As they track north eastwards this morning anticipating their passage of the first Great Cape of this Vendée Globe – Good Hope – the leading quartet of skippers are making slightly more modest speeds as they transition to the next system.
Leader Charlie Dalin (MACIF Santé Prévoyance) still had about 120 miles to go to the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope but the top four boats are – remarkably – within 40 miles of each other as they contemplate and prepare for a month in the big south. Meantime for one day only, a matter of hours maybe even, all 39 boats are in the South Atlantic after Szabolcs Weöres (New Europe) crossed the Equator last night at 20:49:02hrs, 7d 01h 38min 47s and 4d 00h 04min 46s.
Now it will be fascinating to see how each sets the cursor in the south. As Sam Davies noted this morning, seamanship and care for the boat and sails need to be the highest priority, Seb Simon echoing her words from fourth place. “Now everyone does their own race, there will also be the harsh law of a mechanical sport of course. The goal is to get all the way, I would like to arrive at Cape Horn with a boat in good condition, and then we will see what we are capable of playing on the way up the Atlantic, but not before! It’s going to be a very very long month of racing, you have to keep your goals in mind. Otherwise everything is fine, I hope the rest will continue like this!” said the skipper of Groupe Dubreuil who smashed the 24 hour solo monohull record. He wonders whether his nearest rivals might have some small damages which compromised them:
SUSPICIOUS MIND
“ I suspect the first three of having had real technical problems because for once I really found them slow, and knowing them I know that they are capable of much more than that, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had real problems anyway, it’s not possible to come back on them like that! There are inevitably some wear points, ropes, tacks that get a little damaged but overall it’s okay, I try to go around regularly, almost every day, and I think this boat has been really well prepared, that’s what allows us to push the machine a little, the most difficult point is not to get carried away by the first three, to keep my own pace, not look at the others too much, make my own trajectory, continue to check the equipment and make my boat move forward as I feel! Yoann (Richomme) said that you couldn’t keep up that pace for two months and that it wasn’t very reasonable, what do I think?
“It makes me laugh that Yoann is the one who says that because he’s still the most brutal of us and has been since Le Figaro. We know him well for that! Afterwards it’s true that when you push the machine, it quickly becomes no longer fun at all, you want it to stop, for the noise to calm down, to be able to go to sleep peacefully. I’m not too afraid of the machine, in truth they are boats that have been well tested, I have confidence in my machine, I know when I can push and when not to, for example I wasn’t one of those who pushed it so hard when passing Cape Finisterre because the sea was rough.”
Simon continues, “I feel pretty good given yesterday’s comeback, I’m in the leading group, it’s incredible, so of course mentally I’m fine. Physically of course, you can feel the effects of 20 days at sea, your upper body is fine because you move your arms and shoulders a lot, you hold yourself constantly, but I can feel that my legs are no longer the same, my back, my abs. You can feel that your body is getting energy from elsewhere. I force myself to eat even if I’m not always hungry, it’s the race pace and that’s going to be it for two months, your body will get used to it!”
“ Apart from a few small things, the boat is fine, touch wood. It’s calmed down a lot now, I have 20 knots of wind, a relatively flat sea, I’m downwind under J0 and it feels good to have slightly calmer conditions, where the boat glides. We feel that these are really easy conditions, and it feels really good, it allows us to clean the boat, to get ahead of the little technical problems that we may have had, to do a global check-up, so it really feels good!”
AUS SOONER RATHER THAN LATER
“ I can’t wait to be in the Indian Ocean, to set off in this huge huge South, plus it looks pretty good for us apart from a big depression, but no setbacks, it’s going pretty quickly, there will be two and a half difficult days out of the nine to ten days of crossing, we’ll very quickly find ourselves in Australia so I have a night with this somewhat calm wind and then the conditions will gradually get tougher but it will remain reasonable so it’s great!”
He says he has found a ‘secret set up’ “I had found a very strange configuration with the boat, I won’t say more but the boat was running on its own, I didn’t feel like I was pulling on it like an animal either, but it was really going super fast and I did 615 miles in 24 hours while keeping the objective of preserving the boat, sometimes I made maneuvers to change sails and not damage the boat, to go and do check-ups on deck, I also reversed because I had something in the keel, so it could have been a little more! But the objective is to go to the end of this Vendée Globe.”
Sam Davies will be looking most of all to get through the next few days and pass the point where she had damage on the last edition which required her to retire in Cape Town as did Simon in the same area in 2020. She is in a solid tenth place this morning and, like others, is preparing for the south as she negotiates a light winds zone, “This is the moment with flat water and calm conditions to get ready for the south because from tomorrow onwards it will be much windier and rougher and so harder to do any jobs that need doing on the boat. I managed to do things yesterday which is pretty good and there a few things to do but overall the boat is in good shape and the sails too. Really it is a case of having a big check around everywhere to make sure I have not missed anything and then have a couple of food bags to have close to hand so I have supplies for the next few days, and then weight distribution, some the food bags I had right up at the front of the boat and so I am going to have everything to hand to satck aft when it gets windy downwind.”
Looking forwards
“Definitely I am looking forward to being in the Southern Ocean I have been looking forwards to my first albatross for the last few days, I have not seen one yet, and I am impatient really to see what it is like with Initiatives Coeur, this boat, I have was lucky enough to do the leg through the Southern Ocean with Paul Meilhat on Biotherm so I have good memories of what it is like in the latest generation foiling IMOCAs. It is pretty hard core. With that experience it helps me get my boat ready to go singlehanded which is a little bit different and I am looking forwards to seeing if all the choices are right and taking on the challenge of sailing around the Southern Oceans which is such a big part of the Vendée Globe.”
30 days and nights, less risk
Davies continues, “It is different sailing in the south, we have to survive full on conditions for 30 days non stop and so there is a bit more seamanship sailing now and with the endurance taken into account and if you break something and need somewhere calm to fix it they are not available, it is a long way to sail. And so generally there is a lot less risk taken in this area. So I take more time to check things and manoeuvre properly as the wind is dense and cold, compared to our sail choices we use in the south we tend to use smaller sails than in the Atlantic, the wind has so much power you are reefing down earlier. It is not just about taking less risk, the wind has so much power.”
And it is a time to regroup and reset for British skipper Pip Hare on Medallia after a week long speed phase which has ultimately not matched her hopes and expectations, “We are quite happy to have broken out of that phase of the race and be into the next one and the objective now is to get south and pick up the next low pressure which is coming through and make our way east. The last couple of days have been hard, really hard and frustrating from a performance perspective – a couple of mistakes saw me give away a few places – and then this riding down this front has been good for those who are at the front, the closer you are to the front of the pack, the better life gets. I feel where we are we have kind of missed out on all the good stuff.
“The boats behind are catching up, the boats ahead are getting away. And so it is now nice to be able to break the cycle and have a different objective other than sailing fast in a straight line which is what we have had to do for the last week or so. It is still warm with flat water, we have not had any sea state at all since the Equator, which is nice in a way but it kind of feels I want to get going. I am not relishing being slammed around I would like to get the handbrake off and get going east. So we will see what happens. It is 24 hours of trying to make ground to the south then we should feel the effects of the pressure coming through. And then we will see. I am hopeful that we will get back in touch with that second pack back. That is my aim and the aim of everyone around me, which is – I think – doable. It is worth reminding myself all the time that this is a really, really long race and we are not even out of the Atlantic yet and so though the last couple of days have not been the best for me, we are breaking the cycle and it time to regroup and go for it again!”
