pair’s fierce duel during the Vendée Globe. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot

Dalin’s recovery

Shortly after the finish in February this year, Charlie Dalin underwent surgery and is now focusing on his recovery. “I had a tumour 15 centimetres long on my intestine. They removed it in February, but it came back elsewhere in April,” he explained to French newspaper L’Equipe.

British skipper Sam Goodchild is racing Macif in next month’s Transat Café L’or (formerly the Transat Jacques Vabre), with new IMOCA co-skipper Loïs Berrehar. The Macif team will be making a further announcement about their sailing squad later this month.

All of us at Yachting World sincerely wish Charlie and his family the very best for the future. Charlie and his team generously gave me the opportunity to sail aboard his incredible Macif in September 2024, and it was an absolute privilege to witness him at the helm. We hope to see him back there very soon.

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Biotherm is the official victor of the Ocean Race Europe 2025 having crowned an impressive overall performance with yet another first place finish at the end of Leg 5, as well as a first place win in the Coastal Race held in Boka Bay, Montegnegro.

Throughout the seven week, 4,500 nautical mile race around Europe, Biotherm has maintained a consistent overall lead, winning the first, second, and third legs of the race and collecting Scoring Gate points in each instance.

The only mark in the team’s neat run is a third place finish in Leg 4, which was instead a homecoming victory for Italian sailor Ambrogio Beccaria’s Team Allagrande Mapei. After the dramatic collision with Team Holcim-PRB early in the race, for which they were not granted redress, Allagrande finished fifth overall.

In second and third place were Yoann Richomme‘s Paprec Arkéa and Rosalind Kuiper’s Team Holcim-PRB. Team Malizia came in fourth, with Canada Ocean Racing and Team Amaala bringing up the rear.

Photo: Vincent Curutchet / The Ocean Race.

Biotherm skipper Paul Meilhat credits all-around collaboration between the shore teams and racing crew, as well as the boat’s preparation, for their triumphant victory.

“There are two parts of this victory,” he said, naming the organisation on shore and the boat’s preparation.

“Biotherm is more designed for this sort of race because it is really fast in transitions – light winds and flat water. We did a lot of improvements on the boat this winter. Also the crew, the motivation – I think we are all focused, we all concentrated, and we all wanted to win the race – that was the case from Kiel.”

How did the Ocean Race Europe end?

Final overall ranking of the Ocean Race Europe:

1. Biotherm – 55 points
2. Paprec Arkéa – 40 points
3. Team Holcim-PRB – 38.5 points
4. Team Malizia – 27 points
5. Allagrande Mapei Racing – 26 points
6. Be Water Positive – 18 points
7. Team Amaala – 9 points

Article contiues below…

The Ocean Race Europe 2025: Everything you need to know

Seven teams, six weeks, five legs, one unforgettable race. For its 2025 edition, the Ocean Race Europe will bring together…

‘This one was special’ – Homecoming victory for Beccaria in The Ocean Race Europe Leg 4

Ambrogio Beccaria’s team Allagrande Mapei Racing made a triumphant finish to The Ocean Race Europe Leg 4 as they arrived…

The Ocean Race Europe Leg 5 at a glance:

• • Stopover events in Genoa highlighted the importance of ocean conservation, and how offshore racing can be a tool for environmental advocacy
  • The Ocean Race Europe Leg 5 started slow, with two days of light winds after the fleet left Genoa
  • Thunderstorms, lightning, and torrential rains hit on Day 3, with teams reaching foiling speeds of up to 34 knots
  • The fleet segmented off of Sicily, with five boats in the leading group sailing ahead of a stormy transition zone and two teams, Amaala and Canada Ocean Racing, trapped far behind
  • A momentary overtake from Holcim-PRB off of Sicily reshuffled the fleet order
  • Tactical gambles from Allagrande and Paprec Arkèa failed to pay off
  • Biotherm was first into Boka Bay, followed by Holcim-PRB
  • The Coastal Race in Boka Bay brought a fresh wave of excitement and gave teams a last-minute chance to rack up points before the race’s end

The Ocean Race Europe Stops in Genoa

Photo: Jean Louis Carli / The Ocean Race.

The Ocean Race Europe fleet stopped in Genoa’s Porto Antico after an exciting finish to Leg 4, which saw leg winners Allagrande Mapei snatch first place after pulling ahead of Paprec Arkèa.

Allagrande and Genoa’s home-grown skipper Ambrogio Beccaria were greeted by an outpouring of local support, with fans, family, and media alike flocking to the race village for photos, pit lane tours, and speed tests in the Golfo Paradiso.

The stopover was also a launch pad for another Italian sailor’s upcoming endeavours.

Double olympian and Women’s America’s Cup sailor Francesca Clapcich, who also won the 2022-23 Ocean Race with 11th Hour Racing, supported her bid for the 2028 Vendée Globe with a presentation at the local maritime museum. Following the Ocean Race Europe, she will take over Malizia from current skipper Boris Hermann.

Photo: Marie Lefloch I Team Malizia.

Over four days, talks, screenings, and workshops from local activists, sponsors, and grassroots environmental groups highlighted the Ocean Race Europe’s guiding theme of sustainability. With both sailors and race officials advocating for ocean health in real time, and teams gathering valuable water samples offshore, the commitment to Racing for the Ocean was clear.

In a panel discussion following a special showing of David Attenborough’s Oceans, Holcim-PRB’s on board report Georgia Schofield stressed,

“We cannot keep sailing, keep enjoying the sea, without protecting our playground.”

Head to our socials for a behind-the-scenes look at the events and the action, including an exclusive cockpit tour with Team Malizia!

Departure from Genoa for the end of the Ocean Race Europe

Photo: The Ocean Race Europe.

After the Genoa stopover, the Ocean Race Europe’s fleet of IMOCAs set off again for the race’s final leg, a 1,600 nm passage to Boka Bay, Montenegro that would take them down the volatile western side of Corsica and Sardinia, south of Sicily, and into the Adriatic Sea.

“It’s a long zig-zag of eight or nine days through the Med with a lot of curves and local effects and local winds – not a huge wind field but little patches here and there,” Boris Hermann explained.

Leg 4 winner Ambrogio Beccaria’s Allagrande Mapei Racing made an early running start off the coast of Ligury, but the whole fleet was soon subdued by breezes barely scraping five knots. They inched along at three to four knots of speed throughout the night. Not quite a nail-biter!

Photo: Pierre Bouras / The Ocean Race.

Thunder, lightning, and broaches (oh my!)

After a quiet start, the front of the fleet hit a low pressure weather system packing winds over 30 knots that sent them tearing downwind.

‘We were going so fast that we caught up to the thunderstorm and the clouds,’ said Yoann Richomme of Paprec Arkea.

Reports of broaching, loss of control, and footage of crew members getting jostled about abounded.

An involuntary gybe on Paprec Arkea caused damage to a headsail sheet, as well as ripping the radar unit off its bracket on the front of the mast, while Holcim-PRB ended up on its side.

Photo: Gauthier Lebec / The Ocean Race.

The fleet was segmented by a thunderstorm line delineating two different weather regions.

Ahead of it, the first four boats in the fleet powered along in 30 knots of northwest wind.

Behind, cut off from the fresh downwind breeze, Holcim-PRB, Canada Ocean Racing, and Team Amaala were left chasing the fleet at half speed in just 12 knots of southeast.

Photo: Anne Beaugé / The Ocean Race.

An exciting overnight speed test saw Paprec and Allagrande fighting neck-and-neck in an exciting drag race.

“Both boats were doing 35 knots with maybe 100-metres of distance between us,” said Allagrande skipper Ambrogio Beccaria. “It was quite scary, unreal – one of the best sailing moments of my life for sure.”

Unstable conditions, thunderstorms aplenty, and frequent wind turns saw a reshuffling of the Leg 5 leaderboard as the Ocean Race Europe fleet came up on Sicily.

“You always need to be careful in these conditions – always one hand for the boat and the other for whatever it is you are doing,” warned Francesca Clapcich.

Holcim-PRB makes a comeback off Sicily

As they hit lighter winds under Sicily, Holcim-PRB made straight for the waypoint instead of tacking to the North like Allagrande, Biotherm, Malizia, and Paprec.

Skipper Rosalin Kuiper’s gamble quickly paid off– Holcim-PRB jumped from fifth to first place.

Photo: Jean-Louis Carli / The Ocean Race Europe 2025.

Biotherm retakes the lead towards Boka Bay

After rounding the final ‘India’ waypoint, the leading pack rearranged once again.

With Biotherm again in the lead, followed by Allagrande Mapei, Malizia, Paprec, and Team Holcim-PRB, the compressed fleet proceeded North upwind.

“These are good Biotherm conditions – flat water, medium wind – it’s perfect,” said Meilhat. “We have a lot of upwind now as we head to the North.”

Beccaria said he hoped instead for downwind conditions, hoping to pass closer to Italian shores. Allagrande eventually broke away from the rest of the front of the pack in search of more favourable conditions, but the gamble dropped them from third to fifth when the expected wind proved elusive.

Photo: Adrien Cordier / The Ocean Race.

Meanwhile, Canada Ocean Racing and Team Amaala crawled on at the back of the fleet.

To facilitate stopover activities in Boka Bay (and the expected Coastal Race), the Race Committee offered an alternative waypoint to give the two teams the option of shortening the race course, which meant the fleet trailers would trade an earlier arrival for the possibility of placing higher than sixth for the leg.

The Ocean Race Europe sails into the Adriatic sea

Photo: Pierre Bouras / The Ocean Race.

As the fleet entered the Adriatic, Biotherm was still at the front and covering their closest rivals tack for tack.

Paprec Arkèa gambled on an eastern route along the Albanian coastline with little success.

Not far behind, Holcim-PRB and Malizia jostled in an upwind match race, with sailors on both boats keeping a close eye on each other’s sail choice, boat speed, and angle.

While touring the boats during the stopover in Genoa, we learned that some teams like to keep their tricks up their sleeve, even changing or disguising their sail bags to keep their tactical choices a secret until the last moment!

The conditions required teams to stay on high alert to not lose their ground.

“You would think these are pretty steady, similar conditions, but it is not easy,” explained Holcim-PRB sailor Carolijn Brouwer. “The wind is up and down between nine and 12 knots. When we are sailing upwind when we get to 12 knots we are at the upper range of the big sail we have on – the J0. The wind is incredibly shifty – 20 to 25 degrees sometimes.

You really need to be precise and on top of it all the time, to react to the differences in pressure and the shifts in the breeze. That requires a fair bit of concentration and you have to be paying attention all the time.”

Biotherm wins final leg of the Ocean Race Europe

Photo: Julien Champolion / The Ocean Race.

It hardly came as a surprise when Biotherm was first into Boka Bay, having completed the 1,600 nm leg in seven days, eight hours, 33 minutes, and 13 seconds.

Rosalin Kuiper’s Team Holcim-PRB took second place for Leg 5 after staging an impressive comeback to rejoin the leading pack. Third was Boris Herrmann’s Team Malizia; failed tactical experiments from Ambrogio Beccaria’s Allagrande Mapei and Yoann Richomme’s Paprec Arkea left them in fourth and fifth.

“It didn’t pay off,” Richomme commented. ‘But that’s racing sometimes.”

Nonetheless, Beccaria seemed satisfied with the sheer range of conditions teams faced during the Ocean Race Europe Leg 5.

“Leg 5 for us was a real Odyssey, a huge race where a lot of things happened. We had a lot of light wind and strong wind. All the way down to Corsica and Sardinia we had a lot of wind. On the way to Ustica we had a huge amount of wind and a super flat sea, so we were at 35 knots of steady boatspeed – it was unreal,” he commented.

The Ocean Race Europe’s Coastal Race in Boka Bay

Photo: Vincent Curutchet / The Ocean Race.

A Coastal Race upon the fleet’s arrival in Boka Bay closed out the racing events and gave teams a chance to grab last-minute points for their overall ranking.

The results of the Coastal Race pretty closely matched the overall leaderboard, with the only difference being team Allagrande Mapei edging out team Be Water Positive overall thanks to their Leg 4 win.

Even in close quarters, Biotherm once again came first, followed by Paprec Arkea, Holcim-PRB, and Team Malizia.

The Boka Bay Coastal Race results:

1. Biotherm
2. Paprec Arkéa
3. Team Holcim PRB
4. Team Malizia
5. Be Water Positive
6. Allagrande Mapei Racing
7. Team Amaala

What’s next for the Ocean Race?

Photo: Julien Champolion / The Ocean Race.

While the teams rest, reshuffle, and recover after their 7-week sprint around Europe, the Ocean Race events group is busy planning the upcoming calendar.

In November, The Ocean Race Summit Youth in Genova will explore how sport can be a platform for environmental change, and a tool to help build a more sustainable future for our world’s oceans.

In 2026, the first Ocean Race Atlantic will connect New York and Barcelona with a 3,200 nautical mile sprint. It will be the first point-to-point race in the 50-plus year history of The Ocean Race. Like the Ocean Race Europe, the event will feature mixed crews, though this time with a industry-first 50-50 gender split, as well as a focus on ocean conservation advocacy.

In 2027, the 15th edition of the iconic round-the-world Ocean Race will set off from Alicante, Spain.

“The Ocean Race is always on,” says Race Chairman of The Ocean Race Richard Brisius. “Our drive to protect and restore ocean health is a daily mission […] These events serve as inspirational touch points on the journey where we all get together with renewed focus and determination as we connect with the ocean.”

If you enjoyed this article on the Ocean Race Europe 2025…

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The post Biotherm wins the Ocean Race Europe Leg 5— and the rest of it appeared first on Yachting World.

Given what the IMOCA 60 class was designed for – and the way in which blasting around the world non-stop, alone, on foils in just under 65 days grabbed everyone’s attention last winter with the Vendée Globe – we could be forgiven for thinking that a six-leg, fully crewed, stopping service around Europe is a walk in the park for the world’s top sailors and their 60ft rocket ships.

You might not be surprised to hear they don’t seem to see it like that. After all, what’s the point in talking down an event that many of them have been talking up for months in the boardrooms of potential commercial backers?

I spent a bit of time with the skippers and crews on board their boats and on the dock ahead of the start of The Ocean Race Europe in Kiel, and it’s quite clear they mean it when they say that the 4,500-mile, six-week race would be extremely tough.

Sam Goodchild, who is sailing aboard Biotherm, looked me straight in the eye and said: “It’s not going to be easier than the Vendée Globe that’s for sure.”

Biotherm skipper Paul Meilhat, who finished 5th in the last race around the world, and who sailed Biotherm fully crewed in the 2022/23 Ocean Race told me that, while he had recuperated physically from his recent lap of the planet, he hadn’t fully recovered from the project mentally and that this race around Europe would give him, ‘the kind of slap in the face that I need to get back on track!’

Photo: Jean-Lous Carli / The Ocean Race Europe 2025.

Both of them talked of the intensity of the race and the focus it requires – particularly the complexity of a course that weaves itself around sand banks, rocks and wind farms to exclusion zones, shipping lanes and general traffic. They talked of the complex weather, the tides and, of course, their competitors. The crews may have barely discussed a watch system, given that there’s so little opportunity to operate one if you’re going to stay ahead of the pack.

The longer legs in this race from Kiel, Germany, to Boka Bay in Montenegro, each take around four days, around the time that the rest of us might take to do the Fastnet Race. But in their case, they do five of them back-to-back with just three days at best between each race. Each team is also limited to just five shore crew, which means the race crew will have to muck in at the stopovers if there is (and there will be) anything to fix.

The fact is that even though The Ocean Race Europe doesn’t really bill it like this, the crews see this as a very different and intense race for this class, something akin to the Figaro, or perhaps even a bigger version of the Tour de France à la voile of the early 2000s when it was raced in Mumm 30s.

So, whether you were talking to Yoann Richomme, Brian Thompson, Boris Herrmann, Cole Brauer, Pip Hare or Alan Roura, they all said much the same. They also said they were looking forward to learning from each other.

“When you sail on your own all the time you do tend to stick with your way of doing things,” Goodchild pointed out. “But working with others who have been your arch competitors provides a great opportunity to try out different techniques.”

Article continues below…

‘This one was special’ – Homecoming victory for Beccaria in The Ocean Race Europe Leg 4

Ambrogio Beccaria’s team Allagrande Mapei Racing made a triumphant finish to The Ocean Race Europe Leg 4 as they arrived…

Biotherm wins Ocean Race Europe Leg 3 after going neck-and-neck with Team Holcim-PRB

In the latest from the Ocean Race Europe Leg 3, Biotherm is still defending its perfect streak from Leg 1…

And therein lies a hint to something else that’s going on in this class. The ability to experiment, test, develop and refine the IMOCAs by pushing them harder with a full crew than you would alone is providing a form of accelerated learning in some cases.

The last around-the-world Ocean Race ended up attracting a lot of interest from the offshore rock stars as they started to see that some of their arch-rivals were collecting valuable data on the long ocean legs that might be useful in their solo campaigns. For some, that resource remains in their minds and they’re using the wide variety of races now available for this class as a means of learning more.

With 5-10 new boats expected for the next Vendée – several in build and price tags of up to €6m apiece – there’s no shortage of focus on winning the ultimate solo prize.

But the newfound intensity in crewed IMOCA racing can also come at a price, as Holcim PRB and Allagrande Mapei Racing discovered less than a mile off the start line in Kiel when a serious collision forced both of them out of the leg.

Dramatic as it looked, the large hole in the side of Holcim wasn’t the biggest issue, instead it was time. Fixing this kind of damage can be done, but when the round Europe schedule is as relentless as this one, a crisis like this can be a huge blow to a campaign.

No wonder the teams don’t see this race as a walk in the park.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post ‘Teams don’t see The Ocean Race Europe as a walk in the park’ – Matt Sheahan appeared first on Yachting World.

Ambrogio Beccaria’s team Allagrande Mapei Racing made a triumphant finish to The Ocean Race Europe Leg 4 as they arrived in Genoa, Italy early Wednesday morning.

Beccaria, who built and launched his Class 40 yacht in Genoa in 2022, said he considers the city his second home, and was overjoyed to have gone from missing Leg 1 completely due to a dramatic collision with Holcim-PRB to winning this stretch.

The Ocean Race Europe Leg 4 saw the fleet of IMOCA 60s on a 600 nautical mile leg that started in Nice before snaking around Corsica, through the famed Bouches de Bonifacio, and into Genoa, which hosted the Grand Finale of inaugural edition of The Ocean Race Europe in 2021.

Already at the start of the Ocean Race Europe Leg 4, Beccaria had said he had only one goal– to be first across the finish line in Genoa.

After coming ashore in the night, having finished the leg at 01:42:14 local time on Wednesday 3 September, he confirmed, “I always want to win every leg. But this one was special because the finish was in Italy.”

Beccaria wasn’t the only Italian sailor looking forward to a homecoming.

Francesca Clapcich of Team Malizia said, “I’m really looking forward to having a lot of Italian people coming down in Porto Antico in the middle of the city. We have an Italian boat also in this race with Ambrogio. Hopefully people will be really excited to come down, check it out, and spend time together.”

Second at the end of the Ocean Race Europe Leg 4 was Yoan Richomme’s Paprec Arkéa, followed by overall race leader Biotherm in third.

Ocean Race Europe Leg 4 at a glance

• The fleet leaves Nice sailing upwind
• Biotherm first through the scoring gate off Monaco
• Light winds off the Western side of Corsica
• The pace picks up as the fleet races through the Strait of Bonifacio
• Power outage onboard Allagrande Mapei as they pass the Island of Elba
• Homecoming victory for Ambrogio Beccaria and team Allagrande Mapei

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Ocean Race Europle Leg 4 starts in Nice

The fleet, Code Zero headsails high, headed upwind in 8 knots of wind. Photo: Jean-Lous Carli / The Ocean Race Europe 2025.

Holcim-PRB, with Nico Lunven replacing skipper Rosalin Kuiper for Leg 4, and Paul Meilhat’s Biotherm made the cleanest start, slipping away from the pack within the first minutes of the race.

Team Amaala opted for a port start, heading offshore hoping for stronger winds and hoping to reap the benefits of a radically different tactic.

Paul Meilhat of Biotherm, the race’s clear overall leader, had commented, ‘It’s better to be the hunted than the hunter, that’s for sure. I don’t really care about the pressure. It’s not that I like it, but it doesn’t affect me a lot. When you’re chasing the others, it’s more pressure. You have a problem to fix, you’re not really confident.”

True to his word, Biotherm was once again first through the scoring gate at Monaco, snatching the lead from Paprec Arkéa at the last second.

Photo: Gauthier Lebec / the Ocean Race Europe 2025.

The winds died away overnight, taking the fleet through patches of calm. Paprec Arkéa held speed more consistently than the fleet, managing to gain a one mile lead.

A breath of air around 2am separated leaders Holcim, Paprec, and Biotherm from the rest of the group.

“Our first night at sea didn’t really go according to plan,” said Team Malizia’s Cole Brauer of falling behind, which she called “disappointing.” “They were blasting away while we were just sitting ducks.”

Uncertainty in the Mediterranean

In the Mediterranean, “Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” said Biotherm’s Benjamin Ferré. “We study the Meteo and try to understand what will happen, but in the end it is totally different. So we just have to adapt, keep moving, keep focused, and try to go as fast as possible in the right direction.”

Pip Hare, who sailed the last leg of The Ocean Race Europe 2021, said, “My experience is there is not a lot of wind, with waterspouts and thunderstorms – it throws it all at you.”

Photo: The Ocean Race Europe, Powered by PredictWind.

As in Leg 3, Italian sailor Ambrogio Beccaria of Allagrande Mapei remained unfazed by the unpredictable conditions in his home waters.

“I love Mediterranean sailing,” he commented. “I was born here and it is what made me love the sea. I hope she loves me too, but sometimes it is a difficult relationship and it is hard to understand what she wants.”

Sprint through the Bouches of Bonifacio

Team Hoclim-PRB pulled ahead as the fleet approached Bonifacio, with Biotherm and Paprec Arkéa close behind. They were fresh off a long night of light air sailing, during which the fleet stayed compact.

“There’s going to be lots of manoeuvres now, lots of tacking, a transition. We will probably go into the strait upwind and come out of it downwind. It’s going to be a busy few hours,” said Alan Roberts aboard Team Holcim-PRB.

As the fleet came into the Strait of Bonifacio and the wind increased from five knots to nearly thirty, the sailors had to exchange their enormous Code Zero headsails for smaller J3s.

Photo: Julie Champolion / The Ocean Race Europe 2025.

“Racing around Corsica is always very tricky because the mountains on the island are big and their wind shadows are huge,” says Paprec Arkéa’s Yoann Richomme.

Holcim – PRB skipper Lunven explained how the Venturi effect impacted conditions, “In the Bonifacio Strait the wind increased because of the funnelling effect between Corsica on our port side and Sardinia on our starboard side. These islands are very high – especially Corsica – between 2,000 and 2,500 metres. It is a narrow passage between the two, so the wind accelerates a lot.’

Still, he commented, ‘30 knots for Bonifacio is an easy day – it could have been way worse!”

Allagrande pulls ahead off the Island of Elba

Photo: Pierre Bouras / The Ocean Race Europe 2025.

Even as they dealt with an onboard power issue that left them without sailing instruments for an hour, Ambrogio Beccaria’s team Allagrande Mapei managed to pull ahead of the fleet while passing the island of Elba.

“At one point we tried to charge our battery and the engine didn’t start. So we had to shut down the whole boat, steer the boat with nothing – at night. Morgan succeeded in repairing the alternator and we were able to go on with the race. But that moment could have been the end for us,” said Beccaria.

