Within a day of setting out on the Global Solo Challenge, Cole Brauer wakes up from a nap with an urge to puke. She’s never been seasick in her life, so she assumes food poisoning. Whatever the cause, there’s no stopping it, and as vomit turns to bile, she can’t stop crying. The rigging of her Class 40, First Light, shrieks as she lies fetal on the cockpit floor, the boat pitching in 10-foot seas and 50-knot gusts. She’s not far from shore, but she’s never felt so alone. 

Then, like a guardian angel, a voice comes over her phone speaker. “Get up, Cole,” says her onshore weather router, Chelsea Freas. “You have to tack the boat.”

“There’s no way on God’s green earth I can tack this boat right now,” Brauer gurgles, lying face down in her last meal. 

“I don’t care what you have to do,” Freas says. “Get your shit together and tack the boat. You are pointed toward Greenland right now.” 

But Brauer doesn’t care which way the boat is headed. It might as well be pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. The seas surge, her body floats in nothingness. A gray wind. A gray ocean. One wave comes, then another. 

“Get up, Cole!” Freas repeats. “You didn’t come all this way to quit now.”

Brauer takes the comment as a challenge, and like so many times before, she answers it. She sets down her phone, gulps, and gets to work transferring the sail stack from one side of the boat to the other. When all the sails have been shifted, she readies herself at the back of the boat, one hand on the tiller, the other on the winch, ready to break the jib. She times the turn on a wave, and once the sails refill, she collapses again.

“Cole?” Freas asks. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Brauer responds. “Where else would I be?” 

four months earlier, in June 2023, Brauer is on a call with her sponsor, F.K. Day, to negotiate the next phase of her racing partnership. She has just won the Bermuda One-Two, and when she floats the idea of entering the Global Solo Challenge, she is using it primarily as a bargaining chip. She figures there’s no way Day will pony up $1 million for an audacious around-the-world campaign, so she hopes he will settle for her second choice: the Transat Jacques Vabre, a doublehanded trans-Atlantic race.

But Day surprises her with a simple question: “Which one do you think you can win?”

With their vintage 2008 Class 40, racing against the new-generation boats of the TJV and expecting a win would be a fool’s errand. The Global Sailing Challenge fleet, however, is beatable. “Let’s go big or go home,” Day says. “If you want to race around the world, this is your chance right now.”

On the Fourth of July, Brauer has less than 90 days to outfit her boat in Newport, Rhode Island, and deliver it to the start port in A Coruña, Spain. She has never led a project of this scale before, and what was a $300,000 program is now a million-dollar effort with a full support team in tow.

“We realized very quickly it was going to be more,” Brauer says. “From flights to lodging to food and people’s salaries, plus the boatwork, to run a fully professional program was going to cost a lot of money to do the right way.”

She assembles her squad in a few different phases, starting with her media team: photographer, videographer, and a social media and marketing manager. She then hires a project manager and buys 10 brand-new sails. She retains a medical team to stand by 24 hours a day during the race, and after replacing all the batteries and electronics and loading the boat with spares, the only thing left to do is make the start. 

The Global Solo Challenge features a pursuit-start format, and by the time her starting window opens on October 28, a few of her competitors are already well down the Atlantic. The day she is scheduled to set out, a low-pressure system with gale-force winds keeps her in port, but after a day of waiting, she crosses the starting line at 5:38 a.m. local time through a shroud of morning darkness, thrashing upwind in the remnant gale. 

“I had a good idea of what I was getting myself into,” she says. “I felt strong and quite confident and not nervous whatsoever about leaving.”

Elation turns to nausea, and then she’s on the cabin sole. “Thank God my medical team was there,” she says. “They were shoving me with drugs, trying to get me to stop throwing up. They were talking me through it, reassuring me that everything was going to be OK.”

Brauer eventually ­administers herself an IV, sharing the experience with her Instagram followers in what will be one of many brutally honest and emotional “shares” with several hundred thousand people she does not know. Despite well wishes inundating her social media feeds, tears flow daily. Not all day long, but every morning, she thinks about her friends in Newport or her parents in Maine, and sure enough, the tears come again.

“I had such a good community, and then, with no weaning-off period, I was just shoved out into the middle of the ocean all by myself,” she says. “That was probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do. I was having a really rough time.”

Over the next month, Brauer is jockeying for position on the way south, past the Cape Verde Islands, through the Doldrums, and straight into the Southern Ocean for her baptism of fire. “The waves in the Southern Ocean have a different level of violence not trainable anywhere else in the world,” Brauer says.