Allagrande’s triumphant arrival in Genoa

Photo: Lloyd Images / The Ocean Race 2025.

Beccaria’s Allagrande Mapei held on to their lead and made the most of an incoming breeze from a Mediterranean low pressure system. They sprinted towards Genoa, hitting 25 knots of downwind foiling speed and increasing their advantage to 20 nautical miles over chasers Paprec Arkéa.

Undaunted, Paprec Arkéa managed to shrink the gap to just eight miles, but it ultimately wasn’t enough to overtake Beccaria’s homecoming team, which pulled away again thanks to an offshore drainage breeze.

When is the Ocean Race Europe Leg 5?

After enjoying celebrations and some much-needed rest in Genoa, the fleet will set off for Ocean Race Europe Leg 5, the race’s last, on 7 August. The 1,000 nautical mile dash to Montenegro will take them through a scoring gate at Santo Stefano, in the Arcipelago della Maddalena, before the race’s grand finale in Boka Bay.

If you enjoyed this recap of the Ocean Race Europe Leg 4….

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The opening leg of The Ocean Race Europe was rocked by drama within moments of the starting gun as two of the IMOCA 60s  — Team Holcim PRB and Allagrande MAPEI Racing — collided at speed, forcing both boats to suspend racing and return to the dock in Kiel.

The incident occurred just after the fleet set off in big conditions, with strong winds delivering fast-paced action from the gun. While Biotherm and Paprec Arkéa pulled into the early lead, a sudden side-on impact between Holcim PRB to leeward and Allagrande MAPEI to windward brought the two team’s race to a halt before they had even cleared the first mile.

Both teams are now dockside in Kiel, where shore crews are assessing damage and preparing for rapid repairs. Fortunately, all crew members were reported safe following the collision.

Skipper Ambrogio Beccaria of Allagrande MAPEI Racing expressed visible disappointment on the dock: “I’m sad to be back here now,” he said. “The team made a huge effort to be here and we only did one mile of the race. It’s super sad for our competitor also. We are not alone in this story… We are checking the boat. For sure we will not drop out until there is no chance. It doesn’t seem easy, but we will see.”

Team Holcim PRB, skippered by Rosalin Kuiper, also confirmed significant hull damage. “We had to retire from the race because of damage to our hull,” Kuiper said. “It is very disappointing for our entire team, and for Allagrande MAPEI and for The Ocean Race as well. We have to repair this damage and that is what we are going to do.”

Race Director Phil Lawrence confirmed that both boats had suspended racing and returned to port, and noted that Holcim PRB has lodged a formal protest against Allagrande MAPEI Racing. “This matter will be handled by the International Jury at a time to be determined,” he added.

While the two damaged teams regroup, the race pressed on with Biotherm leading the fleet through the Kiel Lighthouse scoring gate, earning the first two points of the race. Paprec Arkéa followed close behind to take one point. Canada Ocean Racing – Be Water Positive impressed with a strong showing in third, ahead of Team Malizia and Team Amaala.

With strong winds forecast and a challenging course ahead — including wind farms, current zones, and the iconic passage under the Great Belt Bridge — this edition of The Ocean Race Europe is already proving to be intense.

Both Holcim PRB and Allagrande MAPEI Racing hope to rejoin the race in time for the next stage, with further updates expected early in the week.

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Despite their lack of foils, Eric Bellion’s and Jean Le Cam’s Raison-designed Non-foiling IMOCA sisterships (Stand as One Altavia and Tout Commence en Finistère – Armor lux respectively) were actually the newest IMOCAs in the Vendée Globe.

After his remarkable 4th place finish in the 2020 Vendée on a 2007 design, veteran racer Jean Le Cam contended that a non-foiling IMOCA could perform competitively at a fraction of the €7m-plus cost of a latest generation foiling boat.

Eric Bellion – who finished 9th in 2016 as first ‘rookie’, and was returning for 2024 – agreed. He was seeking an easier to sail design which could potentially be built as a mini series, giving younger skippers and SME companies backing them a way into the IMOCA game at a lower entry price with a modern, good looking boat.

Bellion and Le Cam both wanted a super-simple, super-light boat. Although they spoke to several different design studios, they settled on Raison who, over a decade ago, revolutionised Mini 650 sailing with his Magnum scow design. He has also pushed boundaries in the Class 40 with his 2019 Max40 scow Crédit Mutuel.

Though all recent IMOCA designs have fully enclosed cockpits, Le Cam and Bellion wanted theirs open to the air at the back. Sloping side decks give fast access to the outer deck. Photo: Photos: PKC Media

Le Cam and Bellion found a worthy partner in Raison. “He was available and hungry, had brought scows into racing in the first place and was keen to do his first IMOCA,” recalls Bellion. “Every time we went to see other naval architects they said ‘maybe just small foils…’.”

Support from Bellion’s sponsors Altavia got the project off the ground and Persico’s advanced build methods and their capacity to take on two Non-foiling IMOCA in quick succession made it possible in a tight time frame, with the boats shipped to CDK in Lorient for fitting out.

“We were originally inspired by Hubert, Le Cam’s much-modified 2007 Farr on which he finished 4th, and Theophile (2011 Verdier/VPLP, ex-Macif, sailed by Benjamin Ferré in 2024).

“We wanted to build the best daggerboard boats ever, a pair of boats which were on average 1.5 knots faster on all points of sail, that was the target. So this boat is very simple, very easy to sail and very light: 1.3-1.4 tonnes lighter than any of the newest boats with foils – the foils and structures cost so much weight. And they have very low electrical consumption: the screens are all small, there is no big innovation. When you are alone at sea the easier it is, the faster it is to sail.”

Article continues below…

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Reducing complexity includes a proven simple rudder system, flat decks, minimal carbon use, a low consumption 6Ah electrical system including no complex fibre optic sensors, and single skin hull bottom. “The daggerboards are just 30kg each and we don’t have as much structure,” Bellion adds.

“Most of the hull is monolithic, the deck is a honeycomb carbon sandwich.” “The boat is a little less than €5 million all in, ready to go – all sails, ropes, electronics.”

Jean Le Cam’s Tout Commence en Finistère – Armor lux is a sistership, with a marginally lighter keel. Photo: Eneour Lost

Max power

“The boat is an evolution of the Max 40 with the waterline adapted to the IMOCA rule,” explains designer Raison. “Below the waterline the boats are very light and so the hull depth is actually about the same as in Class 40. The lines are very, very straight and quite flat – we have the flattest boat in the IMOCA fleet.

“We are not so wide; Jean asked for that. The idea was to be not so wide and very light and so we matched two records (narrowest and lightest) with these two boats.

” There are very small differences between them. Eric’s boat is closest in the fleet to the maximum righting moment allowed – his was 25.499 tonne/metres so had just 1kg/m more to be at the maximum – he has something very powerful there. And Jean Le Cam has the lightest IMOCA in the fleet with a lighter bulb.”

The most obvious features of the Raison hull are the flat, slab sides and the full length chine which generates a side force like the rail on a windsurfer or catamaran. Le Cam notes, “The chine of the hull gives good stability to the boat. The actual heel angle depends more on the slope of the hull and thus also depends on the point of sail. Upwind or reaching we try to go for 20° of heel and it works well.”

Skipper’s seat positioned forward in the covered cockpit area with main trim controls to hand. Photo: PKC Media

Non-foiling IMOCA are ‘lightly proven’

Bellion began building in the spring of 2022 and went into the water in June 2023, while Le Cam was up against it with fitting out beginning in August 2023 before launching in September. He was not ready for the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre Normandie Le Havre and instead had to deliver his boat to Martinique to complete the solo Rétour à La Base, which he started late. Meanwhile Bellion retired early from the TJV with a structural issue. Le Cam completed the December 2023 solo transat in ‘delivery mode’ to keep on track to qualify for the Vendée Globe.

So as well as being newest, both boats had sailed fewer ocean miles than the rest of the fleet when they started last November’s Vendée.

Wily veteran Le Cam showed well in the early part of the descent of the Atlantic – staying well east and leading the rankings for a couple of days. He was left behind at the Canaries and the Cape Verdes in very light winds. But the best indications of his radical scow boat’s potential were in the Indian Ocean when he either held pace or was quicker than the foilers of Alan Roura (Hublot) and Isabelle Joschke (MACSF).

The straight boards are simple to handle and a fraction of the weight of a foiling board. Photo: PKC Media

All the time Le Cam’s was the first non-foiler boat, nearly 1,000 miles ahead of Benjamin Ferré. But the Atlantic climb and more sticky light winds were cruel to 65-year-old Le Cam. He had to climb the mast four times to fix halyard hook problems and lost miles.

Bellion proved a slower starter, initially spooked at the enormity of what he had taken on again. But he too found his feet in the south, although never pushing as hard as the ultra-experienced Le Cam. He ultimately had to abandon into the Falklands due to a problem with the J2 stay deck fitting.

Simple B&G H5000 system, solar and keel ram controls, PC screen, webcam, AIS and VHF. Photo: PKC Media

Non-foiling IMOCA’s offer great performance

Back in Les Sables d’Olonne Bellion told us: “The boat really was great at times, making 26-knot averages for 24 hours straight in the Indian Ocean when the seas were really crossed. We could see Jean was very fast then.”

Le Cam also reported that the boat performed well in waves. “Downwind, 140-145° to the wind, we were very fast with the FR0, the J3 and with one or two reefs.

“In comparison to Monnoyeur (Benjamin Ferré) we were faster most of the time.”

He concludes, “The boat needs to be fairly light. As she was a new boat, I think we put too much food and gear aboard and that was a handicap. We could have been much faster!”

Ultimately Le Cam finished 20th in the Vendée Globe, the third daggerboard boat. Benjamin Ferré was first non-foiler in 16th, followed just 16 minutes later by Tanguy Le Turquais (Lazare).

The slab-sided hull with full length chine is Class 40 inspired. Photo: Qaptur

It will be interesting to follow what happens next with these two radical designs. Raison feels they are still yet to see the best of the boats and has received enquiries from teams interested in building more. Bellion is intent on doing The Ocean Race Europe and believes the lighter winds and many transition zones of the Mediterranean may play to its strengths.

Looking forward to the 2028 Vendée Globe, which will likely see at least 10 more new foiling IMOCAS built, there could be a potential pool of 35 foilers in a limited field of 40. For younger skippers and lower-budget campaigns the cost savings of getting Non-foiling IMOCA are considerable.

Daggerboard boats may still have their place on the start line – though some observers and skippers, a militant Jean Le Cam included, have suggested a separate fleet should be considered – but they will have to work hard to qualify, and the competitive potential is not yet proved.

If you enjoyed this….

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British IMOCA skipper Pip Hare has announced that she’ll be racing alongside Canadian skipper Scott Shawyer on Shawyer’s Be Water Positive campaign for the 2025 edition of The Ocean Race Europe.

Pip will be onboard as part of the four-person team for every stage of The Ocean Race Europe, which is a crewed multi-stage race that begins on 10 August 2025.

Shawyer’s team is shortly about to take possession of their new foiling IMOCA yacht (details to be announced soon) on the next stage of his working towards the 2028 Vendée Globe.

“It’s a nice development,” she told Yachting World. “I’ve been speaking with Scott ever since he started his campaign. I remember what it was like coming into the class and kind of feeling a bit isolated – so I always try to check in with him, see how he’s doing, see if there’s anything I could support him with.

Hare and Shawyer in the foiling ‘Canada Ocean Racing’ IMOCA – details to be unveiled soon.

“Then after my dismasting (in the 2024 Vendée Globe) we started talking about what a collaboration might look like, whether I could support him with stepping up into a foiling boat.”

Hare’s own IMOCA is currently being shipped back to Europe after dismasting in the 2024 Vendée Globe. She is currently seeking a new title sponsor for her own Vendée Globe 2028 campaign.

“It’s one of the really positive things about being able to collaborate within the class.

“We’re all out there on our own with our own projects and very much in competition, particularly at the moment. Trying to find sponsorship is very hard for everyone. So all pulling together to maintain our knowledge, to keep driving performance while still trying to look for our own projects is going to be a really important thing for quite a number of sailors.

“I’m going to be kind of driving the sailing programme over the next two months. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity of sailing with some other IMOCA sailors and learning from them about how to manage the boat fully crewed – this idea of being able to sail a foiling IMOCA at max warp for days on end, the power of collective minds and strength. That’s really exciting to me.

“I’m just really pleased that Scott and I have been able to work something out. And it’s going to be exciting to see another non-French team making an impact.”

“I think we’re going to have a lot of fun over the summer.”

The course for The Ocean Race Europe – Leg 2 will be a monster!

Ocean Race Europe course

However, she points out that the course for the Ocean Race Europe is going to be tough.

The race starts from Kiel in Germany, with stage finishes in Portsmouth, UK, then a ‘flyby’ at Matosinhos in Portugal before finishing the long Leg 2 in Catagena, Spain. Leg three takes the fleet onto Nice, then they race to Genova, before hooking around Italy to finish in Montenegro.

“Having taken part in the Ocean Race Europe in 2021, I know about the challenges of the Mediterranean – particularly the massive frustrations as well of wind shadows and parking up.

“Leg two is going to be enormous and then the leg from Genoa to Montenegro is a complete unknown for me, that’s an area in the Med that I haven’t been to before.

“It’s going to be an intense race – the stopovers aren’t very long.”

Scott Shawyer shortly after announcing his IMOCA campaign ‘ Canada Ocean Racing’. Pictured here training on the team’s first run offshore with his original boat and mentor Alex Thomson. (Photo by Lloyd Images)

Shawyer, a successful businessman and lifelong amateur sailor, announced his Vendée Globe ambitions in 2022. He has since worked with Vendée veterans Alex Thomson and Nick Moloney as he builds experience and preparedness for the 2028 race.

“Pip is a ruthless competitor with a huge heart,” he said. “She brings a rare mix of tenacity, experience, and humanity to the team. Her ability to dig deep and lead through action will be a huge asset to us.”

The post Max warp speed for days on end! Pip Hare on joining Canada Ocean Racing for The Ocean Race Europe  appeared first on Yachting World.

As 2004 drew to a close, a 15-year-old Sam Goodchild was leafing through his dad’s copy of Yachting World – the magazine no doubt slightly dog-eared and delayed, by the time the subscription had been delivered to the family’s home in Grenada. Inside was the remarkable story of Conrad Humphreys, one of three British skippers in the Vendée Globe, who had to single-handedly repair the rudders on his IMOCA Hellomoto, diving underneath the boat off Cape Town.

Sam felt a jolt of inspiration. “I remember quite vividly reading an article on Hellomoto,” he recalls. “Conrad’s was the story that stuck in my mind. And that was where the idea of doing the Vendée formed.”

It was a time of change for the Goodchild family. Six weeks before the Vendée Globe fleet set off in France, Hurricane Ivan had ripped through the island they’d made home. Infrastructure was destroyed, and Sam spent a term going to school in Antigua, some 250 miles away. Not long after, he flew back to the UK, swapping barefoot sailing in the Caribbean for boarding school and dinghy racing on a chilly reservoir. But the Vendée spark kept burning.

Twenty years later, he celebrated his 35th birthday while leading the 2024 Vendée Globe. That teenage dream had been made real in a way he could never have predicted.

School runs by Optimist and a life afloat for Sam and his siblings. Photo courtesy of Sam Goodchild

Liveaboard life

Sam Goodchild was not quite born on a boat, but very nearly. “It was a matter of months,” he says. “My parents decided to go cruising while my mum was pregnant. My dad sailed across the Atlantic just after I was born, then I flew out with my mum. I was two or three months old.”

The family spent six years living aboard a 38ft wooden double-ender, cruising around the Caribbean. “It was a fairly slow life, mostly living on anchor. My brother turned up when I was three. There was a bit of homeschooling, and on a few of the islands, like Grenada and Tortola, we went to a real school.

“Now, having my own kids, you appreciate how daring and just how out-there it was to do that in the early ’90s. To jump on a boat and say, ‘we’ll figure things out as we go’ with two small kids and a third one coming.”

Goodchild’s father picked up some work doing carpentry as well as teaching. “My dad liked building things, and he built me a little dinghy, a plywood and epoxy Optimist, called Sea Urchin. When I was five or six, that was my happy place,” he recalls.

Any short-handed ocean racer has to be a jack-of-all-trades, able to make repairs on the fly. Goodchild grew up around boat work. “A lot of that came from my dad. I remember we used to call the engine room the angry room, because every time dad went in, he’d come back out angry! From building things with wood and tinkering, whether with engines or electronics or anything else, the fact that it interested me definitely came from my dad.”

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The family returned to the UK for a couple of years, but the draw of life afloat was strong, and they moved back to the Caribbean. “My dad bought a boat damaged in the hurricanes of 1998, we rebuilt the broken bits, and lived on that boat for another three or four years,” Goodchild recalls. The family settled in Grenada until he was 15.

With GCSEs looming, Goodchild went to a state boarding school in the rural Cotswolds – miles from the sea. Determined to find some sailing, he cycled to Farmoor reservoir, an hour’s pedal away. “I turned up on a Sunday, said, ‘I haven’t got a boat, I haven’t got a wetsuit, but I want to go sailing, what can I do?’”

Teenage Sam was soon in demand among the club dinghy fleet, and began racing 29ers. “Fairly quickly I also went match racing, because at 15, I was completely out of my depth with anyone that had done Optimist racing for 10 years, but a lot more at ease on a First Class 8 or a J/80.”

Sam Goodchild was the first graduate of the Artemis Offshore Academy aged 21, racing a Figaro. Photo: Lloyd Images

Life plan

He was selected for what later became the British Keelboat Academy when Alex Thomson’s team offered the opportunity for a couple of academy sailors to help deliver a Volvo 60. With his big boat experience, Sam was signed up. “I took my Easter holidays to sail across the Atlantic from Portsmouth to Canada,” he recalls.

“That opened my world up to meeting people that earned a living doing what my passion was. I thought, ‘I don’t need to go to school anymore, I know exactly what I’m going to do.’” His parents persuaded him to at least finish his A-levels, and a week after sitting his final exam, Sam was back working for Thomson.

He next moved to Mike Golding’s team, preparing Golding’s IMOCA for the 2008 Vendée Globe. “I was just a nipper, doing everything that no one else wanted to do. They once gave me glue to stick on a padeye and I did it so badly, I didn’t get given glue again!”

Sam’s 2013 Solitaire du Figaro was the best British result for 20 years. Photo: Maxime Flipo/Solitaire du Figaro

The 2008 Vendée was the biggest yet, with seven British entries. It was Goodchild’s first taste of the iconic event he’d read about four years previously. “I went down the channel on start day and no one had briefed me as to what it was going to be like. It was just complete mayhem. But to actually see it only increased my hunger to come back in my own way somewhere down the line.”

Making an impression

Creating his own opportunities, Goodchild pulled together a shoestring campaign for a double-handed Round Britain and Ireland. By the time the Artemis Offshore Academy programme was launched, with the aim of developing young British ocean racing talent, Goodchild had done a circumnavigation of Britain, a transat and transpac delivery, and years of living aboard.

“What stood out to us when selecting Sam as the first ‘graduate’ of the Artemis Offshore Academy was his contentment in being onboard a boat,” recalls Academy manager Charles Derbyshire. “It was his home, he could live onboard easily – this freed up so much capacity to plan ahead any manoeuvres or the race strategy. The rhythm of eating and sleeping, sunset and sunrise routines, was innate.

Years in fast multihulls, such as the Ocean 50, developed confidence offshore at speed. Photo: Getty Images

“He also took on board really early on that this was a long road: he wasn’t interested in finding a short cut knowing they are unlikely to exist, so exhibited that other required solo sailing trait: patience.”

Goodchild raced a Figaro for four seasons. In 2013 he was accepted by the Pôle Finistère training centre, and finished 11th overall in the Solitaire du Figaro, the best British result in over 20 years in the multi-stage solo race. Looking back on his Figaro career now, he is circumspect. “I was quite young and out of my depth. The hopes were higher than the results!”

Nevertheless, he had begun to make an impression. “I remember getting a phone call saying, ‘Hey, Sam, it’s Michel Desjoyeaux. I’m going to go do the Volvo Ocean Race, come with me’,” Sam recalls. His first reaction was, ‘I don’t believe you.’

The caller was indeed the legendary ‘Professeur’, and Goodchild joined Mapfre for the start of the 2014 round the world race. But the team imploded by Cape Town and Goodchild was let go. “I got back to France, having been fired by Mapfre, with no Figaro campaign, no money, no boat,” recalls Sam.

Next to call was Brian Thompson, offering racing on a MOD70 in the Caribbean. Goodchild was initially unsure: the options in front of him didn’t seem to lead towards his ultimate goal. “I said to Mich, ‘I want to do the Vendée Globe singlehanded, why should I sail a multihull fully crewed? Is it actually going to help me?’ He told me to go for it because 1), you’ll learn loads sailing with other people, and 2), when you come back to sail monohulls, you won’t be scared of going 30 knots anymore!”

On Holcim-PRB in The Ocean Race. Photo: Georgia Schofield | polaRYSE / Holcim – PRB

Unsurprisingly, Mich Desj was right. Goodchild crewed everything from the MOD70 Phaedo, to Jules Verne bids on Spindrift and Sodebo, sharing watches with some of the world’s best ocean racers. “Definitely something I enjoy about offshore sailing is that it’s constantly learning. I don’t think I’d be at ease in an Olympic campaign where you’re trying to perfect the same movement hundreds of times a day for four years. But I like to keep learning, to keep changing boats and sailing with different people.”

Desjoyeaux’s theory that multihull racing makes everything else seem a bit tame also proved true. “He was 100% right. In 2022 I’d been sailing for two years on the Ocean 50 (formerly Multi 50), which is arguably one of the most dangerous and sketchy boats to sail offshore. Ultims nowadays don’t really lean over – they fly flat. An Ocean 50 is a bit more old-school, you have to lean them over and they can pitchpole because they haven’t got T-rudders. You’re basically on edge the whole time.

“I went from that to a training session with the IMOCA Holcim PRB in 25-30 knots. We got hit by a gust and the deck spreader went in the water, the boat was at 35 degrees. I was thinking, this is all fine, no stress!”

His first TJV on the Class 40 Concise in 2013 ended when the boat began delaminating, but he took 2nd in 2019 with Class 40 Leyton. Photo: Lloyd Images

Dream realised

After years of grafting, his Vendée dream ultimately came together in a hurry. Having delivered some good results skippering the 50ft trimaran Leyton, he joined Thomas Ruyant’s team as part of a two-boat campaign. Sam took over Ruyant’s fast previous generation IMOCA, and by 2023 was lining up for his first Vendée Globe with Vulnerable. “You’re waiting for this big moment, and the moment takes years,” recalls Sam.

Once at the helm of his own IMOCA, he immediately made a big impression. “The 2023 season was what put the most pressure on because we hit the ground running and finished 3rd in every race of the season. I’d been given a great boat with a great team, but off the bat we outperformed expectations: our own and everyone else’s.”

But Goodchild could draw on his wide experience to give him confidence. “By going through all the steps I had to get there, I wasn’t going into the unknown. I’d been in the Southern Ocean with Holcim. I’d been sailing with Brian, he’d done the Vendée. I’d been sailing with Mich, he’d won the Vendée Globe twice. And little by little, it builds confidence. I could understand what they were doing, how they were doing it. I could be reassured that, ok, I might not have made exactly the same decisions or done it perfectly – but I’m not a million miles away.

Powered up on IMOCA Vulnerable ahead of the 2024 Vendée Globe. Photo: Pierre Bouras

“What worried me the most was the mental side of things,” he says. It was something he worked on with a sports psychologist before the Vendée Globe. “There were going to be points where my boat was fast, sometimes even faster than the new boats. And there were points when I knew I was going to be knots slower.

“When you’ll see that you’re losing 10, 20 miles on a position report, it was about making sure that I didn’t get into either a negative spiral of not enjoying it, or a dangerous spiral of taking too many risks and potentially breaking the boat just because I was trying to keep up with people you shouldn’t be able to keep up with.”

The deliberate approach paid off, Sam sailing strong and evenly, never getting too high or too low. When he spent his 35th birthday leading his first Vendée Globe, he sanguinely observed, “It’s going to be hard to beat that. But there’s a long, long way to go, I can’t cover 40 boats.”

Major sail repairs in his final miles. Photo: Sam Goodchild/VG2024

Similarly, when his mainsail exploded during a crash gybe while lying in 4th in his final week, he wasted no energy on disappointment, but threw himself into 48 hours of repairs to get the boat home. “You’re very much into: ‘What’s the action I can do to make the situation better now?’ as opposed to thinking back on what’s slipped through your fingers.” He ultimately finished 9th.

Sam set out with the ambitions of finishing his first Vendée, and enjoying it. He achieved both. Now, as the IMOCA world becomes a merry-go-round of sponsor negotiations, boat sales and build slots, he is trying for a second, even more competitive entry.

“The aim is to have a winning campaign,” he says. “We’re four years out from the start now. So the aim is to give myself the best chance to have a campaign that’s capable of winning it.

“For me, that is a very different campaign in terms of timing, in terms of money, mental preparation, risk management, in terms of everything. Especially when you look at how the last race was won: the level has been upped and the intensity has been upped. But that’s the aim. What’s the saying? Shoot for the moon and hope you land on the stars!”

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The post Sam Goodchild: from liveaboard to Britain’s best ocean racing prospect appeared first on Yachting World.

In the early hours of 15 December 2024, midway between Australia and Antarctica, my second Vendée Globe race came to a devastating end when my IMOCA Medallia dismasted. It still seems crazy that such a complex situation could be summed up in one sentence.

Almost exactly halfway through the most competitive solo round the world race ever, I had truly found my stride and worked my way up to 15th in the 40-strong fleet, ranking 2nd among the 2016-generation boats.

The Indian Ocean had been brutal for the pack I was racing in. It was my first experience of sailing big Southern Ocean conditions in a foiling IMOCA and I was learning every day about how to thrive. Our small peloton had been stuck in relentless winds and waves for two weeks, but we were heading out of the worst and rapidly catching the group of newer boats ahead.

At the time of dismasting I was waiting for the centre of a depression to pass over me. The wind had been light but was steadily building. The boat was not particularly powered up – reaching with a J2 jib and full main.

Medallia was flying, lifting out of the water on the leeward foil, surging forwards, the bow coming back down each time with a familiar crash. We flew and landed, flew and landed, then flew – but as the bow touched down the noise was different. I looked up through the cockpit bubble to see the mainsail falling towards me, deflected off the coachroof above. In two seconds my race was over.

It’s hard to describe the multitude of feelings that buried me in that moment: shock, disbelief and utter devastation. I felt sick, I was trembling, I wanted to curl up in a ball and stop the world from turning for even one more second.

Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

So many people had put so much energy into the four years building up to this Vendée Globe. It was failure and it hurt more than I could have imagined.

I contacted my team, who set the wheels in motion to communicate what had happened to the race committee, sponsors, supporters, followers and the press. Meanwhile I was alone on the Southern Ocean, and there was no time to give in to any sort of emotion. I needed to take control.

The most important rule of seamanship is to prevent your situation from deteriorating. The most immediate risk was presented by the jagged broken carbon mast bashing against the hull. In just 20 minutes since the dismasting the wind had strengthened and I knew the sea state would build rapidly. I needed to work quickly to separate the debris from the hull.

The 2024 Vendée Globe was Pip Hare’s second, and she was lying 15th when dismasted in the South Indian Ocean. Photo: Pip Hare Ocean Racing

Freeing the boat

IMOCAs have a wing mast which sits on a ball joint on deck with two deck spreaders. The lateral shrouds are ECsix, a type of rigging made from bundles of carbon rods enclosed in a fabric cover. Forestays and backstays are composite rigging cables. I had three forward stays up at the time of dismasting: the structural J2 stay, the J3 staysail furled, as was the J0 on the end of the bowsprit.

To release the mast I’d need to cut or unplug all these stays, as well as free the mainsail from the boom.

I carry a battery-powered angle grinder and a hacksaw. The angle grinder is always loaded with a cutting disc and has two fully charged batteries ready to go. My hacksaw is a standard full size saw with a brand-new metal blade loaded – I also had a full pack of spare blades.

I decided to start with the hacksaw, to understand the loads and see how difficult it would be to work safely with the motion of the boat before deploying a powered blade.

Article continues below…

Pip Hare dismasted in Vendée Globe: “I am so devastated”

Pip Hare, the only British based skipper in the Vendée Globe, has dismasted on Medallia while racing in the South…

How to turbo-charge a round the world racer

Ahead of me, the bow of Medallia is pointing at the sky. This is not poetic license; I am actually…

After surveying the situation I decided to salvage the furlers from the forward sails, then cut the windward rigging, then leeward rigging, then the boom. I managed the forward sails quickly, then moved to the windward shrouds. The hacksaw made light work of the carbon rigging. As soon as the windward stays were cut, the deck spreader was free and I knew I’d banked a way to make my jury rig.

With the windward rigging released the mast debris that had gone over the side moved closer to the boat, possibly because the top of the mast was able to sink.

This meant the stump started to hit the hull more aggressively. I realised the halyards and wiring loom that ran up through the centre of the mast were very loaded and connected the piece of mast in the water to the piece on the deck, holding the stump into the hull. I started to cut at the halyards with my knife, but cutting through Dyneema line is not fast, and the blade blunts quickly.

I switched to the hacksaw and under tension a sharp serrated hacksaw blade made light work of halyards and trip lines, and both wiring looms. It was a big learning point on how a hacksaw can be a versatile tool.

Mast debris on the coachroof and dangling overboard before Hare could cut it free. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

Once the two sections of mast were separated, the weight of the debris shifted on to the boom. It took a while to cut through all of the lines connecting the boom, mast and mainsail and there was a constant pressure pulling the boom towards the crushed lifelines on the side deck. This was the hardest part of the whole procedure and where I had to take most care of my safety, ensuring I was always cutting from windward to avoid being dragged overboard if the boom suddenly loaded up.

With hindsight, I should have cut the mainsail free first.

The work to cut the rig free took less than an hour and during that time I found a sense of calm and almost content. Adrenaline plays a massive role in our survival during these extreme moments, not only negating fatigue and physical weakness but keeping your mind sharp and allowing quick decision making.

I was surprised how calm I felt when I returned to Medallia’s cabin to message my shore team and tell them the situation was contained. It was approaching midnight in Europe, both I and the boat were safe, so I suggested the team got some sleep.

Deck spreader became a jury mast. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

Jury rig

I had a clear picture of how I’d make a jury rig mast using a deck spreader. I could use the ball joint as the mast step and attach three stays to the eyes of the old shrouds. Setting up the forestay and backstays was quick and easy: I put a snatch block on the bow to make a forestay using my spinnaker snuffer downline. Then I used existing backstay blocks, with extensions to the runner tails, to make backstays. All the stays were quickly attached with soft shackles.

The tough part was going to be keeping the foot of my new mast in place during stepping. I put a neoprene balaclava from my cold weather kit over the ball joint to make it softer and less slippery, then tied a jib control line around the ball joint.

This line came out through a central hole in the deck and so held the bottom of the new ‘mast’ centrally, and allowed me to apply some down force to the mast step while pulling it into place. I made a halyard for the storm jib using a carabiner as a turning block.

Erecting the mast was easier than I expected. With the ball joint held in place, I pushed the deck spreader out to the windward side of the boat, then took it in turns applying tension to the forestay, downline and leeward backstay. Once everything was highly loaded, I went on deck and started to use the roll of the waves to bounce the mast into the air.

Neoprene balaclava stopped mast base slipping around. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

There was a lot of to and fro, but slowly I could throw the mast upwards, each time it fell to a position further and further off the deck. Finally it was high enough that I could use the leeward backstay to wind it into position, then wound on the forestay to add height.

Once up, I secured it firmly alongside the original mast step with a ratchet strap. Next I hoisted the storm jib, and within three hours of my dismasting I was sailing again.

It was then I hit a wall of emotion and exhaustion that knocked me hard. The crippling feelings of loss and guilt at my race ending were intensified by the incredible isolation of being alone, in a cold, wet and stricken boat in one of the most remote places on the planet. For one day and one night I was unable to do anything except sit and cry and sleep. It was a dark 24 hours.

But in solo ocean racing, consumption by self-pity is not a long-term option. I was the only person that could make things better. I was safe, with plenty of food and the means to generate power and water. The boat was sound and functioning. I was not in danger; I was simply inconvenienced. I still had 170lt of diesel which could provide a range of around 200 miles. I even had Starlink and a Netflix subscription. Life was not that bad.

Far from being helpless, it was clear I could in fact make things better. So I decided to pour my energy into making my jury-rigged IMOCA as efficient as possible and my journey to the shore as professional as my race had been. Over the next 13 days I turned my ingenuity and skills to this task and documented it in daily videos, in a YouTube series I called ‘The slow boat to Melbourne’.

Pip back underway with her jury rig working well. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

Finding safe harbour

Although the closest large port was Hobart, I opted to sail an extra 150 miles north and make Melbourne my destination. Choosing a large shipping port in mainland Australia seemed more sensible for shipping either a spare mast to Medallia, or the boat back to Europe.

But to get to Melbourne I’d need to stay well upwind of Tasmania, which if passed too close could become a dangerous lee shore in the prevailing westerlies.

I adapted my usual routing software to reflect new speeds and wind angles – reducing the polar percentage to 12-15% of maximum and restricting the maximum upwind angle to 80°, but allowing software to send me dead downwind. Over time I was able to increase my polars to 20% in good conditions.

I needed to change the geometry on the storm jib to make any progress reaching or with the wind ahead of the beam. Because the mast was short, the tack position for the jib was a long way forwards, which rotated the whole sail aft. This meant when the existing clew was sheeted on to maximum, it was touching the deck. I didn’t want to permanently damage the storm jib so added a second clew point higher up for reaching by attaching two Dyneema strops to the sail, one on each side, held in place with patches of sail cloth glued to the sail with Sikaflex.

On day three I made a trysail from one of my existing damaged sails. I cut the head off, rotating the sail through 90° so the head of the old sail became the new clew. The two loft finished edges became the leech and the foot.

Hare sailed Medallia for 13 days and around 800 miles under jury rig before reaching Melbourne. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

I made a head and tack using Dyneema loops, then repurposed two webbing boom loops to hold them into the new mast. I was able to attach the existing mainsheet to the trysail clew and use the full width traveller. The trysail doubled my speed on certain wind angles – giving me a top speed of 8.4 knots – and allowed me to sail at 70° TWA in lesser sea states.

As an IMOCA is very flat under the waterline it was key to move as much weight forward in the boat as possible. This helped in two ways: when trying to sail to windward it meant the bow was not blown off the wind quite so easily. Secondly, following seas had been pooping the cockpit, often filling it up to knee height. Moving weight forward alleviated this a little. I was also meticulous about closing the valve on the engine exhaust after each time I charged the batteries, to avoid flooding via the exhaust.

I was under jury rig for a total of 13 days, and carried out visual checks to the rig and the deck under the mast step every day. On day nine I was becalmed for 18 hours so I used the opportunity to take the rig down, check all fastenings and the deck before putting the rig back up again. In my final approach to Melbourne I had to sail through 45-knot winds and 6m waves, which I was more confident in having been able to make a good rig check.

Routing polars had to be adapted after the dismasting. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

I only ran the engine for propulsion for 12 hours – on the night I was becalmed, at low revs to make 3 knots through the water. The rest of the time I kept my fuel reserves for getting into Melbourne, when I knew I might have to navigate through confined areas.

Halfway between Australia and Antarctica there is virtually no passing traffic so the risk of collision was low until I approached the Australian coast. I used a web application to check AIS – this only gives limited data for vessels uploading AIS data via satellite, but is better than nothing. I also hoisted an emergency VHF antenna up the mast to boost my own AIS signal.

Keeping busy

I was genuinely surprised by how busy I could keep myself with optimisation tweaks and boat maintenance.

I guess it’s a state of mind. On a boat, if you chose to be busy there’ll always be something to do. When there were no sails to adapt, I spent time taking an inventory of my leftover food. I serviced my tools. I cleaned. It was important for my mental wellbeing to stay busy and feel like I still had the power to make my own environment better.

A small flotilla joined Medallia as Hare motored across Port Philip Bay. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

During the night hours, I used my excellent Starlink signal (now unencumbered by pesky sails blocking the antenna) to speak with other skippers and call Europe and the US. Overnight I also slept for long stretches, absolutely exhausted in mind and body.

I finally arrived at Port Philip Heads on 27 December and was met by a volunteer crew from the Ocean Racing Club of Victoria. A crew of four on board the 60ft powerboat Little Miss Magic came out to meet me as dusk fell and escorted me overnight towards the tidal entrance of Port Philip, allowing me to get some sleep.

In the morning Little Miss Magic became my pilot boat, guiding me through the Port Philip Heads and into the bay, where the crew passed two jerry cans of diesel and a welcome hamper full of fresh fruit. It took 12 hours to motor across Port Philip Bay, and over the day we formed a small flotilla as various boats came to welcome me and show their support.

Every detail of my arrival to Melbourne City Marina had been organised: customs and immigration were waiting along with a crowd of people assembled on the dock. The shining silver lining in a devastating episode has been the care and kindness shown to me by the sailing community in Melbourne.

Relief for Pip Hare as she makes landfall at Port Philip, Melbourne. Photo: Pip Hare/Team Medallia/VG2025

The Aftermath

With the boat safely in Melbourne the real hard work now begins to get the team racing again. In the 24 hours immediately after the dismasting I struggled to see my future. Following six years as title sponsor Medallia decided not to renew its contract, so we have the major task of finding a new title sponsor ahead of us. Added to the challenge of recovering from a dismasting far from home this is a huge mountain to move. In my dark moments, it seemed to be a flashing neon sign telling me to give up.

But the unexpected consequence of my ‘slow boat’ journey was the time and space to find hope and energy to stand up and fight again. I started my Vendée Globe campaign with a £25,000 bank loan in late 2018. Over
the intervening six years, we’ve grown to establish a successful and respected ocean racing team, which has forged its way to become one of the top 10 IMOCA teams in Europe – despite being the only team based in the UK, and on a relatively meagre budget.

Ocean racing is my life, my passion and my career.

I know I have much more to give, I have not yet reached my peak performance potential. I’m determined that both my team and I can not only continue to advance and progress at the elite end of this sport, but also make lasting change by diversifying the appeal and reach of a sport that can offer so much to so many people.

It’s not yet time to hang up my boots. We have many more miles left to sail.

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The post ‘As the bow touched down the noise was different… In two seconds my race was over’ – Pip Hare’s Vendée disaster appeared first on Yachting World.

That tens of thousands of Vendée Globe fans were prepared to get up in the early hours of the morning and camp out on a sea wall in the middle of winter to see a group of boats pass by is truly remarkable. I can’t think of another event in sailing that has this kind of pulling power on this scale.

There is no doubt the Vendée Globe is an extraordinary phenomenon. Forty years old, now in its 10th edition and with a record entry of 40 boats there’s nothing else like it in sport. The fact 39 boats made it down to the South Atlantic having crossed the Bay of Biscay was also a record.

But the success of this event has been no accident. Neither has the fact that the class is stronger than ever. That the Vendée Globe was oversubscribed this time around is evidence of that.

Yet success hasn’t been without its stresses, especially when it has come to deciding how to allow teams and their designers to continue to evolve and develop their machines at the leading edge of the sport. The recent development of the foiling IMOCAs has been fascinating to watch with speeds that are simply incredible.

Article continues below…

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The Vendée Globe leaders are locked into near-perfect conditions, riding the leading edge of a low pressure system in the…

But to fly the boat using a pair of asymmetric hydrofoils and then balance it fore and aft by dragging the stern around is not the way you’d set out to create a leading edge offshore machine if you started with a blank sheet of paper. Designing an aircraft with asymmetric wings, a lump of lead on one side and no tailplane isn’t a popular approach either.

Lifting the stern out of the water with a T-foil rudder would make life easier, quicker and some say safer. But the class voted it out back in November 2023 as it considered what the rules would be, not for this Vendée Globe but the next one in 2028.

It had been a big topic of conversation with plenty of advocates for making an IMOCA 60 fly properly. But the class is as sensitive to costs as it is to preventing a technical arms race that would fragment the fleet. The class achieves this by acting as a democracy: it’s the sailors and owners themselves who decide the rules. And when it came to defining what an IMOCA would look like for the next Vendée Globe they focussed on a different approach.

T-foils were voted out, largely based on cost, not just of the foils and control systems but also as a result of the amount it would cost to re-think the next generation of 60-footers. Even for those looking to re-configure their boats rather than build new, (which currently is around €7million), it was said that the cost could be as much as €2-3 million for a full facelift.

To fly the boat using a pair of asymmetric hydrofoils and then balance it fore and aft by dragging the stern around is not the way you’d set out to create a leading edge offshore machine

To some this may have looked like the class had frozen in the headlights as it struggled to figure out how to handle a key technical upgrade. Yet, looking back at its history there are several areas where the class has looked at what would make the racing better, safer, more popular and more reliable instead of going for outright speed. The move to a one-design keel fin is a good example.

Producing a robust design for everyone meant that the horror of broken keel fins has – touch wood – stopped.

So this time around, instead of going for T-foils, the class decided to approve a new one-design mast. This has been much needed for a boat that has developed significantly more power since the foils that created greater righting moment. Keeping the rig in the boat is a tricky, and at times stressful, part of sailing these beasts where alarms are pinging constantly with load monitors in the red zone.

But apart from performance and reliability, the IMOCA class also feels a responsibility to encourage more sustainability throughout the build and campaigning of the boats. From reducing the number of sails that a team can have, to crediting points to teams that, say, share moulds, there are several incentives that have been introduced to reduce the class’s carbon footprint.

During the recent Yacht Racing Forum in Amsterdam we heard of ways in which designers and builders are using panels produced using flax fibres and a green resin for some of the non-structural parts of the boat

But the really clever thing is that this is happening without seriously compromising the performance of the boat and without disgruntled teams and owners drawing stumps and heading to a different class. To maintain this for over 30 years, while still pushing at the leading edge, is remarkable and an example to many other areas of our sport.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post Why the Vendée Globe fleet is right to reject a full foiling rule appeared first on Yachting World.

British solo skipper Sam Goodchild today finished the Vendée Globe in an impressive 9th place, and first Brit home in the solo around the world race.

It was a hugely respectable performance for the ‘rookie’ skipper, who only joined the IMOCA class two years ago, with Goodchild and his previous generation IMOCA Vulnerable duelling with experienced French contender Jérémie Beyou on Charal for 4th place until the very last days of the race.

Sam Goodchild (GBR) finishes in 9th place in the Vendee Globe, on January 25, 2025 in Les Sables d’Olonne, France. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot / Alea

Sadly for Sam and British fans, the mainsail on Vulnerable split in a 54-knot storm just days from the finish, which ended his battle with Beyou and allowed four more boats to overtake while he made substantial repairs.

He finished after 76 days, 02 hours, 01 minutes and 45 seconds of racing, which put him 11 days, six hours and 38 minutes behind race winner Charlie Dalin of France.

Impressive rookie performance

Goodchild’s first Vendée Globe got off to an incredible start, leading for much of the early stages in the North Atlantic despite being on a boat which was four years older than most of the front-runners.

Ever sanguine, he told Yachting World in the first of a series of exclusive weekly video blogs, that he knew he ‘wasn’t going to lead all they way’. Nevertheless, he managed to hold on to an impressive top five position as the fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope, despite losing an autopilot at an early stage.

Once the fleet entered the Southern Ocean his previous generation boat – which team mate Thomas Ruyant had sailed in the 2000 Vendée Globe as LinkedOut – was outpaced by some of the newer foiling designs, but he rounded Cape Horn in a top 10 position.

He chipped his way back through the fleet on the return South Atlantic leg, maintaining a high work rate and taking some smart inshore routes.

By the time he passed Fernando de Noronha, he was locked in a duel with Beyou off the coast of Brazil duel – at its most intense the pair were just 3 miles apart as they passed the latitude of the Canary Islands, while a major front brought 7m-plus waves and 50-knot winds that the leaders had to pass through in the final week.

“A squall came through, I was sailing with 2 reefs and a J3, and in a big wave the stern got picked up and thrown to one side into a gybe. The pilot did its best to catch it, but unfortunately wasn’t quick enough. Because I was dead downwind the main did a quick gybe – broke all he battens around the backstay – and then when it gybed back again it just split it two.”

Goodchild diverted east, sailing goose winged under twin headsails, and began a mammoth 48-hour repair, using over a dozen tubes of glue and sikaflex to patch the split sail together with a rigid panel in the luff. Despite having to contend with waves washing down the deck while trying to glue the panels, he was able to rehoist his sail and continue sailing to finish within the top 10.

Sam Goodchild’s Vendée Globe

Speaking after today’s finish he said: “Today again, I knew that even if [the sail] broke again, I could finish. So, I gave it everything I had, and it held up.

“It’s true that [the damage] happened when I was competing for the Top 5, but in hindsight, I’m satisfied.

“My goal of doing this Vendée Globe has very much been achieved. I’ve been dreaming of this race for 20 years, it’s shaped my life. It’s why I live in France, why I have a French family… Everything revolves around the Vendée Globe, it’s the common thread of my journey.

“So losing a place isn’t so bad compared to what this adventure represents for me.”

Several times throughout the race he commented on how he was pleasantly surprised by how much he was enjoying the race – his longest period of sailing solo by many multiples.

“Of course, there were difficult moments, but ‘cracking up’ is not my style. And I just would not complain.

Sam Goodchild’s Vulnerable given a fantastic reception in Les Sable d’Olonne after finishing 9th. Photo: Anne Beauge / Alea

“Doing the Vendée Globe is a privilege. Complaining about sailing around the world on these incredible boats is just unimaginable for me. My goal was not only to complete the race, but also to have fun, to enjoy every moment. When it was tough, I remembered all the work I had done to get there, and it gave me energy.”

“I was lucky to have excellent preparation, especially with The Ocean Race on Holcim-PRB and on Thomas Coville’s Ultime Sodebo. So a lot of things were not completely unknown to me.

“On the other hand, I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much. I thought it would be harder, longer, more monotonous. In the end, it went very well, except for the last three days, when I found the time a bit interminable.

“What I found the hardest were the technical issues. These boats are so complex that there are always problems, big or small.

“You have to constantly arbitrate: how far can you push the boat? When should you stop to repair? This constant technical aspect, look after the boat was the real headache. Sometimes, I climbed the mast just to check that everything was okay. That’s clearly what I found the most trying in this Vendée Globe.”

Best British performance

Goodchild, who turned 35 during the race, is British born, though for much of his childhood his family lived aboard his parents’ cruising yacht, including spending time in the Caribbean island of Grenada.

He was one of the star graduates of the Artemis Offshore Academy, which was created with the aim of finding young British talent who could excel in the French offshore racing world. Having proven himself in the Figaro class and Classe 40 fleets, he skippered a very competitive Multi 50 campaign and also crewed for Ultim trimarans such as Sodebo.