One broaching wave in particular gives her a true taste of more to come. She’s thrown clear across the cabin and lands on her right rib cage. Video of the incident, shared around the world thanks to her Starlink terminal, goes viral, but harder moments are ahead. The boat’s autopilot ram blows a gasket during the broach, so she heaves-to and crawls into the cramped rudder compartment to fix it. With her ribs throbbing, she replaces the primary autopilot ram with her secondary unit, but a few days later, she discovers that a piece which attaches to the quadrant has unthreaded itself, so she’s spelunking for another fix. “Everything that could go wrong was starting to go wrong,” Brauer says. 

At this point, she’s in a part of the Southern Ocean they call “The Train,” where ­low-pressure systems come one after another, with dramatic changes. “The northwesterly [wind] is a lot calmer,” she says. “A lot less shifty, a lot less cold. And then it switches to the southwesterly, which comes from Antarctica, which is the scary breeze. The way the wind comes down from the upper atmosphere makes it super-violent and unstable.”

Here in The Train, she soon discovers water pouring through the rudder bearings and onto the electronic rudder unit, which eventually dies. “The last 24 hours, I’ve been so angry,” she shares on a video dispatch. “And not angry at one thing in particular. Just angry. Angry that things keep going wrong. Angry that the rudder reference thing has happened. Angry that my ribs hurt so bad.”

She has to wait three days for the wind to abate so that she can calibrate the new rudder reference, which is something people typically do at the dock. She has Freas route her to a calm spot, allowing her to stop the boat completely, and even then, she isn’t happy with the job, given how bad the sea state is.

“I was nervous because there was still so much water coming through the rudder bearing, so I made a little raincoat for the rudder reference, which was just a Ziploc bag and some tape. I poured baby powder on top of the unit so that I could look into the bag and see if the powder was still dry, then I knew I didn’t have to replace the plastic bag.” 

Through weeks of hard work and grit, her rib injury subsides and rudder issues wane. When she rounds Cape Horn on January 26, 2024, she is the first American woman to sail past the three great capes. She announces her procession to her Instagram following, which will grow from 2,300 followers to nearly half a million by the end of the race. Her unique ability to make hardcore ocean racing look fun and sometimes silly is resonating with an audience who likely doesn’t know bow from stern. With quirky videos of her vibing on the boat, she manages to captivate followers well beyond the sailing bubble.

“We didn’t do it for the numbers,” Brauer says. “We didn’t go out and buy our followers. We just wanted everything to be organic, and I think we got a big following because we weren’t too pushy about anything. Every day, we made between 2,000 and 7,000 followers steadily, until I got to the finish.” 

On March 7, as first light pokes through the clouds off the coast of Spain, Brauer stands on the back of her boat with a pair of marine flares, per tradition, and crosses the finish line, second overall to Frenchman Philippe Delamare by 11 days. She’s celebrated as the first American woman to race nonstop singlehanded around the world, and the reception in A Coruña is a flurry of hugs, kisses and champagne. With superhuman adrenaline, she powers through a daunting schedule of network-news interviews—an overnight media darling featured by every major news outlet in the US. Her and her media manager’s phones are ringing off the hook: endorsements, book deals, documentaries, and ­speaking arrangements all in demand. Reporters ask her ad nauseam what it means to have finally achieved her goal. She talks about how great everything was, but in truth, all the attention just makes her want to get back on the ocean and do it all over again.

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Ronnie Simpson—brimmed hat ­backward, eyes forward, a light touch on the tiller extension of his borrowed Open 50 Sparrow—is in his element. It’s a radiant September day with a pumping south­westerly raking Rhode Island Sound, and I’ve joined a pickup crew for a shakedown sail aboard the spartan 50-footer that he is just starting to get a feel for. “Learning,” he says repeatedly. “That’s what we’re doing here today. Learning.”

Sparrow is the latest handle for the well-traveled 50-footer, which began life as Newcastle Australia when Aussie Alan Nebauer commissioned it for the 1994‑95 BOC Challenge; it was rechristened Balance Bar after American Brad Van Liew took it for a second around-the-world spin in the Around Alone race four years later; it became Pegasus when tech mogul and sailing enthusiast Philippe Kahn took command shortly thereafter; and, ultimately, it was dubbed Sparrow after Simpson’s friend Whitall Stokes acquired it. Stokes still owns it, but he has basically given the keys to Simpson; the pair met while competing in the 2012 edition of the Singlehanded Transpac Race from San Francisco to Hawaii.