As part of his IMOCA preparations Sam Goodchild sailed with Holcim-PRB in The Ocean Race, finishing fourth, and also scored a consistent clutch of 3rd places in short-handed IMOCA events with his own Vulnerable.  The Vulnerable program was unique as a two-boat campaign with Goodchild and Thomas Ruyant, sailing a newer Antoine Koch-Finot Conq design, who finished 7th.

He will surely be a strong British candidate for the 2028 Vendée Globe on the back of his impressive performance an experience gained in this race.

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French sailor Charlie Dalin has secured a long-awaited and hard-earned victory in the 2024 Vendée Globe, the grueling solo, non-stop, around-the-world yacht race. Dalin, skipper of Macif Santé Prévoyance, crossed the finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne on a cold Tuesday morning, sealing his place in history with an emphatic and masterfully executed victory.

Photo: Vincent Curutchet / Alea

Redemption after 2021 heartbreak

Dalin’s victory in this edition of the race serves as redemption for the disappointment he faced in the previous Vendée. In 2021, he was the first to cross the finish line, only to be relegated to second place after time compensation was awarded to Yannick Bestaven for his role in rescuing fellow competitor, Kevin Escoffier. This time, however, Dalin’s win is undisputed, with a dominant performance from start to finish.

His 2021 heartbreak was a moment that defined him. On January 28, 2021, in the early morning darkness and cold, Dalin watched from the victory pontoon as Bestaven was crowned the winner. Despite missing out on the title by just two and a half hours, Dalin displayed grace and sportsmanship, accepting the outcome while internally replaying the race in his mind for months to come. “I would wake up at night searching to find the minutes I had lost,” he later admitted. That loss has fuelled a relentless drive to return stronger in 2024.

This victory makes Dalin the first skipper ever to cross the finish line first in two consecutive races (Michel Desjoyeaux is the only sailor in history to have won the Vendée Globe twice, in the 2000 and 2008 races).

Record-breaking performance

Crossing the finish line with a total time of 64 days 19 hours 22 minutes and 49 seconds means the 40-year-old skipper shattered the previous race record set in 2016 by more than 9 days, underlining the superiority of his performance.

From the outset, Dalin showcased his tactical nous and consistency, leading at key most of the key race waypoints such as the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Leeuwin. His closest rival, Yoann Richomme (Paprec Arkéa), was just nine minutes and thirty seconds ahead at Cape Horn, but Dalin seized the lead on December 30th in the South Atlantic and never looked back.

One of the defining moments of Dalin’s race came in the treacherous Southern Ocean. He made a bold decision to outrun a powerful low-pressure system featuring 50-60 knot winds and massive seas. This audacious move, taken alongside then-second-placed Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil), allowed both sailors to gain over 500 miles on the fleet. While others faced punishing conditions, Dalin emerged unscathed, his careful sail management and reliable boat proving decisive.

Dalin at work in his IMOCA cockpit working on tactical decisions. Photo: Macif

A long rivalry

Dalin’s success has been shaped in part by his enduring rivalry with Yoann Richomme, dating back nearly a decade. Their battles in the Figaro class were intense, with Richomme narrowly defeating Dalin in the 2016 Solitaire du Figaro by just over five minutes after four stages of racing. The two were also teammates and training partners under the Skipper MACIF program, and their mutual respect continues to push them both to new heights.

Richomme’s performance in this race should not be ignored either. The Frenchman is, as we write this, a little over 100 miles from the finish line and is all but assured of second place in this, his first ever Vendée.

Photo: Jean-Louis Carli / Alea

Overcoming Setbacks for Ultimate Success

Despite his meticulous preparation, Dalin faced setbacks in the lead-up to the race. A medical issue forced him to sit out two key transatlantic races in late 2023. While frustrating, this unexpected break led to a crucial shift in his mindset.

He took extended holidays in the Caribbean and spent nearly 20 days relaxing in the summer—an unheard-of luxury for the previously relentless competitor. Dalin has stated that this newfound balance helped him return sharper, more focused, and more determined than ever.

Dalin has been racing under the MACIF banner since 2015, first in the Figaro class, and his Vendée Globe triumph delivers a second victory in the iconic race for the French insurance giant. The project is managed by MerConcept, the offshore racing powerhouse founded by 2012 Vendée Globe winner François Gabart, further solidifying MACIF’s legacy in solo ocean racing.

Crossing the finish line finst in his first Vendée Globe in 2021 and winning the race outright in his second edition must surely cement Dalin’s place among the greats of offshore sailing. His blend of tactical brilliance, unwavering consistency, and technical expertise has made him a deserving champion of the world’s most challenging solo race.

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The post Charlie Dalin clinches victory in the 2024/25 Vendée Globe and sets a new race record appeared first on Yachting World.

The winner of the 2024-25 Vendée Globe will be crowned early tomorrow, Tuesday January 15, and it looks set to be Charlie Dalin on Macif Santé Prévoyance.

Dalin, who has led since December 30, is now just over 110 miles from the finish in Les Sables d’Olonne, and current predictions are he will arrive between 0430-0830hrs (UTC) on Tuesday.

Barring some unforeseen disaster Charlie Dalin is poised to achieve a remarkable double.

Poised for victory… Charlie Dalin off the coast of Brittany today ahead of the Vendée Globe finish tomorrow.

He will be the first skipper ever to cross the finish line first in two consecutive races (Michel Desjoyeaux is the only sailor in history to have won the Vendée Globe twice, in the 2000 and 2008 races) – though this will be his first race victory, having finished 2nd to Yannick Bestaven on redress in 2021.

And he is likely to also demolish the course record, set in 2016 by Armel le Cleac’h at 74d 03h 36m. Dalin, and his second placed rival Yoann Richomme, both look set to complete the course in close to 65 days.

Vendée Globe final miles

Speaking to race organisers earlier today, Dalin said: “There will be some upwind to finish in some very cold temperatures, maybe the coldest night of the entire race, and it is going to be a flat sea.

“So that is my final picture, the boat skimming nicely upwind, sometimes foiling, close to the coast, that is how I picture it.”

Fading easterly winds along the French western coast have resulted in both Dalin and Richomme opting to approach to the north of Les Sables d’Olonne, sailing within sight of land off Penmarch, before cautiously heading south close to shore on a complex end to the final Atlantic stage.

The complex final approach to Les Sables d’Olonne for the leaders to the finish of the 2024/25 Vendée Globe

Dalin explained: “We are sailing so close to my training waters, where I have been so many times with the boat, and I will sail probably close to the home base which for me is a nice symbol, to be sailing close to Finistère where the boat is based and the boat was built.”

Though these waters are well known to the IMOCA skippers, many have trained on them relentlessly during their days in the Figaro class, they bring their own challenges for tired and stressed sailors, with complex tides, rocks, and fishing activity.

In the last race German skipper Boris Herrmann collided with another vessel in the final miles of the race, and in 2008 Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss was dismasted after a collision with a fishing vessel outside Les Sables before the Vendée start. Hence neither Dalin or Richomme, not their teams, will celebrate until their boats are finally approaching the sands of Les Sables d’Olonne safely.

Vendée rookie for 2nd

Richomme’s Paprec Arkéa is yet to lose the breeze, and has closed his deficit to Dalin to less than 100 miles – an astonishing achievement in his first Vendée Globe.

Richomme has duelled with Dalin throughout this Vendée Globe, the pair exchanging the lead since mid-December. But their history goes much further back, racing against one another at the front of the Figaro fleet for many years (Dalin on the podium five times, Richomme winning it twice).

Yoann Richomme is taking part in his first Vendée Globe on Paprec Arkéa. Photo: Yoann Richomme/Paprec Arkéa/VG2024

Speaking to the IMOCA class a few days ago, Richomme was magnanimous, saying of Dalin. “I would be happy for him if he won it.”

“I think he deserves it. I think the scenario of the last Vendée Globe (was unfair) on him and he deserves the win. If he does manage to win it, I will be happy for him, but I’m not going to offer it to him.”

Yachting World is in Les Sables d’Olonne for the finish, so watch our social media feed for live updates.

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Charlie Dalin approached the 2024 Vendée Globe with a unique perspective. Dalin’s previous boat, Apivia (now Clarisse Cremer’s L’Occitane en Provence) was one of the benchmark IMOCAs of its generation. So fast, in fact, that it wasn’t until Dalin arrived in Les Sables d’Olonne in January 2021 that it became obvious just how hobbled Apivia had been, with a MacGuyver-esque arrangement of improvised stays supporting the port foil for 13,000 miles.

Dalin was first across the line in the 2020/21 race, though eventually finished 2nd after Yannick Bestaven received redress time for his part in the rescue of Kevin Escoffier.

So when it came to creating a boat for the 2024 race, his target was to try and improve on a design so quick that it had effectively dominated the Vendée Globe fleet while sailing at reduced performance.

“Apivia was a really good boat,” Dalin explained. “In almost any condition, it’s just an amazing boat. It’s easy to go fast and it’s easy to maintain a high speed. But the boat had a small weakness: running dead downwind with a big sea state. That was a bit complicated.”

Fellow Vendée Globe skipper Yoann Richomme went further. “The conclusion of the 2020 generation was that they were bloody fast, and the foils were improving all the time, but the hulls were awful in the way the bows were digging all the time,” he told us in Les Sables d’Olonne.

Designing and building Macif took a team of 50 people, over 20 months and 60,000 hours of work. Photo: Ronan Gladu/Disobey/Macif

For the 2024 IMOCA cycle the design evolution has mostly centred on two major areas of improvement: hull shape and ‘liveability’. The aim is to create a hull shape that can handle big seaways without the huge speed losses – and damage potential – of slamming and nosediving into waves, but maintain fast, smooth averages.

Meanwhile there has been an increased focus on the interior spaces and how the skippers can safely survive – let alone perform at their optimum – at the sustained high speeds and brutal motion of a foiling IMOCA. Across the fleet there has been an intriguing variation in how to solve these problems.

Moving the volume

To draw his new Macif, Dalin returned to work once again with legendary IMOCA designer Guillaume Verdier. Verdier’s wizardry is evident from first glance with Macif’s complex hull form. There is a lot going on here.

Macif’s complex hull form with wave deflecting strakes and chines running forward. Photo: Maxime Horlaville/Disobey/Macif

The overall shape is the first thing that’s most striking; long gone are the days when IMOCA transoms flared out to maximum beam. “Because of how we managed to harness the power of the foils, we realised that there was a possibility to make a narrower hull shape, especially on the transom. And because we really wanted to get rid of this nose-dive problem, we essentially moved the volume forward,” Dalin explains.

“So we got narrower at the stern and made the boat as wide as we could, according to the rules, further forward, to give it as much power as we could in the forward sections, to avoid the boat going down [the mine].

“We’ve also got a bit more rocker, so the boat can sit a bit higher naturally. It’s a more natural position for the boat to sit when you’re sailing downwind, but reaching is not so good. [Combined] with the width distribution, we got a smaller wetted surface area compared to Apivia, so it’s better all round. The first time we went sailing on the boat, I really felt like the boat was less draggy in the water.

“If you look at the bow, it’s vertical at the sprit, at the very tip. Then we’ve got a hard chine all the way forward.”

Richomme also observed that the lower chine helps Macif take off at lower angles of heel, and lower speeds, for earlier flight.

The curved, slightly convex deck shape is inherently stronger and also disperses water. Note the toerail/flanges are also structural. Photo: Maxime Horlaville/Disobey/Macif

A ‘drier’ ride

As well as a hard chine, there is a relatively deep ‘strake’, which helps wave deflection – keeping water off the bow and off the deck is key. Again, designers of the newest boats have tried to tackle this problem in different ways.

On Macif the deck has a slightly ‘gull-wing’ organic shape, rising to mounds on either side, with its higher freeboard also helping keep the bow out of the sea. Dalin says there are multiple gains to it: “Having a deck which is this shape gives it a natural rigidity. The water presses against it, and if it was flat, that would just break.

“It’s like the inside of a cardboard box; you find this little wavy pattern. This makes it more rigid naturally, so you can put in less carbon.

“The second reason is because you’re lower down in the middle of the boat, you’ve got smaller bulkheads as well. And also, you lower your centre of gravity on the deck.”

The hatches can be partially closed from the bottom to keep out deck water, from the top to protect against spray, or left fully open/closed. Photo: Guillaume Gatefait/Macif

Structurally, getting the sides of the deck to take some of the loads and bending forces is advantageous, as he explains: “Basically, you’ve got 20, 25 tonnes pushing on the mast step. Then you’ve got the runners at the back and the stays forward. So the boat wants to bend. Having the sides of the boat higher means that some of the efforts are running on the side part of the deck.”

And because every part of the boat has been thought through in enormous detail, what looks like a simple toe rail is also structural trickery.

“We’ve added this little flange on the bow. With this feature, the water is just evacuated to the side. And it helps the structure for sure – instead of having something that’s useless inside the boat, like a horizontal stringer, this is multi-purposed.”

The winches have been arranged so every sheet can be used on three out of four units. Photo: Guillaume Gatefait Macif

Cockpit evolution

The area where Macif most departs from the rest of the fleet is inside. Covered cockpits have become a huge trend, with everything from Ultims to Class 40s pulling protection further and further aft to keep skippers safer and drier. Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss was probably the most radical IMOCA of the last generation for this, with a completely enclosed cockpit. Thomson’s ‘living’ space was something of an afterthought though – with a combination of bean bag and chair wedged in.

Skippers have gone for different arrangements this time around, with a raft of solutions to create a protected navigation and sleeping area. Sam Goodchild and Sam Davies both have aft-facing reclining and canting chairs in a central companionway, so they can view their screens while hurtling along, and won’t get thrown forwards. Alan Roura, whose Hublot is the former Hugo Boss, has a reclined ‘double’ chair behind the cockpit aft bulkhead so he can sit or lie on either tack. Richomme’s cockpit is entirely covered, and has a forward-facing chair with mountain bike suspension (Davies’ seat also has suspension based on that used on RIBs).

Dalin has gone for a unique solution: a covered cockpit forward, with an even more protected living ‘pod’, which he calls the studette (or studio) aft. The whole premise is based on reducing movement – both for efficient ergonomics, and the more dangerous involuntary movement of being thrown around as the boat nosedives or falls off a wave.

Dalin’s customised bunk and deep foam mattress went through several iterations to perfect it for the Vendée Globe. It’s also the only IMOCA bunk with a sea view… Photo: Macif

The less energy Dalin spends on clinging on, or staying warm and dry, the more energy and focus he can spend on eking out every fraction of performance.

The spaces are intentionally small – just 5m2 – and the number of steps between each ‘function’ has been carefully thought out. It’s just 1.5m from his bunk to the chart table, and 1.5m from chart table to winch column.
To create the spaces, a 1:1 scale model of the cockpit, including articulated coffee grinders, and living pod was set up in Dalin’s team base at MerConcept, Concarneau, while the boat was built at CDK, Port la Forêt.

In the cockpit, he opted for four winches rather than five for reduced weight, but the team worked hard on finessing the ergonomics. “On Apivia, we had the four winches in a line. At the beginning we thought that was a good set up. We tried, but it was not really working well with the tunnels on Macif. This set-up is actually better.

“The jib sheets, J0, fractional, the runners… everything goes through these tunnels. And for all these sheets, we can use three out of the four winches.”

Charlie says that on the last Vendée even a simple act like filling up his jet-boil to make food involved frustrating, energy-sapping scrambles around the cockpit. This time everything has been packed into a compact space with everything Dalin needs in arm’s reach from his mission control chair, like the pilot’s seat in an aircraft cockpit. The main screen is repeated in both the cockpit and nav station also.

Built-in ventilation hatches – Dalin says that temperature management was a big problem in the last race. Photo: Guillaume Gatefait Macif

Ventilated

Keeping the water out is of essential importance, but Dalin emphasises that ventilation was also given a lot of focus. He has two access hatches on either side of the cockpit which have a three-way closure that can keep out water sweeping down the deck, spray from above, or be fully closed/open. There are also aft facing portholes that can be opened for ventilation, and air circulation has been built into the studette. Forward facing perspex ‘look outs’ offer visibility.

Both his bunk and chair went through several iterations. The bunk is lengthways in the compact space, with Dalin’s feet up against the forward bulkhead, and a deep custom-shaped mattress that might just be the most comfortable racing yacht bunk ever.

A 1:1 scale mock up of the cockpit and living area was created at the MerConcept team base. Photo: Macif

His chair was created after a 3D body mapping process and built to his exact shape. A window aft lets Dalin keep an eye on conditions outside as well as the mainsheet track. It also means his is, he believes, the only IMOCA to offer a bed with a sea view!

Enjoying the process

For Dalin, who is a trained naval architect, the process of designing and building Macif has been fascinating and he was closely involved in all areas. “It’s such an amazing, interesting part [of the campaign] because you take decisions every day that are programme-changing decisions. Once you hit the button of your hull shape, that’s it. You’re committed for four years.

The ‘nav station’ has a custom-built chair, plus lanyards and stow pockets dedicated to everything – from forks to headphones. Photo: Macif

“I had something to say on everything. The hull shape, foil case positioning… things that are not impossible to change, but are pretty fundamental, and extremely expensive and time consuming to move. I think we moved the foil cases just at the last minute!

“I always loved to think and rethink about it during the night. Then in the morning, I’d come up into the design office and say ‘I had an idea last night. Maybe it’s bad, but listen up, guys!’ Sometimes we keep it, sometimes we bin it.

“But it’s such a fun project, such a fun process. You are making a boat just as you want. As a naval architect, it’s something I really enjoyed, both for Apivia and Macif. It was really cool.”

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Pip Hare, the only British based skipper in the Vendée Globe, has dismasted on Medallia while racing in the South Indian Ocean.

On Sunday, December 15 at 21:45 UTC, approximately 800 nautical miles south of Australia, her IMOCA Medallia dismasted while racing in 15th position in the Vendee Globe race.

The aftermath of the dismasting on Pip Hare’s Medallia in the Vendée Globe

Hare has managed to set a jury rig and is heading for land, the nearest point is Tasmania, around 700 miles east.

As Vendée Globe skippers must complete the course unassisted, this is now the end of Pip’s 2024 Vendée Globe.

Hare, who is uninjured, said from Medallia: “I’m roughly halfway along the longitude of Australia on day 35 of the race and this morning my boat Medallia took off on a wave and when it landed the mast broke into two pieces and fell down and it’s put an end to my second solo round the world race.

The broken rig of Pip Hare’s Medallia

Pip Hare ‘so devastated’

“It all feels pretty raw right now. I am so devastated.

“This is four years of preparation and planning and four years of development, the boat and I were in really great shape, having a really good race and we were about halfway round the world. So, to dismast now is really brutal.”

Her team confirmed that Hare has patched together a jury rig to begin sailing towards safety.

Pip Hare has constructed a jury rig on her dismasted Medallia, and is around 700 miles from Tasmania

Hare continues: “I’m about 700 miles from the closest piece of land and I’ve already managed to do a jury rig with one of the bits that I salvaged. I’ve got some sail up and I’m making way slowly towards the land. Security wise I’m absolutely fine, the boat’s fine and we are making our way to the shore.

“I’m just really devastated, it was the greatest edition of the Vendée Globe yet. It was a highlight of my career and for it to end in this way is really punishing.

“But a race of this nature that’s three months long, taking you to some of the world’s most extreme environments, these things happen and unfortunately, it’s happened to me this time.

“I just want to say a massive thank you to all my sponsors and supporters and my team for the hard work that they’ve put in over the last four years to get us to the start line of this race.”

Loving the race: an image Pip Hare sent from the Vendée Globe before Medallia dismasted. Photo: VG2024

Hare is bitterly disappointed in the ending of her second Vendée Globe. After fighting her way around the course in an older boat in 2020, for this race she had a newer design, which her team upgraded with larger foils and a refined bow section, and had set herself performance goals.

She had recently overtaken Romain Attanasio (Fortinet Best Western) around the longitude of Cape Leeuwin, moving up to 15th place. She had also overcome some minor structural damage, making repairs to a bulkhead.

Hare looks forward to 2025

In an emotional video from the disabled boat, Pip explained further:

“I’m absolutely fine, physically fine. And the boat’s pretty unscathed as well.

“I worked for about three hours to clear all the mess up, and managed to get a jury rig up, and we’re now sailing along – doing about 4 knots. I’ve got about 700 miles to the nearest point of land so I’ve got plenty of time to think about where I’m going!

“I don’t think right now I can unpack how I feel, it’s just a case of doing the practical things to look after me and the boat and making some progress towards the shore so we can sort this out.

“But I do just want to thank a massive thank you to everybody who has worked so hard over the last four years to make this happen.

“To our incredible sponsors, Medallia and Aspen. To all of our partners, our technical partners, our personal partners.

“Everyone’s who’s got a name inside the boat, everyone who’s help out, volunteered, came to fundraising events. Because we’ve all put so much in to making this race happen. And I’m so sorry that it’s ended this way.

“It’s not the end. It never is the end. And I hope that by the time I get to the shore we’ll have a really good plan about how to get Medallia sailing again and get back to Europe and then get back on the race track in 2025.

“But I want to thank you all for your incredible support and encouragement and for following the race this far.

“And to all the other competitors out there, stay safe, finish the race, and I’m really going to miss the other half of the race with you guys.”

Hare making structural repairs to a bulkhead easier in the Vendée Globe.

Rigging damage

This is the first dismasting to occur during the 2024 Vendée Globe, which had been remarkable for its low rate of attrition during the first half of the solo non-stop around the world race. IMOCA rigs are one-design, as prescribed by the class rules.

Just two skippers have retired so far: Maxime Sorel on V&B Monbana – Mayenne, who retired after suffering problems to his main headboard car as well as an ankle injury. Second was Louis Burton on Bureau Vallée 2, who – having made structural repairs when he discovered cracking on his IMOCA – then suffered rigging damage which was irreparable, and put into Cape Town.

However, as the fleet contends with stronger conditions in southerly latitudes there has been an increased number of rigging problems accumulating.

Antoine Cornic (Human Immobilier, 32nd) has suffered damage to his mainsail track that required him to climb the rig. While sailing in 60 knots of wind and 8-9m seas, a gust caused his boat to broach, tearing off nearly 1m of mainsail track. He diverted towards the uninhabited Saint-Paul and Amsterdam Islands, north-northeast of the Kerguelen Islands, in order to make repairs.

Guirec Soudée (Freelance.com, 30th) also headed to the lee of the Kerguelen Islands to make rigging repairs after a broach.

Last placed skipper Szabolcs Weöres last night (Sunday 16 December) reported his port D2 diagonal shroud has broken on New Europe while sailing in winds gusting to over 40 knots.

‘Szabi’ is uninjured and the boat itself has no damage. He took a third reef in the mainsail and gybed, which has allowed him to keep his mast and rigging safe. When the damage was reported was 450 miles west of Cape Town and he is currently heading for South Africa.

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The Vendée Globe is the world’s ultimate race course: one non-stop lap of the globe. The course starts in Les Sables d’Olonne, France, on 10 November. There are three marks of the course – the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Leeuwin and Cape Horn – all of which must be rounded to port, before finishing back in Les Sables d’Olonne. Beyond these marks, we skippers must choose our own way around the world and that navigation will be primarily defined by weather, rather than geography.

Aptly named by the French as Le Grand Sud, the Southern Ocean section of the Vendée Globe race is the most remote, relentless – and for me personally the most formidable – part of the course. Only a handful of sailors in the fleet could call themselves ‘familiar’ with this unbroken stretch of water and I have yet to hear an anecdote that started ‘it was a nice day in the Southern Ocean’. This is where the fleet will actually circumnavigate the globe, skirting Antarctica, taking between four and six weeks to reach Cape Horn.