With Stokes’ blessing, Simpson has launched a bid to race Sparrow in the upcoming Global Solo Challenge, an eclectic, nonstop, singlehanded around-the-world contest scheduled to begin from A Coruña, Spain, in September 2023. For Simpson, however, racing in the GSC is hardly the point of the exercise—far from it. No, he is very clear this is a steppingstone to a much larger goal: to fulfill his longtime dream of nailing significant sponsorship for a full-on Vendée Globe campaign on a competitive IMOCA 60.

“If I’m being honest, I’m in way over my head financially,” Simpson tells me before we set sail. “I’m rolling the dice in a really huge manner. If doing (the GSC) on an Open 50 was the endgame, I probably wouldn’t be here. I consider this my shot for the Vendée. I don’t know why I’m so driven to do that race, but I wake up every day and I want to do it, and I go to sleep every night and I want to do it.”

Sparrow has a long and well-traveled history, but it pales to Simpson’s personal odyssey. Now 37, he has sailed more than 130,000 nautical miles and worked professionally as a racing sailor, delivery captain, charter captain, sailboat rigger and race-boat preparateur. Which is saying something, since he admits, “I never sailed a boat a day in my life until I was 23.” Which may never have happened had he not joined the Marine Corps and been nearly blown to bits in the Iraq War.

Which, indirectly, is how and why I met the man. A talented writer, long after his service he began submitting sailing articles to the magazine I was then working for, Cruising World, and I became his editor. His early submissions were pretty straightforward voyaging yarns, but his first major feature was a blockbuster, flagged on the publication’s November 2015 cover with this title: “From Fallujah to Fiji: An Iraq Veteran’s Odyssey of Redemption.”

A summary: Caught up in the patriotic fervor following 9/11, nine days after graduating from high school in Atlanta, Georgia, Simpson enlisted in the Corps, and on June 30, 2004, he was riding in a Humvee outside Fallujah when it came under heavy fire and a rocket-propelled grenade detonated just yards away. Simpson sustained major impact injuries to his body, brain and eyes, and inhaled enough of the explosion’s rapidly expanding gas to shred his left lung. He was put into a medically induced coma and woke up 18 days later—in San Antonio, Texas. He spent the next three years there, more or less recovering, but also feeling aimless and “unfulfilled.”

“I was rolling the dice in ways they should not be rolled,” he wrote. “Then one night, I discovered sailing on the internet. Within 90 days, I’d dropped out of college, quit my job, sold my house and, for $30,000, bought a 41-foot bluewater cruising boat in San Diego and moved aboard. I’d never before set foot on a sailboat, but I was resolved to sail around the world.”

In October 2008, he set forth by ­himself, bound for Hawaii. A little over a week later, he was rolled by Hurricane Norbert. He abandoned the boat and was picked up by a freighter that deposited him in the Chinese port of Shanghai. (“Twenty-one days across the Pacific!” he said.) He was out a boat, but he was also outward-bound on a cleansing adventure, which continued over the next seven months on a 9,000-mile bike trip through nine countries in Southeast Asia. For much of it, all he thought about was the Vendée Globe.

In August 2009, he flew back to California with $500 in his pocket and a single obsession in his mind: to race across oceans alone.

For $1,000, Simpson found a Cal 25 for the 2010 Singlehanded Transpac. Fatefully, a Vietnam veteran named Don Gray, who ran a nonprofit for wounded vets called Hope for the Warriors, offered him the use of his Mount Gay 30 for the race, which Simpson gratefully accepted. A repeat arrangement on a second boat called Warrior’s Wish, this time a Moore 24, was procured for the 2012 race (where he met Sparrow’s Stokes, then sailing a Tartan 10), aboard which Simpson won his class by a mere 90 minutes.

Next, he wrangled a writing assignment to cover that year’s start of the Vendée, and afterward traveled to Switzerland in hopes of making contacts to at least score a used Open 60 for the event’s next running. But he realized for the time being that raising the funds was a bridge too far, and he was itching to keep sailing. Returning to Hawaii, he landed a gig delivering a cruising boat back to the mainland, and then plonked down four of the five grand for a Cal 2-27 he found in Seattle that he named Mongo. He slapped on a solar panel and wind vane, and pointed the engineless 27-footer into the Pacific.

On his approach to Fiji in that summer of 2014, he notched an important anniversary. Precisely 10 years earlier, he had nearly lost his life in the desert. From Fallujah to Fiji indeed.

For the next several years, Simpson used both Fiji and Hawaii as bases of operation, surfing as much as possible. He upgraded his ride to a Peterson 34 called Quiver and continued to cruise the Pacific. Using the GI Bill, he earned his undergraduate degree in multimedia from Hawaii Pacific University. He handled press duties for events like the Pacific Cup and Transpac, and continued delivering yachts and racing offshore. Most importantly, he launched a business in Fiji running day charters and offering other watersports for the tourist set, which looked like a long-term plan for funding a Vendée campaign.