The Ice Limit

The ice limit will play a significant part in strategy and navigation during the following weeks. Because the shortest route around the world is found at the highest latitudes, race committees over the various runnings of the Vendée Globe race have needed to manage risk by setting limits on how far south skippers can go.

In previous editions ice gates have been imposed – virtual waypoints through which competitors must pass, which encouraged them back to the north.

However, the race organisation now favours an ice limit, or Antarctic Exclusion Zone: a series of GPS points around the globe below which a boat might not sail without penalty.

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The ice limit will be defined by the race committee in collaboration with meteorologists and glaciologists tracking the position of icebergs and their drift, which is linked to currents and changes in sea levels, over the next three months. It covers the Antarctic zone, Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The initial ice limit is delivered to competitors as early as one month before the race start to allow planning, but it can be modified and updated ahead of the lead boat to react to real time information as the race progresses. From memory we received around 10 updates to the ice limit during the course of my 2020 race.

Australian Rescue Limit

The ice limit is only broken by a small shelf in the course along the longitudes of Western Australia, bringing competitors up to 45° south for a stretch of around 600 miles. This limit is defined by the range capabilities of the Australian search and rescue authorities.

Synoptic chart showing the train of depressions circulating around Antarctica.

Riding the fronts

The ability to catch and ride a cold front is key to progression in the Southern Ocean. Fast moving depressions are the overwhelming weather feature of the south.

These systems will develop in known areas such as the semi-permanent cold front off Brazil, then slingshot into the Southern Ocean, where they will deepen, strengthen and make their way east around the globe.

The trajectory of each low-pressure system will be in a south-easterly direction. The younger depressions have active cold fronts which are of particular strategic benefit to Vendée Globe skippers. Ahead of the front there can be found ‘relatively’ flat water and north/north-west winds which provide super-fast reaching conditions to make miles east. Each time a new depression arrives, a skipper will need to decide how close to the centre of the depression they wish to position their boat – further north there will be less wind and less risk.

Once in position the trick will be to set up the boat, put your foot to the floor and sail hard ahead of the front banking as many miles as possible. These weather fronts will travel at between 30 and 35 knots so eventually will catch up and overtake a boat, so the incentive is to keep the pressure on for as long as possible. Any inclination to slow down will accelerate the front’s closing speed.

Once the front has passed, the wind direction will back to the west, the sea state will become rough and confused and there will be multiple squalls making it impossible to continue sailing fast and hard. As the depression moves east, the wind will drop and boats may be left in a ridge of high pressure waiting for the next depression to arrive, often carrying competitors from hundreds of miles behind, to their position.

The ice limit and pinch points between it and Cape Horn and the southern tip of New Zealand

The Indian Ocean

Passage into the Indian Ocean is dominated by the presence of the Agulhas current, which flows from Madagascar down the east coast of Africa to the tip of southern Africa, where it turns north and is then forced by the prevailing wind loops back to the east. It’s a warm current, a lot like the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, and can flow at six knots in places.

This current makes passage into the Indian Ocean challenging, not only from the resulting brutal sea states, but also because the warm water attracts marine mammals (whales) who feed on its contents. The use of current GRIBs and noting the sea temperature will help ascertain the position and course of this feature.

In the Vendée Globe qualification races over the last two years, race management has been working with marine ecologists to specify exclusion zones around these areas known to attract large marine life.

It’s likely that the Vendée Globe course will include marine mammal exclusion zones, around both the Azores in the Atlantic, and the Agulhas current, which will be defined before the race, but open to change ahead of lead competitors – as with the ice limit.

The route from Africa to New Zealand will be governed by depressions and risk management. Sailors will use synoptic charts and GRIB files to spot depressions forming to the north, then position their boats to ride each front as it comes along. Between depressions will come the opportunity to repair and regroup.

Windy.App image showing the Agulhas current that, having run south from Madagascar to the southern tip of Africa, then loops back to the east

The Pacific

The Pacific provides two pinch-points in the course which can force the fleet to contend with bigger weather. The gaps between the bottom of New Zealand and the ice limit, and Cape Horn and the ice limit, are relatively small – bringing sailors south, closer to the centre of passing depressions with no escape route north. Timing is critical when passing through these gates and some competitors may be forced to slow down, hanging to the north and west while a depression rolls through, rather than risk being clobbered by 60-knot winds with nowhere to run.

The ice limit must naturally drop south on the approach to Cape Horn, meaning that sea and air temperatures will plummet. Often there can be snow in the squalls, the sea temperature at the ice limit could be as low as 4°C, and with no insulation provided by our carbon hulls, we will not just be battling the cold, but the inside our boats will be permanently slick with condensation. Any competitors with heaters will reap benefits during our two-week crossing of the Pacific.

Cape Horn

From mid-Pacific the approaches to Cape Horn will be of primary concern: the distance between the Cape and the ice limit is less than 200 miles and the close proximity between South America and Antarctica form a wind acceleration zone of sorts increasing gusts by 10 knots or more. Finding the right route and timing to pass through this gap is critical. Competitors need to be wary of small depressions forming further north on the land and driving south. This is also one of the only areas on the course where we will encounter land, so we must be ever wary of being trapped on a lee shore if considering an approach from the north-west.

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The post Pip Hare’s guide to racing in the Southern Ocean as the Vendée Globe fleet continue south appeared first on Yachting World.

The Vendée Globe leaders are locked into near-perfect conditions, riding the leading edge of a low pressure system in the South Atlantic on a direct fast train towards Cape Town.

Combined with a relatively manageable sea state, particularly for the latest generation IMOCAs which have improved wave handling capability, this has seen the front pack hit record speeds over the past 24 hours.

The Antoine Koch/Finot Conq-designed IMOCA Paprec Arkéa has broken its own speed record within a week in the Vendée Globe. Photo: Eloit Stichebaut/Polaryse/VG2024

The current 24 hour solo sailing record was recorded at this morning’s, Monday 25 November, 0300hrs ranking, with Yoann Richomme on Paprec Arkéa covering a phenomenal 579.86 (1073kms) nautical miles, maintaining an average speed of 24.2 knots.

Over the previous day several of the lead boats took turns to set a new 24 hour record, the most recent benchmark having been established just four days previously by Richomme at 551.84 miles on a ‘crazy horse’ ride in the North Atlantic.

Thomas Ruyant’s Koch/Finot Cong Vulnerable, a sistership of Paprec Arkéa, has also set a new speed record in the Vendée Globe, though it was immediately broken. Photo: Eloi Stichelbaut/Polaryse/VG2024

First, Richmome bettered his own record by covering 574.41nm in the previous race ranking, then Thomas Ruyant on Vulnerable, which is a Antoine Koch/Finot-Conq designed sistership, covered 568.35 nm, then 571.6 miles. Richomme then set the 579 mile benchmark.

Many of the top boats were easily covering over 550 miles in 24 hours, with last week’s record holder Nicolas Lunven (Holcim-PRB) at 554.55 miles, leader Charlie Dalin (Macif) with 558.82 miles, Jérémie Beyou (Charal) at 551.5 and Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil) at 551.

While the solo skippers are progressively adding 20-30 miles to the 24hr record, Richomme believes that the crewed IMOCA record, which stands at 641.13 miles, is even within reach.

Living like animals

Thomas Ruyant reported to the Vendée Raace team this morning: “It’s flying along, we have the right boats for this.

“We’re not going fast just to break the record but especially to try to keep the best position with this depression, we don’t know what the rest will bring but in any case if we can keep it as long as possible, it’s good.

Fast speeds for 2nd placed Vendée Globe skipper Thomas Ruyant on Vulnerable. Photo: Pierre Bouras/VG2024

“On a downwind course, I think I have a good machine, I’m getting used to it well, after Charlie and Yoann continue to go very fast, the rest of the fleet too, in the end there are still a bunch of boats quite close.”

“We’re all here within a hundred miles, so in IMOCA it’s nothing! So the match is super tight, everyone is going fast, the fleet is really so impressive! I just had a spell at 32 knots there.

“But we live a life a little crouched, holding on, sitting, lying down, being extremely careful because the boat sometimes has movements and reactions that are a little bit unexpected because of the sea state, I feel like a small animal surviving in this hull that goes at Mach 12!”

New boats to the fore

The huge speeds and mileages have also seen a slight reshuffle at the front of the 39-boat fleet with the newer designed IMOCAs coming to the fore in the optimum conditions.

Charlie Dalin (MACIF Santé Prévoyance) continues to hold the lead he secured two days ago, though Ruyant is just 50 miles astern.

Yoann Richome has moved up to 3rd, just 10 miles behind on the tracker.

After two weeks of racing in the Vendée Globe, the leaders are heading on a fast direct route to Cape of Good Hope

Another 50 miles back is a small chasing pack, with Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil) in 4th is, previous record holder Nicolas Lunven (Holcim-PRB) in 5th, and Jérémie Beyou (Charal) in 6th.

Top Brit Sam Goodchild, who had led for some stages of the North Atlantic and is the only sailor of the group in a previous generation boat (Vulnerable) has slipped to 7th, but is still within touch of the chasing pack.

“It’s been a bit of a rough day getting used to a new type of sailing,” Goodchild reported from Vulnerable this morning.

“The boat’s going fast, doing 27, 28 knots at the moment. There’s a bit of sea state and it’s a bit of nose divy. So it’s not very easy but trying to find a nice balance of what Brian Thompson likes to call fast but not furious! Easier said than done.

Wet but fast conditions onboard Sam Goodchild’s Vulnerable at the start of Week 3 of the Vendée Globe. Photo: Sam Goodchild/Vulnerable/VG2024

“It was a bit stressful this morning but I’m getting used to it slowly but surely, so it’s something like this for a while now. Losing a bit of miles but there you go it’s part of the game – try and keep up but try not to take too much risk.”

The leaders have around 2,000 miles until they pass south of the Cape of Good Hope. Ruyant explained that he does not expect them to route close to the headland.

“The next few days we are just out to stay on this this depression, to reach the Cape of Good Hope, which we are not going to pass very close.

“We will stay quite South or even close to the ice zone, but it is still far ahead, so for the moment we are moving towards the objective!”

The post IMOCAs hit warp speed: 24hr solo sailing record falls repeatedly to hit incredible 579.86 miles appeared first on Yachting World.

Yoann Richomme, on the IMOCA Paprec Arkéa, has broken the record for the longest distance sailed solo in 24 hours on a monohull.

Richomme has smashed the 550-mile barrier, covering 551.84 nautical miles, the equivalent to 1,021.7 km, in just 24 hours (subject to official ratification by the World Sailing Speed Record Council).

The record was set between 0930 yesterday and 0930 today, Wednesday 20 November. Yesterday Richomme sent video from onboard showing Paprec Arkéa flying along at 29+ knots in glorious sunshine and fairly flat seas in the North Atlantic.

Yoann Richomme has set a new 24hr solo record on Paprec Arkéa in the 2024 Vendée Globe, at 551 miles. Photo: Yoann Richomme/Paprec Arkéa/VG2024

“It wasn’t that much wind, maybe averaging 18 knots or something, not that much,” said Richomme in a live link to his boat today. “But the swell was really nice and you know when the boat gets flying it does work really well.

“I was a bit overpowered on the J0, I know a few boats peeled to the fractional to be a bit safer.

“It was a bit of a crazy horse ride sometimes, so I had to calm the boat. But I do have access to the foil rake and the mainsheet just from my seat so I actually had quite a nice day just trimming along as the gusts and maybe a few squalls went by. It was quite a smooth ride for most of it.”

Sunny days and flat seas on Paprec Arkéa. Photo: Yoann Richomme/Paprec Arkéa/VG2024

The previous record was set by fellow Vendée Globe competitor Nicolas Lunven on Holcim-PRB just a week ago (546.64 nautical miles).

“It was pretty unexpected [to break the record] because the run between the [high pressure] ridge we had beforehand and the ITCZ was quite short – so I wasn’t even looking at beating it because I thought it would be less than 500 miles. But apparently it was enough to beat Nico Lunven, which is my main pleasure – beating Nico Lunven in life!” joked Richomme today.

“I really pushed hard, my goal was to catch the guys in front because I’m really afraid of a breakaway near Brazil, and I thought I could catch up some miles during that day. It did work out – but it’s not paying off too much today, because I’m stuck in a light spot and have been doing 3-4 knots, so it’s not looking good for the next sched.”

Yoann Richomme: fast ‘rookie’

Yoann Richomme is taking part in his first Vendée Globe and is currently ranked 4th in the 39-boat fleet.

Remarkably, until this time last year, Richomme had never raced an IMOCA solo. However, he is highly experienced in Class 40 and Figaro racing – a two-time winner of the Solitaire du Figaro – and immediately made his presence felt on the fleet.

The Antoine Koch/Finot Conq-designed IMOCA Paprec Arkéa has proven fast since its launch, setting a new 24hr solo record in the 2024 Vendée Globe, at 551 miles. Photo: Eloi Stichelbaut/Polaryse/VG2024

In November 2023, Richomme and co-skipper Yann Eliès took 2nd in the Transat Jacques Vabre with the Antoine Koch/Finot Conq-designed Paprec Arkéa.

He immediately followed that up by winning the Retour a la Base eastbound transatlantic race – his first ever solo race in an IMOCA.

And he delivered a back-to-back win in his next Transat, the 2024 Transat CIC.

Richomme sat out the last Vendée Globe – despite having the clear ability to compete, he did not have a well funded campaign prospect, and decided that he did not want to take part if he was going to be uncompetitive.

In 2021, however, he was selected to skipper the long-standing Paprec Arkéa programme, replacing Sébastien Simon (who now races the former 11th Hour Racing IMOCA as Groupe Dubreuil).

The programme included building a new latest generation IMOCA. Paprec Arkéa is a near-identical sistership to Thomas Ruyant’s For The Planet. Richomme did a full tour of the boat for Yachting World ahead of the Vendée start, in which he explains the design concepts behind it – see our YouTube channel.

Vendée Globe Day 10 leaders

Richomme is currently in 4th place on day 10 of the 2024 Vendée Globe. The lead pack are separated by just 40 miles, with current leader another Vendée ‘rookie’, British skipper Sam Goodchild (Vulnerable).

A closely packed leading group heading into the Doldrums on Day 10 of the 2024 Vendée Globe

In 2nd place is Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil), just 11 miles behind Goodchild on the tracker.

Third placed Charlie Dalin (Macif) is just 6 miles away from Richomme, with previous record setter Nicholas Lunven (Holcim-PRB) some 30 miles west. Thomas Ruyant (Vulnerable) is another 30 miles west also. As the fleet enters the Doldrums this lead group is liable to compress and switch rankings as they hit pockets of lighter air.

“The thing is we came in [to the Doldrums] pretty much all in the same spot, with a bit of lateral distance,” explained Richomme.

“Charlie and I got under this cloud which didn’t look bad, but started growing on us right away. We could see the exit, two miles, three miles in front and it kept on growing and we’ve been stuck.”

However, early forecasts suggest the South Atlantic could offer good conditions.

“I think it does look good,” said Richomme. “I stopped looking because I don’t know my exit times out of the light winds, and once I get out I’ll do some routings again.

“But I saw there was nice stable cold font by Brazil, that was maybe cutting the high pressure in two. Which would be nice – this is a slow trip so far, eh? I know I’ve beaten the record and we’ve beaten it twice, but in between these days it’s been so slow.”

Yoann Richomme is competing in his first Vendée Globe. Photo: Eloi Stichelbaut/Polaryse/VG2024

It has been a slow race so far: the current race leader, Sam Goodchild, is around 1000 miles behind Armel le Cleac’h after 10 days of racing, when le Cleac’h set the course record in 2016.

However, Richomme believes with good conditions the current IMOCAs could yet set more records. “If we do get into a warm front in front of a cold one on a flat sea, I think the crewed record is do-able.

“I don’t think it matters too much if you’re solo or crewed, so we could get a lot closer to the crewed record. You’ve got to get the right conditions, but I feel like most of the boats do have that kind of speed now.”

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Nicolas Lunven, skipper of the IMOCA Holcim-PRB has set a new 24-hour record for a single-handed monohull (pending official certification by the World Sailing Speed Record Council).

Lunven has covered an incredible 546.6 miles in 24 hours sailing solo in the Vendée Globe.

This breaks the previous record set by fellow Vendée Globe entrant Thomas Ruyant of 539.58nm, during the Retour à la Base race earlier this year (an average speed of 22.48kts).

Nico Lunven on Holcim-PRB has set a new 24-hour solo sailing record in the Vendée Globe. Photo: Adrien Nivet / Polaryse

Nico Lunven: bold navigator

Nico Lunven is taking part in his first Vendée Globe and is currently ranked 5th in the 40-boat fleet.

Known for his navigation and routing expertise, in the early stages of the Vendée Globe, Lunven confidently took a radical westerly route.

On the second night of the race, which started on Sunday 10 November, he split away from the fleet at Cap Finistere, sailing some 180 miles further north-west than the boats which went inside the TSS zone off the Galician coast.

Nico Lunven took a westerly route with Holcim-PRB which rewarded him with a long, fast run south at record page.

This bold move was rewarded with a 550-mile straight line speed run south in north-easterlies. While his rivals had to contend with a series of gybes off the Portuguese coast, Lunven’s approach reduced manoeuvres – and risk in 30-plus knots – preserving both him and the boat while enabling him to clock the highest mileage of the fleet.

Nico Lunven is competing in his first Vendée Globe

Fastest IMOCA in the world

Holcim-PRB is a Verdier-designed IMOCA that had originally been created as a fully crewed boat for The Ocean Race. However, when that team’s plans fell through mid-build, PRB bought the partially constructed hull at Carrington’s in the UK in 2022.

Major modifications were made almost immediately – including sawing off around 4.5m of bow and rebuilding it with a shallower section designed for more offwind and all-round performance.

The original Ocean Race route had included some long upwind legs to China, which were later scrapped, so the boat was re-optimised for the predominantly downwind Vendée Globe, as well as the long Southern Ocean leg of the 2022 Ocean Race.

Holcim-PRB also set a crewed record on The Ocean Race.

Holcim-PRB has now become the fastest IMOCA in the fleet, also holding the crewed 24-hour distance record. Former skipper Kevin Escoffier and crew covered 640.48 miles in the fifth leg of The Ocean Race in 2023, at an average speed of 26.68 knots.

(In the same leg, Boris Herrmann’s Malizia clocked 640.70 NM – so a longer distance, but not by a sufficient margin to set a new record, according to WSSRC rules. Lunven was part of that crew also.)

Vendée Globe Day 3 leaders

Lunven is currently in 5th place on day 3 of the 2024 Vendée Globe.

The current leader is Yoann Richomme (Paprec Arkéa), just 12 miles ahead of Charlie Dalin (Macif), from British ‘rookie’ and yesterday’s leader Sam Goodchild (Vulnerable) in 3rd. Jérémie Beyou (Charal) is 4th.

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Day 3 of the Vendée Globe dawned this morning, Tuesday 12 November, with much of the fleet having gone through their first bout of testing conditions around Cap Finistere.

Though the margins are still small, it’s British ‘rookie’ sailor Sam Goodchild, competing in his first Vendée Globe on Vulnerable that is currently leading the pack according to the race tracker.

After Sunday’s light winds start, the 40-boat fleet remained closely packed for a gentle Biscay crossing – with just 50 miles separating first and last IMOCAs after the first 24 hours of racing.

Charlie Dalin and Macif, tipped by many to be one of the race favourites, took the early lead. Macif was first to Finistere, passing inside the TSS (traffic separation zone) along the Galician coast yesterday evening.

High boat speeds and stronger breezes for the fleet around Cap Finstere. Photo: Benjamin Dutreux/Guyot Environment/VG2024

He was followed through by Sébastien Simon (Groupe Dubreuil), Sam Goodchild, Jérémie Beyou (Charal) and Yoann Richomme (Paprec Arkéa), with Goodchild’s team mate Thomas Ruyant (Vulnerable) leading another group on this inshore course some 20 miles back.

Meanwhile the last race winner, Yannick Bestaven (Maitre Coq V) and Justine Mettreaux (Teamwork Team SNEF) were the first boats to break west. By opting to sail outside of the TSS they were clearly hoping to reduce the number of manoeuvres needed and seek stronger winds.

Even those boats that went ‘inside’ however reported over 30 knots in the acceleration zone off the headland, with a messy sea state of 2m-plus.

“There was the TSS – and I passed it on the wrong side. A dumb move! I tried to play it safe, and calm things down with two reefs in the mainsail – I did dismast two months ago. But that choice did not help me. I thought that passing on the outside of the TSS at Cap Finisterre there would be fewer gybes, but in the end the wind was very strong- it is still 38 knots,” reported Roman Attanasio from Fortinet this morning

“The seas are acting crazy, it’s still bombing along – I’m making 18-20 knots.”

Goodchild in the lead

Once south of the TSS in the early hours of this morning, Goodchild and his team mate Ruyant both opted to hug the Portuguese coast to great effect, Goodchild taking the lead – though just some 7 miles ahead of Dalin according to the race tracker. Meanwhile Ruyant pulled up to 3rd overall.

Sam Goodchild has had a fantastic start to his first Vendée Globe, taking the lead on Day 2. Photo: Sam Goodchild/Vulnerable/VG2024

Yoann Richomme has headed the most west of the leading group, and has one of the fastest boat speeds with at least 10 knots more pressure than those inshore.

Meanwhile Nico Lunven (Holcim-PRB) has taken one of the most radical routings – heading some 180 miles west of the TSS before gybing south. At the moment the tracker has him in 28th place, but Lunven is a highly experienced and well rated navigator and router, so his move is definitely one to keep an eye on.

In the bigger breezes, Boris Herrmann’s Malizia-SeaExplorer is also coming into its own. Sailing outside the TSS, the German skipper moved up into the top 10 this morning after a tricky start dealing with some problems with his steering system in the very early stages, ranking 40th at one stage.

A big shift

For all the skippers, after the emotional rollercoaster of the start, followed by a tense first night of close quarters manoeuvres – many of the skippers in constant contact on VHF to avoid collisions – the stronger breezes around Finisterre required a big shift – not only in mindset, but in physical set up of the boat.

View inside Yoann Richomme’s Paprec Arkéa as the fleet picks up speeds around the Cap Finistere TSS. Photo: Yoann Richomme/VG2024

With many of the IMOCAs carrying from 800kgs up to 1 tonne of additional weight in food, gear and spares, shifting the carefully stowed stack of bags from their light wind start position to the back of the boat for bigger breeze trim is a major job. For the boats opting to sail inside the TSS, with repeated gybes, there’s then the additional physical challenge of shifting that gear across the boat.

“Approaching Cape Finistere, the wind’s starting to pick up and the sea state is starting to get a bit gnarly. So the ride becomes rougher and I’ve got a bit of work to do,” explained Pip Hare from onboard Medallia, surveying the stack of bags she had to move. “The trick is not to do it all at once.”

Not coming back

For the first time in the Vendée Globe’s history, not one single boat has yet returned to the start port of Les Sables d’Olonne. Under race rules, skippers may return and restart within the first 10 days, but once they have left Les Sables, must complete the rest of the course unassisted.

Avoiding collisions was key in the early stages when light winds saw the fleet stay tighly compressed. Photo: Benjamin Dutreux/Guyot Environment/VG2024

Often strong conditions in the Bay of Biscay sees some skippers return to effect repairs (Michel Desjoyeaux most famously returned in 2008, restarting some 40 hours later, but went on to win), but this year’s light conditions have not – so far – seen any report major damage.

However, Thomas Ruyant’s team has disclosed that he has discovered some water ingress in the forward area of his IMOCA Vulnerable. In the strong conditions he is currently sailing in Ruyant is pumping out the water and monitoring the situation.

The post Brit Sam Goodchild takes Vendée Globe lead after fleet’s first testing night appeared first on Yachting World.

So who will win the 2024 Vendée Globe?

Spoiler alert: we don’t know
.

And that’s not only because of the Vendée Globe’s notorious attrition rate (somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 entries are statistically likely to fail to complete the course), but because with this year’s record entry of 40 IMOCAs and hugely competitive fleet, even the skippers struggle to work out where they rank against each other.

Eyes on the prize: Jérémie Beyou looks at the Vendée Globe trophy as he heads to the start. Photo: Anne Beaugé / Alea

How to pick the top IMOCAs

“Previously in the IMOCA class, you just had to have a reasonable boat. The fleets were so small that if you had a reasonable boat and an okay budget, then you were pretty much guaranteed to be in the top five.

“Now with that, you can just be in the top 20,” explains Sam Davies, skipper of Initiatives Coeur, ahead of this year’s start.

“It’s something we’ve worked on, because it’s really hard to know where to expect to be. Sometimes I’d finish a race and I’d feel really happy with the result, and the team would be really frustrated because we weren’t all on the same page.”

LORIENT, FRANCE – British skipper Sam Davies on Imoca Initiatives Coeur. Photo by Jean-Louis Carli/ALeA

To help them gauge performance, before every race in the lead up to the Vendée Globe, Davies and her team would create a table ranking the boats and skippers against her and her boat.

“We have an open debate between us in the team [and score each column] either +1, 0, or -1. One means the boat is better than my boat. Zero, equal. Minus one, I’m better. And we do both boat and skipper because you can have a really good boat with a less experienced skipper. Then you add the two together and that result is one, zero, or minus one.

“At the end, you have a group that is better, a group that’s equal, and then there’s a group that I should be ahead of.”

40-boat Vendée Globe fleet

The problem is that if you do that exercise for the Vendée Globe itself, even once you’ve ranked all the entries into groups, with a huge fleet of 40 boats each ‘group’ is so large and evenly matched that they’re simply too hard to split.

Recent transatlantic races have been decided by minutes, if not seconds. And that’s with some of the skippers sailing – relatively – conservatively in order to secure their Vendée Globe qualification miles.

So the best we can offer – and yes, it is a bit of a cop-out – is to group the fleet. Here’s our best guess at the likely front-runners and races-within-a-race for the 10th edition of the Vendée Globe (you can see how well we do on the live tracker):

Winning potential

Picking a winner is a fool’s errand. As Jérémie Beyou pointed out, whilst many people pegged him and Alex Thomson as among the favourites for the last race, both suffered damage which ended their chances. Meanwhile few commentators picked Yannick Bestaven as a winning bet.

Also, as Davies explained, the fastest group used to be comprised of four or five boats, but there are now double figures of boats that could be in it.

So whilst we’ve picked our top four, if any are forced to retire or have their performance limited by damage, there’s a huge group of other IMOCAs and skippers that could move up.

Charlie Dalin’s Macif is one of the favourites to win the 2024 Vendée Globe. Photo: Ronan Gladu / Disobey / Macif / VG2024

Caveats out of the way, we think the four strongest contenders for line honours are Charlie Dalin Macif, Thomas Ruyant Vulnerable, Jérénmie Beyou Charal 2, and Yoann Richomme’s Paprec Arkéa.

Of these Dalin probably has the slight edge. Not only does he have an incredibly well-prepared and optimised boat, but the added factor of having been the skipper to lead the fleet home last time around, although he ultimately finished 2nd after redress was awarded for the boats involved in Kevin Escoffier’s rescue.

Richomme might be a Vendée first timer but he knows how to perform on the big stage, having twice won La Solitaire du Figaro. Though a newcomer to the IMOCA class, he won his very first two races in the fleet with his Koch/Finot Conq design. A smart and tough sailor who’s known to push his boat hard. Which means if he doesn’t break anything, he could be right up there.

Yoann Richomme’s Paprec Arkea is a Koch/Finot Conq design. Photo: Eloi Stichelbaut – polaRYSE / Paprec Arkea / IMOCA

Ruyant has closely matched Dalin for much of the past IMOCA cycle, and the pair are still hard to split. He has a fast new Antoine Koch/Finot Conq design that’s a sistership to Richomme, won the major transatlantics in 2021/22/23, and was in the top three for much of the last Vendée until foil damage slowed him.

Jérémie Beyou is another who has a fearsome amount of experience combined with a latest generation IMOCA that is a regular on the podium. It’s hard to bet against Beyou being in the top three.

‘Top five’ challengers

Sam Goodchild is a Vendée ‘rookie’ with a lot of ocean experience. Photo: Pierre Bouras / TR Racing / IMOCA

We’d love to see an English skipper like Sam Davies or Sam Goodchild lead the Vendée Globe this time around, and they certainly have the potential, but even if not amongst the very front runners we expect them to be part of a strong group of podium or just-off-the-podium contenders.

Boris Herrmann’s Malizia-SeaExplorer has the most miles under its belt of any IMOCA, and has proven itself to be robust, reliable, and fast in the big stuff. If Herrmann can hang onto the more slippery designs in the forecast lighter early stages – and particularly if the fleet picks up some conventional strong Southern Ocean conditions – then this boat could be right up there.

Sam Davies’ Initiatives Coeur had some build teething issues, but with those ironed out Davies seems to be hitting her best form at just the right time.

Sam Goodchild is another ‘rookie’ who is actually hugely experienced, and has the particular advantage for a Vendée first-timer of having already raced in the Southern Ocean in the Class 40s, Ultims and onboard Holcim PRB in The Ocean Race. His Vulnerable is not a latest generation design, but is Ruyant’s IMOCA from last time. Working with Ruyant, the team made the decision not to make any major changes, hinting at confidence that it is still competitive.

Nico Lunven and Holcim-PRB could be strong contenders in the 2024 Vendée Globe. Photo: Adrien Nivet / Polaryse / VG2024

Nico Lunven might have a slightly lower profile than some of the solo stars of the IMOCA fleet, but he won two Figaros and has sailed with, or routed for, many top teams. His Holcim-PRB is known to be fast, and though his recent results perhaps don’t reflect it, many of the other sailors rate him highly.

Yannick Bestaven‘s new Maitre Coq V is fairly unproven, but he delivered a surprise win in the last race, having put in a solid performance with high averages, and could do the same once again.

‘Top 10’ contenders

Those of you who can count will have worked out that we’ve already picked out 9 boats, and are yet to list our ‘top 10’ grouping. But assuming that there will be at least some retirements in the race, this sector of the fleet could be incredibly closely fought. They include:

Maxime Sorel, who has a refined new boat with V&B Monbana Mayenne, and a series of top 10 results with it.

Paul Meilhat’s Biotherm was thoroughly tested during The Ocean Race. Photo: Qaptur/VG2024

Paul Meilhat also has a latest generation IMOCA with Biotherm. Although the boat seemed a bit tender during The Ocean Race, its structure has been beefed up and if average conditions are on the lighter side could prove very rapid. Another one that other skippers will be keeping a close eye on.

The top boats from the last IMOCA cycle have real potential and many have been smartly reconfigured. Sebastien Simon has the former Ocean Race winning boat (ex-11th Hour Racing). Meanwhile Justine Mettreaux was part of that winning team and can take the experience of those ocean miles onto her first Vendée with Teamwork Team SNEF (which is the former Charal).

Justine Mettreaux has a fast last generation boat with Teamwork Team SNEF (ex-Charal) and plenty of IMOCA experience in The Ocean Race. Photo: Gauthier Lebec/VG2024

Clarisse Cremer has had a disrupted campaign, but has Dalin’s ex-Apivia, which was first around the course last time, prepared with Alex Thomson’s team in Gosport. She’s proven repeatedly that she is not to be underestimated, and could definitely be in the front group with L’Occitane en Provence if it all comes together in time.

Alan Roura’s Hublot is the former Hugo Boss from the last race, and he’s made some significant modifications to it. Though he’s not going into this race with the pressure of expectation, he’s hoping to be in the top 10.

Louis Burton finished an impressive 3rd in the last race. This time he’s sailing the first ‘scow’ in the fleet, Sam Manuard’s 2019 design, having identified it as a boat which will suit his hard-pushing style as Bureau Vallée.

Pip Hare’s Medallia is the oldest boat of this group, but the 2015-built ex-Banque Populaire currently holds the course record, and has been re-optimised with a new boat shape and larger foils. Hare is gunning for a top 10 position and her results show a clear uptick with a 9th in the most recent New York-Les Sables transat.

Pip Hare’s re-optimised Medallia is the current Vendée Globe course record holder. Photo: James Tomlinson

Another 20 boats to go…

That’s less than half the fleet, and we haven’t even touched on Damien Seguin, who finished an impressive 7th last time around, followed by Giancarlo Pedote and Benjamin Dutreux, who are also returning.

Or newcomers like Guirec Soudee, who has years of adventure sailing experience (most famously with his red hen Monique) despite being aged just 31, and will be likely able to handle any damage or crazy conditions this race throws at him.

Then there’s the ‘daggerboard’ fleet – which could be a race within a race. Or, if legendary skipper Jean Le Cam is correct – and the lighter winds hold into the south Atlantic– the straight board boats could mix it up with the foilers.

Jean Le Cam with his new non-foiling IMOCA Armor-Lux. Photo: Marc Agnoly/IMOCA

Le Cam is one of two skippers who opted to build a brand new non-foiling boat for this race, believing that the performance advantages simply weren’t worth it. As he’s going into his sixth Vendée Globe, that’s a lot of experience to discount. Last time around he finished 4th, in a straight board boat, having picked up the shipwrecked Kevin Escoffier mid-race.

If that proves anything, it shows that Vendée Globe form indicators are only as good as the skipper, the weather, and the many twists of fate this race inevitably deals out.

We’ll be following all the way – plus look out for our IMOCA boat tours and exclusive skipper interview videos.

The post Who will win the 2024 Vendée Globe? appeared first on Yachting World.

Past Vendée Globe races have seen the fleet get an absolute pasting in the early days, thanks to the first hurdle of crossing the Bay of Biscay in November.

But this year looks set to be a gentler introduction for the 40 solo skippers, with likely just  5-10 knots at the start, though there will still be some tough strategic decisions early on. IMOCA co-skipper Will Harris shares his expert analysis of the forecast.

Harris is a key part of Boris Herrmann’s Malizia-Explorer team, and has been co-skipper for the IMOCA crewed and double-handed races. For the Vendée Globe he is ‘reserve’ skipper (all the solo skippers have nominated an emergency stand-in), and part of the meteorology team working with Herrmann ahead of this year’s round the world race.

While he says he’s been looking at general trends – such as where different systems are and how they’ve tracking – all week, it’s only in the final few days that he began running routings in detail with any degree of confidence.

Weather updates at the final skippers’ briefing ahead of the 2024 Vendée Globe

High pressure Vendée Globe start

Currently the forecast is for light winds on start day, Harris explains. “It’s a high pressure situation. We’ve had this massive high pressure over Western Europe the last two or three weeks – bringing nice sun some days, very foggy, but basically not much wind or an offshore wind a lot of the time.

“And we’re going to have that all the way to the start and going into the middle of next week. So basically, for the start day, we’re going to be right in the centre of the high pressure.

“There are a few little occluded fronts and things, which is going to make it very variable. We’re not really sure what direction the wind is going to come from, but we’re basically looking to pick up a north-easterly flow going into Monday. That’s going to take the boats around Finistère, where it will have nicely accelerated around that corner.

“So the first 18 hours is where we’ll see the first differences between the boats, as there’s some strategy calls to make about how to get through the light winds. But the differences won’t be too huge in the fleet. I think it’s going to be later on, Thursday or Friday, where they’re going to have to start choosing how to deal with the low pressures that are disturbing the tradewinds.”

The first night is expected to see light conditions. Photo: Antoine Auriol/Malizia/VG2024

These low pressure systems are further south than usual. “There are two or three [lows] sitting right over the Azores, which is normally where the high pressure is,” explains Harris. “And that’s basically disturbing the trade winds.

“So you’ve got to choose: do I try and stick to the African Coast and use what’s left to the tradewinds? Or do I punch straight through this light wind and see if I can get a better VMG to end up with a nice reaching angle towards the Equator?

“And so that’s the two main points that are there from this [early forecast]. The first 18 hours being very difficult and uncertain, and then later on this much bigger strategy call and the bigger split. But we’re going to just have to see how the forecast develops with that – it’ll probably be a call that [the skippers] have to make later on in the race.”

Will Harris co-skippering with Boris Herrmann on Malizia-SeaExplorer during the double-handed IMOCA Le Défi Azimut race.

Finistère acceleration zone

Although light winds and flat seas dominate, the fleet could see some stronger conditions around Finistère. “Finistère is a big acceleration, a big bit of breeze. There’s definitely some miles to be made there, and choosing whether you gybe inside or outside the TSS, because it’s basically a big curve.

“If you come to the inside of the curve, you get a better shift. But equally, it’s more manoeuvres, more risk as well. Especially around that corner, they could see 30 knots going into Tuesday and Wednesday.

“So you want to keep it simple on that first night and not do 10 manoeuvres and totally exhaust yourself.”

After Finistère, Harris thinks the fleet could compress back up again. “The bit that’s interesting [in these early forecasts] is that around Finistère, you’ve got a big acceleration, and then they’ll get spat out into not much wind. So everyone will come flying around that corner and then slow down a bit.

“Especially if it’s still light in the Bay of Biscay, they’ll suddenly go from 10 knots to foiling at 25, and they can jump ahead. But then later on, that could not work out like that.”

Sea state around Finistère is also forecast to change, which Harris says could benefit Herrmann on Malizia. “There’s a bit of a west swell coming in, which is going against the downwind conditions. It could make it a bit choppy and messy – but that favours us, really. We love that stuff. The messier the sea state, the better for us.

Boris Herrmann’s Malizia-SeaExplorer is known to favour strong winds and larger sea states. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot/Malizia/VG2024

“Then once they’ve got to that point, I think they’ll start really looking, okay, how am I going to get south? Am I going to try and stick a bit to the west, go close to the Azores and pass through the low pressures? Or am I going to sneak down the African Coast and go through the Canary Islands and push along the coast there?”

Potential splits in the Vendée fleet

Light downwind conditions could see the fleet making some big splits and different tactical choices.

“With VMG angles, you can really split up the fleet quickly. It only takes one boat to decide to gybe 10 miles later, which is very typical in these boats. You’re solo – trying to cover each and every gybe is a lot of work. So they’re going to have to stick to their own guns a bit, but maybe one boat gybes 10 miles later and suddenly gains 100 miles,” Harris explains.

“The top guys – Charlie [Dalin, Macif], Thomas [Ruyant, Vulnerable], Nico [Lunven, Holcim-PRB], and Yoann [Richomme, Paprec Arkéa] – they’re all going to be really on top of their gybes and making those calls. And Biotherm as well. I think Paul [Meilhat]’s boat is very good for this flat water VMG downwind stuff.

“But they still might have slightly different ideas of how they’re going to do it, and it could open things up.”

Light winds in the early stages could be demanding with manoeuvres and sail changes – Paul Meihat’s Biotherm is among the boats the may revel in the lighter airs forecast at the start.

The light winds could also play into the hands of some of the older designs. “The conditions in the first hours and days could allow boats with straight daggerboards to be in the match,” Louis Burton, skipper of Bureau Vallée pointed out.

Skippers’ relief

Though there is a general feeling of relief among the teams that this edition looks unlikely to see boat-breaking conditions in Biscay, light winds – and particularly poor visibility with fog – will bring its own challenge.

“I would have preferred to have a bit more wind and I think everyone is a bit nervous about the fog,” Medallia skipper Pip Hare said after the final skippers’ briefing. “To be honest all anyone cares about is getting away safely.”

There will be some key decisions for the skippers to make as the IMOCAs approach the tradewinds, with low pressure currently forecast around the Azores. Photo: Antoine Auriol/Malizia/VG2024

“Everyone’s always going to be happy that we’re not starting in 35 knots in the middle of a front,” says Harris. “But I think everyone’s keeping their fingers crossed there’s going to be at least 10 knots or so – it’s looking very light on some of the forecasts.

“What’s really hard is that first night. In lots of transitions, you can really psych yourself out and think: ‘Oh, I’m losing miles. This boat’s doing 10 knots, I’m only doing 2’.

“You’ve just got to remember, it’s a round the world race. It’s not going to come down to that. Keep the boat in one piece and don’t try and gain all your miles back at Finistère and push the boat too hard.

“Your biggest danger is yourself, really, on the first week.”

For more coverage of the Vendée Globe check out the Yachting World YouTube channel which has exclusive interviews with the skippers and IMOCA boat tours.

The post Vendée Globe forecast: an ‘easy’ start, then tough decisions appeared first on Yachting World.

The final preparations are all nearly made: it’s time for the 40 solo skippers in this year’s Vendée Globe to ready themselves for one of the most emotional moments in sport: start day.

The Vendée Globe start, which this year is on Sunday 10 November at 1300 (local time), is a French institution.

The host port of Les Sables d’Olonne on the Atlantic coast has been full to the gunwales with sailing fans – and France has a LOT of sailing fans – for the past three weeks.

The race village saw around 360,000 people through its gates in the first week alone, and is expecting well over a million by the time the skippers cast off.

Over 1m visitors are expected in Les Sables d’Olonne ahead of the 2024 Vendée Globe

I’ve been in Les Sables for the past few days and I can vouch that these numbers are not one of those ‘uplifted’ sports event statistics prone to exaggeration.

The pontoons are rammed 20-deep with crowds from dawn to dusk, and visiting an IMOCA or meeting a skipper involves military logistical planning, and extremely sharp elbows to simply move through the mass of people trying to get a glimpse of their sailing heroes.

But come Sunday, things will move up a gear yet again.

Start day is unadulterated bedlam. If you’re not on the port walls well before the sun comes up to secure your spot, you can give up any hope of being in the front few rows. Thousands upon thousands of people will be descending on Les Sables to give the skippers the most rousing and spectacular send off in sport.

Emotional start

The passion this event engenders is almost unrivalled.

Emotions are further heightened by the undeniable risk the skippers are about to take. It is an inescapable, but unsaid truth, that there have been sailors who motored down Les Sables’ famous canal to sea, but did not return.

For the 40 solo skippers, it is a lot to handle. Not only do they have their private emotional rollercoaster of saying goodbye to their partners, parents and children, their friends, team mates and sponsors, all while managing their own fears, doubts and adrenaline.

But they also have to somehow absorb the power of the moment that is a Vendée Globe start, without letting the emotional tidal wave overwhelm them.

Yoann Richomme will be starting his first Vendée Globe on the latest generation Paprec Arkéa

“I’ve worked on it a lot, on mental preparation for the start,” says Yoann Richomme, skipper of Paprec Arkéa, who’ll be starting his first Vendée Globe this Sunday as one of the favourites.

“I know that start and the emotion it carries could be a weak point for me, but i’ve worked on it, I feel like I’m ready, and I hope I’ll manage it really well – but I’m going to be very emotional for sure.

“I’ve lived it, in the last race with Damien Seguin, but it was Covid times so almost no one came to see us.

“We know how many people we can fit on those two jetties out there and it’s quite mad. It’s part of the fun of it. It’s a race where we get like a million people over three weeks coming to watch us, and it’s cool to see that we can attract so much attention around one simple race.”

Letting go of land

Pip Hare is taking part in her second Vendée Globe with Medallia. “I’ve been here over three weeks.

“Around the middle of week one I separated myself from the team a bit. Because the intensity of the build up is stressful and I needed a bit of decompression. For about a week or nine days, I just had a nice time, went running and swimming and cycling – just breathing. Eating, sleeping, relaxing.

“Then in the last week it ramps back up again.

“I’m taking control of the boat a bit more. For the last couple of days the team won’t be on the boat any more, it’ll just be me and Joff [Brown, Technical Director], I’m kind of nesting!

“In the last few days striking the balance between preparing me, and giving back to our sponsors, that’s quite hard to find.

Pip Hare signing autographs for a fan ahead of the 2024 Vendée Globe

“Preparing me is the thing that I have to admit I find hardest. When I’m out on the water I am instantly able to let go of all the land based stresses, but I find it very hard to let go of them now.

“I’m looking at the weather, visualising the sail changes, but the biggest challenge for me is trying to let go of the land before the start, not after the start.

“However, I’m actually really, really looking forward to sharing it with people on Sunday. So many people have come out – it’s actually a bit difficult for me because I can’t physically say hello to all of them.

“Having my friends and family going down the canal, I just want them to celebrate that moment – because we don’t know what happens after that!”

The incredible 40-boat IMOCA fleet will each parade down the canal of Les Sables d’Olonne before the 2024 Vendée Globe start

‘In my mind, I’m already at sea’

“The good thing is we had three weeks of being in the race village which helped me to kind of realise I was about to take the start of the Vendée Globe,” Clarisse Cremer explains, shortly before the start of her second Vendée Globe on L’Occitane en Provence.

“The first week was quite busy. The second week was more of a break for me – almost a small holiday with my family, which was super important to feel like I was saying goodbye to everyone, and have a little bit of time with my daughter and my husband.”

For Clarisse, that time has extra importance as her husband Tanguy Le Turquais, is also taking part in the race.

Clarisse Crémer, skipper of L’Occitane en Provence. Credit: Georgia Schofield/Alex Thomson Racing

“But this week is crazy. The race is closer and the stress level is going higher.”

“It’s true that it’s not very natural to go from being surrounded by so many people to being alone at sea.

“You need a few days to really feel like you are doing the Vendée Globe. I think that is what is happening right now – and the reason I feel in a bit of a parallel world right now is because my mind is already at sea.”

The post Vendée Globe skippers prepare for the most emotional send off in sport appeared first on Yachting World.

The 10th edition of the Vendée Globe is set to begin on Sunday, November 10, 2024, as 40 skippers embark on an extraordinary solo, nonstop race around the world. This iconic event has inspired millions with its epic challenge of human endurance and skill.

The build up to the Vendée Globe 2024 has been remarkable for lots of reasons. But a key is the number of new boats built, with 13 new IMOCA 60s set to take the startline.

After two editions of the race that have seen foiling IMOCAs partly fly – and partly lurch and skid – their way around the world, the current crop benefit from more reliable construction, bigger foils, and sophisticated rake controls (though not T-rudders, still banned under class rules) for increasingly sustained flight.

Getting the most out of the latest IMOCAs is now a high-wire juggling act that requires the ability to race technically accurately, analysing vast amounts of data and calibration settings, but also employ some old-fashioned seamanship to know where the danger zone is.

As ever, the race will be a fascinating mix of high performance racing and survival.  For those following the race from afar, here’s how to experience the excitement from start to finish.

Article continues below…

Vendée Globe 2024 preview: The most competitive edition ever?

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Livestreaming and Broadcast Coverage

Two live broadcasts will cover the start in detail. First, from 7:30 am to 10:30 am (CET), fans can watch as each skipper casts off from the dock. Then, from 12:15 pm to 2:00 pm, tune in for the official start at sea, as the sailors cross the line and embark on their global voyage. These broadcasts feature real-time updates and advanced graphics, bringing viewers close to the action with top-notch coverage.

How to watch the 2024 Vendée Globe Start

The Vendée Globe has made it easy to follow along from home, with live streaming available on multiple platforms:

Vendée Globe YouTube: The official Vendée Globe YouTube channel will broadcast both start programs live.
Vendée Globe Facebook: The Vendée Globe’s Facebook page will host live streams for start day as well.
Yachting World Vendée homepage: Our team are on the gound in Les Sables-d’Olonne and will be bringing you exclusive coverage from the start

How to follow the 2024 Vendée Globe Race

After the start, there are a range of options to stay informed as the skippers make their way around the globe:

Yachting World Vendée homepage: We will be following the race closely and providing regular expert updates and insight throughout the race/
Vendée Globe Tracker: The race’s interactive map on the Vendée Globe website allows fans to track each boat’s position and progress in real-time.
Race App | Android | iOS : Download the Vendée Globe app to get live updates, weather conditions, and route progressions for each skipper.
Youtube: For fans who want to go beyond the headlines, the Vendée Globe’s YouTube channel will feature behind-the-scenes footage, skipper interviews, and exclusive content throughout the race.

These include:

Daily Race Reports: In-depth analysis and updates as skippers tackle different challenges in each ocean.
Video Content: Regularly updated videos from the skippers themselves, sharing their experiences and insights during the race.
Virtual Reality: A VR experience that places viewers right on the deck, bringing fans closer than ever to the journey of these incredible sailors.

This year’s Vendée Globe promises to be an absolute thriller and could well be the most competitive edition of the Vendée to date.

Keep track of all the latest Vendée Globe news at our Vendée homepage

The post How to follow the Vendée Globe 2024 appeared first on Yachting World.

“When you think about the Vendée Globe, you always remember the good stuff. I’ve done three now, and you remember the good bits of all the races. So it seems like the race is condensed into a really short length of time. But once you get out there, that’s when it hits…” says Initiatives-Coeur skipper Sam Davies.

“The hard thing is when you realise just how long it is and how you’ve got to survive in those conditions.”

The Vendée Globe can be a powerful drug. For some skippers it’s an experience so transformative it draws them back again and again. For first-timers it’s a daunting prospect: can they endure three brutal months? Will they even be the same person afterwards?

More sailors than ever will pit themselves against the physical, mental, elemental and technical challenges of sailing alone around the world when a record fleet of 40 IMOCAs starts the Vendée Globe’s 10th running on 10 November. It is the longest race course in sport: from Les Sables d’Olonne in France, and back, around the world non-stop without assistance. Technically they are racing for €200,000 – the 1st place prize money. But in reality they are racing for a place in history.

Hublot, the former Hugo Boss now skippered by Alan Roura, hits warp speed. Photo: Vincent Curutchet/Hublot Sailing team

Highs and lows

Charlie Dalin nearly took his place in the history books, having been first to finish in 2021 on Apivia in his debut Vendée Globe, before Yannick Bestaven was crowned winner after redress was calculated for the skippers who assisted in rescuing Kevin Escoffier. For Dalin, the Vendée is truly unfinished business.

“I guess I was like a temporary winner. Only for eight hours. It’s a mixed feeling. When I arrived 80 days after leaving Les Sables, I was really happy – to see my son again, my wife, my team. Sailing around the world on my own – it was amazing. And I always thought the finish line was going to be a relief. But the race was not over, I still had to look at the time. That felt a bit weird – when you do a race like the La Solitaire, the clock is part of the game. But normally in the Vendée, it is not,” recalls Dalin.

“I didn’t think about it for long. I just enjoyed the [welcome]. But I had a moment during the press conference – I was on stage and on the right wall they had big photos of all the past winners. And then I realised that I was not going to be on that wall.”

Charlie Dalin’s new Verdier designed Macif has wave-deflecting forward sections to avoid sudden decelerations. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot/Alea

In the end, the deciding margin was tortuously small. “When I really started thinking about it was a few weeks after the finish, when everything settles back down. The objective you had for so many years, and then for the 80 days of the race – everything is over. We call it the Vendée blues. And that’s where I had a bit of, ‘I could have won the Vendée’. A win was only two and a half hours away, so I started redoing the race in my head every night. Where did I lose this 150 minutes? Where did they go? I did that for quite a while,” admits Dalin.

“I’m not thinking about this anymore,” he adds, “I’m just thinking about the upcoming race,” but to return to the Vendée Globe is to put yourself back through an emotional wringer for even battle-hardened competitors.

Jérémie Beyou will be starting his fifth Vendée. In 2020 he was one of the hot favourites, only to be forced back to port with damage.

Beyou eventually restarted nine days after the fleet, truly alone. “We talked a lot about what happened. From a technical point of view, I think we reviewed everything. But in a mental, psychological way, I have to admit that it was difficult to start again. After the race – like after every Vendée – it was difficult to be okay.”

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Ever present danger

More difficult still is dealing with the cold creep of fear. Fear isn’t a word Vendée skippers use very often, they tend to speak instead of managing physical symptoms like racing heart rates in stressful situations, though many will admit to a fierce dislike of climbing the mast. But danger is ever present, and at the speeds IMOCAs travel at things can go wrong very quickly.

Sam Davies’ last Vendée ended when Initiatives-Coeur crashed, hard, at 20 knots into an unknown object, causing structural damage and throwing Davies across the boat, injuring her ribs. She was, she says, “really freaked out by the whole thing”.

At the speeds IMOCAs travel, things can go wrong quickly. Photo: Marin Le Roux/PolaRYSE

To come back meant facing the possibility that fate could strike again. “Do I really want to do this again? I put four years of my life into this, then something beyond my control has just taken it all away. It’s so disappointing. Do I really want to put myself and my sponsors, my family and everyone who supports me, through that again – because it’s the same risk. The fact that happened doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen next time,” Davies said, recalling her thought process after the 2020 race. “Those were the doubts that I had.”

“But I’m still looking for that result and the opportunity to race a really competitive boat all the way around the world. I really hope I make it this time.”

Back on the horse

This Vendée Globe cycle has been remarkable for lots of reasons. There was an unprecedented 13 new IMOCAs built. This meant there were a lot of IMOCA skippers with boats either in build or in refit, kicking their heels around Brittany, all the while desperate to keep up with the fleet’s accelerated pace of learning.

Sam Davies on Initiatives-Coeur has banked the most qualifying miles of any skipper in the Vendée Globe. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli/Alea

Enter the crewed Ocean Race, which for the first time featured the IMOCA class in 2022. For Davies, whose new Initiatives-Coeur was undergoing significant rebuilding work, the opportunity to get back to racing in the Southern Ocean with Paul Meilhat’s team on Biotherm was too good to miss.

“For two reasons. One was mentally for me, given what happened in the last race, but also in terms of preparing for a Vendée Globe. I realised any Vendée sailor that does The Ocean Race can have a massive advantage, because our boats are evolving so quickly. It’s nothing like what even the top boats were four years ago. We don’t sail them in the same way. Everything’s changed so much, and this was the only opportunity to go and send it in the Southern Ocean with the powerful foiling boats we have now – and with a crew, so you push it a bit harder.”

While sailors in The Ocean Race could practise hard throttling a foiling IMOCA – on someone else’s boat – once back to their own projects every skipper faced a conundrum. Unlike previous races, Vendée veterans did not get an automatic pass to re-enter. With the entry list oversubscribed, every qualifying race counted to secure one of 40 precious spots. This left teams facing some hard decisions: sail conservatively to lock in the miles, or use each opportunity to really test their weapons?

‘We have to navigate a fine line between going fast and preserving our boats’. Photo: Eloi Stichelbaut/polaRYSE/IMOCA

The upshot is that the level across the whole fleet has risen, says Jérémie Beyou. “I think all the teams are much more professional. The qualification mode makes you race a lot, so teams have to be bigger.

“I remember my first Vendée Globe. We had many problems with reliability – it was a new boat, and we had a small team. I’d broken the mast, so at the start of the Vendée I didn’t know my boat, I didn’t know how to do the manoeuvres alone.

“I had a discussion with Violette [Dorage, the youngest entrant in the race at just 23] – she’s much more ready, even if she’s very young, than I was on my first edition.”

High-wire act

Getting the most out of the latest IMOCAs is now a high-wire juggling act that requires the ability to race technically accurately, analysing vast amounts of data and calibration settings, but also employ some old-fashioned seamanship to know where the danger zone is.

“We all have to navigate this fine line between going fast but preserving [our boats]. And that’s what I find really fascinating,” says Dalin. “Because numbers don’t give you the answer – even though we’ve got gigabytes of data with fibre optics in the foil, the rigging loads, acceleration in all directions. But no numbers tell you how to sail the race. The numbers don’t tell you where the line rests. Your gut is going to tell you where this point is.”

Brit Sam Goodchild could well challenge the podium. Photo: Pierre Bouras

As Davies points out, the sensors are not invincible (they are also power hungry). “If something slips in a jammer, or if a hydraulic releases a bit – you can dismast. But you also have to put marks everywhere – and watch the marks because you pretty much know that halfway around the world, some of your load cells will stop working. Then you’ve got to be able to do it the old-fashioned way.”

After two editions of the race that have seen foiling IMOCAs partly fly – and partly lurch and skid – their way around the world, the current crop benefit from more reliable construction, bigger foils, and sophisticated rake controls (though not T-rudders, still banned under class rules) for increasingly sustained flight.

As well as VPLP and Verdier there are boats by Owen Clarke, Farr, David Raison, three scow-style boats from Sam Manuard (including Initiatives-Coeur, built to older moulds but updated, and Charal 2), and two new builds from Antoine Koch/Finot Conq. Hull shape is a major development area, with focus on avoiding the bow burying into waves as the boat comes off the foils.

Dalin says this was a big priority for his Verdier-designed Macif. “My new boat is much better in that respect. We’d get quite a lot of water on deck, and I’d pretty often have big decelerations. The new boat is above the waves nearly all the time. But when it slows, sometimes you can still nose dive. So before, I was always bracing myself and getting ready for the decelerations. This time, I don’t know if it’s more dangerous, but it’s much rarer.”

Thomas Ruyant is one of the front-runner. Photo:Eloi Stichelbaut/polaRYSE/IMOCA

Jérémie Beyou says his Charal 2 also sails at a more level pitch: “In terms of attitude, constant heel and trim, it’s much better than it was four years ago. I have tools to trim the boat easier than last time, with the extension or rake on the foils, and our systems on the rudders. The boat is much more sensitive to that. That is a big step forward.”

Brutal

But with higher average speeds come potentially higher impacts. “In terms of slamming and the loads, it’s a bit higher – and it was already high, so sometimes it’s a bit too much. Inside it’s still brutal,” Beyou adds.

Dalin agrees. “There are ways to tame it a bit, but it’s still pretty violent. No matter what anyone tells you, when the seaway is big, there’s no single boat which, if you go fast, is going to be comfy.”

The bone-breaking impacts can shatter both boats and skippers. Biotherm had three new bulkheads fitted during The Ocean Race’s Cape Town stopover to give the boat’s skeleton more stability, then three more added since.

During the 2023 Retour à La Base solo transatlantic Sebastien Simon knocked himself out, awaking covered in blood. After completing the race doctors discovered he’d also fractured a vertebrae in his neck.

Ruyant’s latest generation Vulnerable has a fully protected cockpit. Photo: Pierre Bouras

Teams are going to huge lengths to keep skippers safe. Sam Davies has turned her living space around with an aft-facing chair with suspension, as on a RIB. “All the really violent movement is basically being thrown forward the whole time. If you sit facing backwards, then it’s a lot less risky, otherwise we end up destroying our screens the whole time.” (The ‘flip’ side is that all Davies’ autopilot controls, radar screen views etc are reversed). Dalin has moved his nav station and bunk aft of the cockpit, with a custom-built chair, that looks like something an astronaut would belt himself into for take off.

Small details matter – Davies has fitted a tap to the bottom of her jet boil canister because pouring boiling water becomes impossibly dangerous (Boris Herrmann suffered burns that required hospital treatment during the Ocean Race while preparing food). Macif is built with no aft-facing flanges in the bulkheads to avoid every possible protrusion that could cause injury.

The skippers have been experimenting with body armour. Head injuries are a big concern, and sailors have tried everything from rugby skull caps to hard helmets. Sam Davies shows me a beanie she’s been trialling with impact protection from a mobility aid company. Musto has developed waterproofs with panels similar to those used in motorbike gear. Dalin says he often wears knee pads to avoid sores: “You have to be so careful. Even a small cut, or if you spend too much time on your knees, you can get infections, and it can become pretty bad.”

An aft-facing nav seat on its own suspension helps protect Sam Davies from being thrown forwards in lumpy seas. Photo Jean-Louis Carli/Alea

But there is also a psychological element. “If you’ve got your shock-absorbing seat and your noise-reducing everything on, if you protect yourself, then it’s a lot less scary,” says Davies. “So then you send it.”

Unknown entity

So what can we expect from this year’s Vendée Globe? “Everyone tells me it will always be the unknown,” says Vendée rookie Dorange, who’s been asking for advice. “Even those who’ve done the Vendée Globe three times say to me, ‘Don’t imagine, it will be the unknown.’”

It’s safe to speculate that if conditions allow, records are likely to be broken and competition is likely to be furiously close. But outcomes are impossible to predict.

“Previously in IMOCA, if you had a reasonable boat and an okay budget, then you’d pretty much be guaranteed to be in the top five. Now with that, you can just be in the top 20,” says Davies.

Jérémie Beyou is a seasoned five times Vendée Globe campaigner and will sail the new Sam Manuard-designed Charal. Photo: Marin Le Roux/PolaRYSE

So how many skippers are realistically in with a shout? Beyou is circumspect. “Last time, I fell into the game of being one the favourites, the two guys to beat were Alex Thomson and myself!” he shrugs. “So no prognostics for me. Maybe it’s 10 boats…”

Starting unscathed is the first task, then it will be about hanging onto the pack and seeing what the Vendée dice rolls. “That’s what I want to do – hopefully, be in the lead group. If I can do that, and manage to sail it like a transat all the way around the world, then I’ll be really happy.

“After the two transats this year, I was like, ‘Do you think it’s physically possible to keep going like that for 10 times the length of what I’ve just done?’” Davies ponders.

Is it? “I’ll tell you in three months’ time.”

Key Vendée Globe 2024 contenders

Charlie Dalin. Photo: Vincent Curutchet/Alea

Charlie Dalin

Picking a favourite is fiendishly hard, but having led the fleet home last time around, there’s only one goal for Dalin and his new Macif. The boat is immaculately prepared, the team and skipper know what to do to get around in front – now it’s largely down to fate and fortune.

Thomas Ruyant. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot/Alea

Thomas Ruyant

Dalin and Ruyant have duelled each other across oceans for years, but it was Ruyant who won both the 2021 and 2023 TJV and 2022 Route du Rhum. Foil damage put paid to his chances in the 2020 Vendée – will his Antoine Koch/Finot-Conq design Vulnerable prove to be anything but?

Jérémie Beyou. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli/Alea

Jérémie Beyou

One of the most seasoned campaigners on the circuit, Beyou’s new Manuard-designed Charal is a consistent podium finisher. Beyou will not want to take any risks on his fifth Vendée, but if he can get around unscathed expect to see Charal right at the front.

Yoann Richomme. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot/Alea

Yoann Richomme

Can you be a Vendée favourite as a rookie? Richomme last year won his first ever solo IMOCA race in the Retour à La Base transat, after a 2nd in the TJV. The two-times Figaro winner has a sistership to Ruyant in Paprec Arkéa and is known for his ability to push his boats seriously hard.

Sam Davies. Photo: Vincent Curutchet/Alea

Sam Davies

This will be the fourth Vendée for British-born Davies, and her first with a newly-built boat. Davies has experience in spades and banked the most qualifying miles of any skipper, having taken every chance she could to ‘Send it’. Her results seem to be peaking at just the right time.

Boris Herrmann. Photo: Vincent Curutchet/Alea

Boris Herrmann

The German skipper delivered a career best with back to back 2nds in the Transat and New York-Les Sables races this spring, while the fullsome Malizia has proved itself capable of handling the biggest Southern Ocean conditions. A strong podium contender.

Sam Goodchild. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli/Alea

Sam Goodchild

Goodchild’s IMOCA campaign hit the ground running with a 3rd in the 2023 Fastnet, and he just kept going, with more 3rds including the TJV, and his first solo IMOCA race, the Retour a la Base. A dismasting this summer was little setback and he’s another rookie podium challenger.

Justine Mettraux. Photo: Vincent Curutchet/Alea

Best of the rest

This is where it gets hard. Yannick Bestaven (Maître Coq V) winner in 2020 or Ocean Race winner Justine Mettraux (Teamwork, pictured)? Then there’s Sébastien Simon, Maxime Sorel, Nico Lunven, Louis Burton… easily 8-10 serious campaigns that could make a very large lead pack.

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The post Vendée Globe 2024 preview: The most competitive edition ever? appeared first on Yachting World.

The Vendée Globe is one of the most quintessentially French sporting phenomena. Fans who make the four-yearly pilgrimage to Les Sables d’Olonne – rising long before dawn to secure their spot on the town’s Atlantic-swept sea walls so they may wave their heroes off at the start – are probably only rivalled in passion by the obsessive Tour de France followers who spend summers camping roadside on mountain passes.

A whole infrastructure is built in France around the Vendée race and the IMOCA class. In Lorient and Les Sables armies of specialists handle the complex rigging, electronics and sails maintenance needs. There are the famed training camps out of Port-la-Forêt, where the best sailors in the world push each other harder and harder in the hunt for marginal gains.

For many it’s near impossible to break into this world without becoming a ‘French’ team (Alex Thomson and Mike Golding being rare exceptions who were based out of the UK). However, the current crop of IMOCA 60 skippers includes a good proportion of international skippers, many based in France – though not all. And this summer’s back-to-back transatlantic races have seen some of these skippers come to the fore.

May’s westbound Transat CIC, swiftly followed by the return New York Vendée Les Sables d’Olonne finishing in June, presented a dilemma for some teams: if qualifying miles were needed, the races had to be completed – perhaps more cautiously than usual. For some the schedule was too punishing, or the time and budget demands too arduous at this stage. Sam Goodchild and Pip Hare were among the skippers who opted to deliver their boat to New York instead.

For others the races represented an opportunity to truly test their boats and themselves in one last ‘big race’ scenario, albeit the North Atlantic in early summer offered very different conditions compared to what skippers can expect on this November’s Vendée Globe course.

Photo: Jean-Louis Carli/Alea

Boris Herrmann

After a career best 2nd place on the outbound Transat CIC, finishing just 2h 19m behind winner Yoann Richomme, Germany’s Boris Herrmann (Malizia SeaExplorer) scored another 2nd place on the return New York Vendée Les Sables d’Olonne race.

Herrmann took an extreme northerly option, climbing over the dominant high pressure system to benefit from fast downwind conditions – at one point he was over 700 miles north-west of eventual winner Charlie Dalin and 1,100 miles away from the main peloton of top boats, which passed south of the Azores. The careful gamble at one stage looked like it might reward Herrmann with his first major solo race win.

Herrmann, who bases his campaign out of Monaco, has done much to raise the profile of offshore racing in Germany, following his 5th place in the 2020 Vendée. The Ocean Race, in which he finished third, also won many fans. But despite those successes, and his notably different IMOCA design, Herrmann has a reputation for perhaps being a little conservative. With two 2nd places under his belt, is he now going to be challenging for the front of the Vendée fleet?

‘I’d expect to be starting full throttle. I think now my boat is indestructible’. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli/Alea

“I think it may make me a bit more confident,” Herrmann agrees. “I’d expect to be starting full throttle, but with a little bit of expectation to stay or to reclaim a good position wherever possible.

“I may also be more likely to be more in race-mode as sometimes I’m a little on my own planet and doing my own thing!”

After 29,000 miles he has high confidence in Malizia-SeaExplorer. “I think now my boat is indestructible – we have half a tonne more carbon than some other people.

“A strength of my boat is when it’s very irregular and unstable, because it is more tolerant [of those conditions]. Its particular strength is probably downwind in sea state, I have the best boat in the fleet for that. Obviously you pay for that when it’s upwind in medium conditions.

“In the light I’m quite good, but in everything pre-foiling – when some of the Verdier designs might just pop on the foil – then we struggle a bit. I need 1-2 knots more.”

To be at the front of the fleet brings its own intensity. “[The New York race] was a very unusual, extreme situation. It’s unlikely we’d ever have such a big split in the Vendée. Quite often it’s more about small optimisations of basically the same trajectory with some boats around you.

Article continues below…

Forty solo skippers taking part in the Vendée Globe race 2024

IMOCA teams have been anxiously counting the qualification miles for this year’s around the world race after 44 skippers initially…

Two new IMOCA skippers who will be fighting at the front of the next Vendée Globe

One year before the 2024 Vendée Globe, two back to back transatlantic races – the classic double-handed Transat Jacques Vabre…

“That is normally quite relaxing for me, as long as I have other people around. In the Transat CIC I had Sam Davies on the AIS all the way until the finish. That was super relaxing, I could lie on my bunk and have a big percentage number [displayed] and see how much distance I was gaining or losing. It’s a bit like having a pacemaker.”

Managing stress is a huge element of the Vendée Globe. What does Herrmann find most challenging? “My main focus now is on recovering better after having gone through stressful situations. For example, during the last Vendée I had the stress of needing to climb the mast with a fear of heights. And I needed to look for Kevin [Escoffier, four skippers were diverted to assist in a search and rescue]. And those situations I remember for days, it took me a while [to get over them].

“This could be quicker if I pay more attention to telling my subconscious ‘it’s fine, it’s all good, don’t worry’. That’s what I mainly want to learn, the attitude of not worrying so much, as I always worry too much about everything.”

Photo: Richard Langdon/Pip Hare Ocean Racing

Pip Hare

The New York to Les Sables race was also a career best for British-based Pip Hare, who finished ninth.

The real success story for Hare and her team is how closely she and Medallia were matching some of the front-runners in the fleet for speed – at times racing within range of Goodchild and Thomas Ruyant, alongside Justine Mettreaux on Teamwork, Sam Davies, and Yoann Richomme on Arkea Paprec. “I am so, so pleased as it is next level for me and the boat. And it is a validation that as a team we really needed,” she said after finishing.

“I have learned a lot about my comparative speed. I have always said it is difficult to be the lone team in the UK. We are very much in isolation. I have learned now about my pace compared to different generations of boat and I have been impressed with Medallia’s performance. It has some holes – as you would expect from a 2016 generation boat – but I was impressed in the conditions that it can hold its own.

“And I just love sailing this boat, I flipping love it!

“I hope this sets the bar high and I won’t go back – that comes with a certain pressure. I have always aspired to be in the top 10. But you can’t click your fingers and get there. It’s a hard, hard journey.”

Photo: Vincent Olivaud

Sam Davies

British skipper Sam Davies has long been part of the French IMOCA world, but she’s also long established as one of the top international skippers, finishing fourth on her debut Vendée with Roxy in 2008. She was dismasted in 2012 (on Savéol), then had to retire in 2020 after her previous Initiatives Coeur hit an underwater object. But for 2024 she has her first custom-designed IMOCA, a 2022 Manuard design.

The joy Davies still finds in solo sailing, 21 years after her first Figaro, is evident. In all her videos from this summer’s transats Davies seemed to be perpetually smiling, a grin which was at its widest on the dock in Brooklyn where she sprayed champagne over her team to celebrate a hard won third place in the Transat CIC. That result – Davies’ best ever IMOCA in the foiling era – was backed up by a strong sixth on the return race.

She and Initiatives Coeur were clearly flourishing at the pace being set by Jérémie Beyou, Justine Mettraux, Thomas Ruyant, and Yoann Richomme. All might be considered Vendée Globe podium contenders – as Davies also clearly now is.

“It was so important for the Vendée Globe to have done those races and to get good results in both of them is a big confidence builder,” Davies says. “For me it was important for the testing factor because I still judge my boat as quite new.

“Last year we just got it up and running so it was really important for me to ‘send it’ across the Atlantic and really push both ways. Now I know I can send it in the middle of the Southern Ocean when there is no shelter nearby.

‘I am on top of the miles table – it’s reassuring to know I could not have done more in preparation’. Photo: Alea/Initiatives Coeur

“This has proven that I’m capable of sailing my boat to its potential. These boats are so powerful and can be violent and a handful to live on – and to keep pushing over a prolonged period of time. So now I feel I’m at the same level as my boat, but I also learned, ‘Whoah, I am in the match!’ I’m up there with the front group and that’s what I, and my team, have always wanted. Those are our ambitions. We want to be in that lead peloton. I’ve proven to myself I can do that, and that it’s really good fun. That makes me want to do that more.

“Maybe there is that little bit of extra pressure now as I have proven I can be on the podium once. But I have done the best things I could have leading into the Vendée Globe, and there is nothing better than being up there among the ‘favourites’ because for the project it keeps us up at the front in the pre-race build up.

“We have a bit to do to refit and reinforce the boat this summer but there are no performance changes. That’s nice to know. I have all the sheets marked and my little ‘bible’ of how to sail this boat is pretty good now.

“I have some new sails. For my sail choices the fact I did the Southern Ocean leg with Biotherm was a big help. You easily forget what it’s like in the Southern Ocean and what it’s like there on your own, and what a huge percentage of the Vendée Globe that is. [That was] one of the big gains to having done that and lived in such an extreme way with the issues we had.

“I am on top of the miles table – that in itself is reassuring, to know I could not have done more in preparation. Some people see it as wearing the boat out or it being too tiring but it’s really important to have done the training. Now I’m in such a good place.”

Photo: Pierre Bouras/TR Racing

Sam Goodchild

Sam Goodchild marked his card early on as a likely Vendée Globe podium contender going into his first attempt – though the modest British sailor is unlikely to say as much.

After spending much of his childhood in the Caribbean on his family’s cruising yacht, Goodchild returned to the UK for school and went through the Artemis Academy in Cowes before moving to France. After impressive results in the Figaro, Class 40 and Ocean Multi 50, he signed his first IMOCA deal in early 2023.

His Vendée campaign hit the ground running with a string of thirds in the double-handed Guyader Bermudes 1000, Rolex Fastnet, Défi Azimut and Transat Jacques Vabre in 2023, before also taking third in his first ever solo IMOCA race, last year’s Retour à La Base.

He elected not to do the outbound Transat CIC this spring, but to focus instead on the New York-Les Sables as the race likely to be more representative of Vendée Globe conditions. But while lying fourth with 1,100 miles to the finish line, Goodchild‘s IMOCA Vulnerable lost its mast. He sailed under jury rig to the Azores, before the IMOCA was repatriated to Lorient under tow.

He is determined the accident won’t compromise his build up to his first Vendée Globe. “We planned to put the boat in for a summer refit, so in theory we might lose no time at all. The refit is just a post-race check – screw everything on a bit tighter and add some more knots to things, make sure we don’t take any risks!

“We can reassure ourselves that the boat’s done eight years and we are going to put a rig on it that is better than the rig which was put on originally – and trust that the 100,000 miles before it broke all went fine. You definitely wouldn’t choose to be in this situation five months out of the Vendée Globe, but you make the best of the scenario.”

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Sam Goodchild, one of the leading contenders for this autumn’s Vendée Globe solo around the world race, has dismasted on his IMOCA 60 Vulnerable (formerly For The Planet) while racing in the New York – Vendée transatlantic race

Goodchild was 4th at the time of the dismasting, sailing 150 miles from the island of Santa Maria in the Azores, and has been frequently racing within sight of Jérémie Beyou on Charal.

Shortly before the dismasting, Goodchild posted on social media a video of him sailing in around 20 knots of wind, upwind, with a single reef in the mainsail. He had torn his mainsail, though it was below the reefing point so did not require an immediate repair.

The skipper is safe and unhurt. Goodchild managed to build a jury rig and is heading for shore.

The New York – Vendée is the final major qualifying race ahead of the Vendée Globe. At the start of the race Goodchild was lying 36th on the Vendée Globe qualification table, for 39 confirmed places, with one wild card still to be awarded.

Yesterday he also posted a video saying that “Whatever happens now we’re pretty sure to be qualified for the Vendée Globe, so a little victory!”

Goodchild, 34, is British born, though he spent much of his childhood in the Caribbean on his parent’s liveaboard cruising yacht. He lives in France, and is part of a unique two-boat programme called TR Racing with top French IMOCA talent Thomas Ruyant. Goodchild sails Ruyant’s previous generation IMOCA. The two boats were previously campaigned as For People and For the Planet, and now both race as Vulnerable.

Goodchild, who previously skippered Figaros and a Multi 50 trimaran, as well as racing MOD 70s and with PRB in The Ocean Race, has had a stellar start to his first IMOCA campaign to set himself up as among the most competitive skippers in a last generation IMOCA.

Last year he finished 3rd in the 2023 Rolex Fastnet Race, 3rd in the Défi Azimut-Lorient, 3rd in the Transat Jacques Vabre and 3rd in the Retour a La Base. He did not compete in the Transat CIC, taking a rest while his team delivered his boat to New York, and was trading places with 3rd and 4th when he was dismasted.

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Clarisse Crémer has been cleared of any misconduct following anonymous accusations that she cheated during the 2020/21 Vendée Globe by discussing routing options with her husband, Tanguy Le Turquais.

The accusations were made via leaked photos of Whatsapp messages exchanged between Crémer and Le Turquais during the race, which were anonymously sent to some French media outlets, IMOCA skippers, and the FFVoile (the French sailing federation) on Sunday February 11.

Crémer, who finished 12th in the solo unassisted round the world race, had posted a vociferous denial of the accusations four days later, in which she insisted that: “I never cheated, I never had any desire to break a rule during this 87-day world tour.

“No conversation I had with him contributed to me changing course or making a strategic choice that would have had an impact on my race. I have always made all my performance choices alone and unassisted according to the rules.”

The conversations were held on a phone owned by her former sponsors, Banque Populaire, which Crémer says she also left accessible after arriving back in Les Sables, in accordance with the race rules.

Cremer finished the last Vendee Globe in 12th position and Photo: julia.huve / imoca.org

Today the Vendée Globe organisers released a statement confirming that the allegations of misconduct against both Crémer and Le Turquais had been dismissed.

In the statement Alain Leboeuf, President of the Vendée Globe, said: “On 12th February this year, the President of the French Sailing Federation informed me of the anonymous e-mail he had just received implicating Clarisse Crémer, who had allegedly benefited from routing information from her husband Tanguy Le Turquais during the 2020-2021 Vendée Globe.

“Since then, the French Sailing Federation has asked me and the Race Committee to appoint a Jury to analyse the veracity of the information and its content.

“The International Jury is entirely convinced that there was no misconduct on the part of either Clarisse Crémer or Tanguy Le Turquais and you will understand that it is not for me to make any comment whatsoever on a decision taken by the federal sporting authority.

“I therefore take note of these conclusions, which were reached in complete independence.”

Cremer Jury findings

The jury’s findings (translated by Tom Grainger) were reported. 

They included the fundamental principles that there is no time limit on calling a hearing under Rule 69, so “the evidence of pictures of WhatsApp messages is just as valid today as it would have been during the 2020-2021 race if it had emerged then. The passage of time has not diminished its significance.”

The report continued: “The main evidence examined, discussed, and questioned were 14 screenshots of WhatsApp messages between Clarisse and Tanguy, from an unknown source, presumably some of many such messages as part of the permitted communication between Clarisse and Tanguy during the race, using the boat’s phone and Tanguy’s own phone.

“Five pictures included examples of route images generated by Tanguy. This concerned very different parts of the race (passage of the Theta low pressure, approach to Cape Horn, return passage of the equator and finish). The International Jury accepts that Tanguy was trying to understand Clarisse’s intentions, for his own reassurance for her safety (as husband) and in order to answer media and family questions. The routes did not include any detailed information about wind, wave states, time and course options that Clarisse could adapt for her own use for routing.

Cremer reunites with husband Tanguy Le Turquais after finishing the 2000 Vendee Globe. Photo: Olivier Blanchet/Alea

“Two pictures related to Clarisse having a problem with her AIS, and wishing to check whether she was visible on the MarineTraffic website.

“The final pictures relate to Clarisse’s projected finish, in relation to severe weather conditions. This was an issue raised by Race Management, which was providing competitors with advice and weather information and encouraging them to coordinate their plans with their teams.

“For this reason, a WhatsApp group was created with the race management, the boat, the shore team and the weather consultant. The timing of her finish was also a relevant issue for the media and for personal arrangements. Her boat was several hours behind the previous finisher and several hours in front of the next boat.

“Clarisse’s weather models used with the routing program was more sophisticated than Tanguy’s, and she was using it for many hours every day.”

Cleared of misconduct

The jury reached the conclusion that: “The screenshots do not demonstrate that “routing” took place as defined in the article.

“Clarisse did not ask for routing advice from Tanguy. She never followed any of the screenshots from Tanguy. They were not useful information for her. She was always in possession of better information and had the time to work on her plans. 

“The screenshots do not demonstrate that Clarisse received performance support as described in the article.

“The Race Management team applied the NoR article Exceptional Circumstances at the end of the race for Banque Populaire, due to safety concerns due to high winds and exceptional weather, to ensure safety of the competitor and her boat. This included permitting conversations and options for Banque Populaire’s finish.

Clarisse did ask Tanguy’s opinion about her finishing route intentions, but that was for safety, and included the possibility of deliberately slowing, to avoid low tides or a night-time arrival given the bad weather. These were issues to which Race Management had alerted all competitors and shore teams of boats likely to be affected. She therefore did not receive outside help.

The jury’s conclusions also noted: “Tanguy had sent several course options to Clarisse, on his own initiative. The International Jury feels that this was not a wise or necessary thing to do, but accepts that his intention was to get clarification of Clarisse’s plans rather than to advise her what to do.”

This will likely become an ever-increasingly careful line that skippers and teams must tread as mid-ocean communications on the IMOCA 60s become not only sophisticated, but as simple to use as sending a message at home. Last race the skippers were already using WhatsApp chat groups and Kevin Escoffier’s rescue was in part co-ordinated on Skype.

The jury’s verdict is that: “Rule 69, Misconduct – The International Jury is completely satisfied that there [sic] was no misconduct by either Clarisse Crémer or Tanguy Le Turquais.”

Crémer is currently campaigning for the 2024 Vendee Globe selection with her new L’Occitane en Provence campaign, managed by Alex Thomson’s team.

In a statement on her new team website, Crémer said: “Of course, I am relieved by this decision, and I thank the jury for examining our case with impartiality and professionalism. Now that these challenging moments are behind us, the team and I can get back to work to prepare for the Vendée Globe 2024.”

Team mentor, Alex Thomson added: “We have weathered this storm together as a team. We have always supported Clarisse, standing by her every day. Clarisse is a person of great integrity, and we were all convinced of that, with the jury’s decision serving as proof.”

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One year before the 2024 Vendée Globe, two back to back transatlantic races – the classic double-handed Transat Jacques Vabre Normandie Le Havre race to Martinique, closely followed by the new solo Retour à La Base – set a demanding schedule for IMOCA 60 skippers who are seeking to be on the start line of the round the world race in November.

The inaugural 3,500-mile solo race back from Fort-de-France in Martinique to Lorient La Base, France’s de facto epicentre of IMOCA activity, was a stark contrast to the outbound transatlantic, with its tradewind miles and Caribbean finish.

The eastbound passage gave skippers a chance to really push their boats hard downhill, riding the early winter train of Atlantic low pressure systems which are generated off Newfoundland. The wind and sea conditions of the North Atlantic in winter are very similar to the ‘big south’ of the Vendée Globe, with the option to modulate their level of attack, sailing closer to the centre of the lows to find more wind or dropping south into more manageable conditions.

It was not only about finding the limits for the boats – many skippers reported brutal conditions on board, while Sébastien Simon suffered a head injury that required him to staple his own scalp back together mid-Atlantic.

This second transat was also key in the race for miles almost every skipper is chasing to achieve qualification for the oversubscribed Vendée Globe. The Retour à La Base was especially essential for new boats, which have to do one solo race in order to qualify.

For skippers who want to take the pressure off a little for 2024 (there are two solo races this year, the CIC Transat in May and the New York Vendée in June) it was a key box to tick.

Thirty two boats started. The most notable absentee was Charlie Dalin on his new MACIF Santé Prevoyance. An unspecified medical issue required him to sit out both the TJV and the Retour à La Base, but happily he is back to training and will compete a full 2024 season.

Yoann Richomme and co-skipper Yann Eliès brought Paprec Arkéa home in 2nd place on the Transat Jacques Vabre – behind Thomas Ruyant’s identical sistership For The Planet. Photo: Pierre Bouras/Retour à La Base

Impressive debut

So, what did we learn from this tough new race? Firstly, that Yoann Richomme has set himself as a potential Vendée Globe favourite.

Richomme is a naval architect who studied at Southampton Solent University at the same time as Charlie Dalin was at Southampton University. He is bilingual – he still has an American accent from three years going to school near Philadelphia when his father’s work took the family to the States – and he and Dalin share the same high functioning ability to crunch volumes of data and deliver race winning performances.

Former Figaro training partners and adversaries, their rivalry on the upcoming Vendée Globe is one of the most exciting prospects of the race. Dalin podiumed five times on La Solitaire but Richomme won it twice.

Richomme has also twice won the Route du Rhum in the Class 40, where he was a class apart in his ability to push his boat – in 2022 Richomme took a penalty for jumping the start yet pulled through the fleet from 51st and a 20-mile deficit to take 1st place comfortably.

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In November’s Transat Jacques Vabre, Richomme and co-skipper Yann Eliès took 2nd on Paprec Arkéa, the identical sistership to race winner Thomas Ruyant’s For The Planet. Designed by Antoine Koch in collaboration with Finot Conq, the two new IMOCAs had a definite speed edge downwind in the trade winds, a trait which Richomme showed again on the return race, which he won by 4h 50m ahead of Jérémie Beyou (Charal). Remarkably, it was his first ever solo race in an IMOCA.

Richomme sat out the last Vendée Globe as he could not raise the funding for what would have been a modest project, saying at the time that he did not want to enter if he’d have been uncompetitive. This time, however, he was selected to skipper the top-drawer Paprec Arkéa programme, replacing Sébastien Simon in 2021.

He has also become very accomplished at meteorology and routing, and in the Retour à La Base made a race winning small hitch to the north on the second major low pressure system, separating from Beyou and Briton Sam Goodchild, which allowed him to jump ahead with the system and extend away.

The Koch/Finot Conq design for Paprec Arkéa placed an emphasis on ‘sailability’. Photo: Yann Riou/polaRYSE

Richomme has the assured self confidence of someone who has always done his homework.

“My goal was to be top five,” he told me. “To be honest all season long it has been hard to position ourselves. We have so much respect for what everybody does and how hard they work and how good the other teams and skippers are. If you made any bad decisions along the way maybe you would not get there.

“But it’s like being in the Olympics: get to the top five and you have a chance. People laugh when I say top five but I don’t think they realise – I have the level to sail in the top three or win.

“I have a good vision of what the objectives are for [sailing], design choice, technical choices on the boat, priorities in terms of going sailing and doing technical work. I think that is where I am good in my zone. The thing is to have decisions which follow the same logic, so not shooting off into hyper technology or being hyper light, or going the other way for hyper reliability.”

Richomme is a meticulous perfectionist always seeking the best solution. He has no truck with sentimentality towards boats, but loves the Koch designs which he says are a clear step ahead in terms of speed, and more importantly ‘sailability’.

Richomme won the Retour à La Base in his first ever single-handed IMOCA race. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli/Alea/Retour à La Base

He explains: “Instead of going for a scow-shaped hull where you have a full, low bow, we have raised the nose of the boat to be above the water. We went back to a V-shape hull with some flare, meant to shove the water aside but also provide a bit of lift. Then the boat has quite a bit of rocker compared with the others and a very low inversion of the transom, so it is able to trim [the bow] up a few degrees.

“It is quite narrow to go through the waves a bit more easily than the fat boats – nowhere near maximum width. We have a deck with camber to get water away from the hood as fast as possible, so we have a few little tricks. The equilibrium, the way the foils work and the position of the keel and the rudders make for a very sailable, very well balanced boat.”

More than most, Richomme seems able to compartmentalise and get into a zone on the IMOCA.

Yoann Richomme and Paprec Arkéa are among the early favourites for the highly competitive 2024 Vendée Globe. Photo: Anne Beaugé/Retour à La Base

“These boats are much more different to sail than the Class 40, which was more of a Figaro rhythm – I would sleep a little bit, wake up, sail, sleep a little bit, sail. But on this boat I have to have three hours sleep, or I am in the red. The first problem is getting to sleep, I have a great bunk and mattress – that’s key to being able to push.

“I am really in my own world, I don’t look at the others – just a little bit now and again. What works well is all the data analysis we do before to be able to have the right polars, to make the right decisions, to have the right sails. Otherwise if you do routings all the time and it shows you different ways, it messes you up. But on this race I had a really clean routing. I think I finished within six hours of my original routing. It is all about the work I do before that pays off in the race.

“And the thing is, it works: I am not making big mistakes. You cannot change a big gennaker twice in a day, the next day you are dead! You need to make the right sail choices all the time and know what you are doing when, otherwise you are going to f**k up. You will never recover.”

Two-boat training with Thomas Ruyant. Photo: Pierre Bouras

British challenger

The second thing the Retour à La base confirmed is that Sam Goodchild is a true Vendée Globe contender. Like Richomme, Briton Goodchild was also taking part in his first ever solo IMOCA race on For The Planet. Having finished 3rd on the Transat Jacques Vabre, racing with the designer Antoine Koch, Goodchild then scored another 3rd on the return race. Adding these to his earlier podium finish in the Rolex Fastnet Race, he went on win the IMOCA Globe Series title for 2023.

Goodchild, who celebrated his 34th birthday on arrival in Martinique, is now the complete package when it comes to ocean racing. No one else in the IMOCA fleet has sailed in the Figaro, Class 40, Ultim and Ocean Fifty trimarans, and on The Ocean Race. Having finished the hard miles on The Ocean Race with Holcim-PRB, Goodchild then joined Thomas Ruyant’s TR Racing – the best funded, and only true two-boat programme in the IMOCA fleet.

Goodchild explains the team’s set up: “We are about 30 people working full time across the two boats. Part of the team is dedicated to both boats – management, logistics, the R&D/design office. The technical director is the link between design and the sailing side. And then there are technical teams who are dedicated to the individual boats, specialists working on each boat’s rigging – one per boat – and then same for systems, electronics and so on.

Goodchild came 3rd in his first solo IMOCA race. Photo: Pierre Bouras

“No other team works with two boats like we do. We use the same dropbox, we have the same person doing all the data analysis and it is shared, an open book to everyone.

“Our pre-race briefings and debriefings are done around the same table, it is all about ‘What can we learn from each other?’ Being so many people around the same table means there is so much more to learn.”

There’s no doubt that Goodchild’s ability to drive hard while remaining calm and dealing with problems is the product of his comprehensive grounding in all areas of ocean racing, “It’s hard to attribute one type of sailing to one aspect. Sailing Figaros is so great for single-handed sailing, while sailing on crewed boats like Phaedo with Brian Thompson, or – albeit briefly – with MAPFRE helps a lot because you have eight opinions.

“The Figaro is good discipline – but it is three or four days and at the end of the leg you go to sleep, whereas the Vendée Globe is three or four months. Even the Class 40 stuff was huge: it is a smaller boat and so you can make mistakes there and you’re able to get away with it. What my strengths really are is having had time with all these different boats, all these different sailors, and learned from all of them in a different way.”
Goodchild’s biggest learning from the Retour à La Base was about the need to look after himself.

Photo: Pierre Bouras/TR Racing

“I think my personal management side of things – sailing for one week, two weeks, one month, three months on your own – is probably the biggest weakness as it is new to me. The boat side of things, the manoeuvres I am good at, on the technical side there are things to debrief. The two things for me after the Retour à La Base are 1) looking after myself, eating and sleeping, and 2) having a boat which is as comfortable as possible to be able to rest as much as possible.”

Goodchild is trying not to read too much into his success this season, “Finishing third is obviously encouraging. But so too it is a huge reminder anything can happen in this class. So you just need to keep pushing on, keep going like you know you can, and let some things come to you rather than force them.”

A winning concept

Antoine Koch has been thrust into the limelight as co-designer, with Finot Conq, of the first two boats on the Transat Jacques Vabre, For The Planet and Paprec Arkéa. He also sailed to 3rd, behind his own two designs, with Goodchild. Koch was an ocean racer even before he went to Southampton as a mechanical engineer to study yacht design – he did not submit his final dissertation because he was racing an ORMA on the Route du Rhum! – and sailed the 2019 Transat Jacques Vabre with Thomas Ruyant before joining his team.

Amazingly the double winning Koch/Finot Conq design is Koch’s first IMOCA. He explains the new concept, “The concept of the boat is called a ‘motorboat’ and it is self-explanatory. It is a little bit different from the scow concept, we wanted the volume to be very high and we wanted to damp the motion.

Antoine Koch. Photo: Jean-Louis Carli

Fast comfort

“When doing a CFD run in waves we really took care to look at the acceleration and we chose the hull shape which is generating the least acceleration – in fact the scientific definition of comfort is less vertical acceleration and less pitch acceleration. The boat is going to suffer less, there will be less slamming for the structural part of the boat and it is probably going to be easier on the masthead, and it has less impact on all the gear – and on the skipper obviously.”

“The feedback on the previous generation of boats is that they were very quick but very harsh to sail. The story of the new boat really started when Thomas [Ruyant] was in the Southern Ocean during the last Vendée Globe. One day, just before rounding Cape Horn, Thomas called me and said: ‘I am not sure I want to go back there. It is really hard and if I go back there I want to go with a boat really designed to handle these conditions well. So I am telling you now because you will remember and I will forget!’ After that we never talked about it, but it was the first, number one goal of the boat.”

A huge fleet of 40 IMOCAs headed out of Le Havre at the start of the Transat Jacques Vabre in November 2023. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot/Alea

The back to back wins for Koch’s designs are in part due to the sail configuration he has pioneered with Ruyant. “We knew that on LinkedOut we needed to heel more downwind because when it was flat it had a lot of wetted surface area. We needed to heel more than 10°, with a deep gennaker it was nearly impossible to do. We chose to go for a small, flat gennaker but to heel more we needed to sheet the mainsail very hard. But when we did that we stalled the mainsail. So to not stall the mainsail you need to use the staysail.

“I talked a lot with Charles Caudrelier after he came back from the Volvo Ocean Race, and that was when they started to successfully use the triple head configuration – so two staysails inside the gennaker.

“The strange thing is that with smaller sail areas we are sailing deeper and slightly faster. And we do that because we have succeeded in sheeting the main really hard. It probably doesn’t work on all kinds of wind speeds and sea states, but luckily for us on the Transat Jacques Vabre we had a lot of VMG downwind in 17-18 knots in flat water and that is the sweet spot.”

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