Until COVID-19 hit, and that scheme came to a sudden, crashing halt.

Simpson’s one tangible asset was Quiver, which he described as “all my eggs in one basket.” There was, however, no possible way to sell it in Fiji during a pandemic, so he hopped aboard, sheeted everything home, and spent 29 days hard on the trade winds to reach Honolulu, where he sold the 34-footer for $30,000. After yet another delivery to the mainland and a stint back in Hawaii running charters and earning his captain’s ticket, he flew to Los Angeles. There, he purchased a Peterson-designed Serendipity 43 cruising boat and signed up for the Baja Ha-Ha Cruisers Rally from San Diego to Mexico. His new plan was ultimately to return to Fiji and employ his new boat to relaunch his charter business.

And then he got that fateful call from his old mate, Whitall Stokes, and everything flew out the window.

Stokes had spent a good stretch of the COVID-19 years on his own excellent solo adventure, sailing Sparrow from the Pacific to the Atlantic via Cape Horn, a 17,000-­nautical mile voyage that concluded in Portland, Maine, at the Maine Yacht Center, a boatyard well-known in shorthanded circles for its exceptional refits and maintenance work. Stokes then put the boat up for sale. But finding scant interest, he decided to see if one of his mates might be interested in campaigning it. His first call was to Ryan Finn, fresh off a record-setting trip from New York to San Francisco on his proa, but he was already involved in another project. The second call was to Simpson, who did not need to be asked twice. “I immediately just said, ‘Yeah, I’m into it,’” he said.

Hasta la vista, Ha-Ha.

Right off the bat, Simpson sold the Serendipity 43 and launched a GoFundMe page that raised nearly $15,000 in a matter of hours, money that went directly into promotion and a website (ronnie​simpson​racing.com). He sailed to Newport, where we spent that epic afternoon putting Sparrow through the ringer, and then on to Annapolis, Maryland, for the US Sailboat Show, where he again put the boat on display. He scored some important sponsorships with New England Ropes, Ronstan and Wichard. He caught a plane to Amsterdam for the gigantic Marine Equipment Trade Show, the necessary hustle now in full flight.

What’s next? On to the Caribbean for a fully crewed entry in the Caribbean 600, then a qualifying Transatlantic sail to France, and the GSC in September, a unique event with a rolling start over 11 weeks for singlehanded boats from 32 to 55 feet. Hopefully, a tremendous race result attracts the notice of a deep-pocketed sponsor wishing to back a tenacious American competitor.

“I’m going to really try making this into a professional campaign,” he tells me. “I want to take everything I’ve learned from the French professionals and try to emulate that. I’m so incredibly grateful to Whitall for giving me this opportunity. Sometimes I curse him because it’s so stressful, but I’m just joking around. I’m so grateful.”

You could certainly say, in this latest chapter of what’s already a remarkable life story, Ronnie Simpson has hit the ground running. But the truth of the matter is, from the moment he landed at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune as a raw teenage recruit, he’s never, ever stopped pounding the pavement. That is a good thing because he has now stepped off on the ultramarathon of his life.

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Experience life onboard the giant, flying Ultime Trimaran SVR-Lazartigue as it prepares over the summer of 2021 for the start of the Transat Jacques Vabre.

The post The Awesomeness of Trimaran SVR-Lazartigue appeared first on Sailing World.

“Why not?” There’s a phrase that leads to trouble. So too does its problematic next of kin: “If not now, when?”

Those were the sorts of thoughts rattling around the mind of Peter Gibbons-Neff last year as he considered his future on the verge of transitioning from active duty after a 10-year stint in the Marine Corps.

A captain and US Naval Academy graduate, he’d survived two deployments to the war-torn Middle East and a divorce, and was back on home waters last year, working at the Pentagon and living in Annapolis, Maryland. With the rest of his life looming large, he wondered, what next?

It turned out the answer lay around the corner from his place in the Eastport section of the quaint old sailing town. It was a boat, of course—a life-altering, slippery little beauty designed to the Mini 6.50 class of tiny, trailerable race boats in which every other year a gaggle of grizzled Frenchmen charge alone into the tempestuous Atlantic on a 4,000-mile sleigh ride to the Caribbean. And, of course, it was for sale.

“I got a test ride,” Gibbons-Neff says, “and I fell in love with the boat. I loved the speed, the size, and what you can do with it. The timing was just right.”

This was 2020, the year of COVID-19, and he figured that by September 2021, if he hurried, he could get ready for the start of the biennial Mini Transat in France, the premier event on the global calendar for the 21-foot sleds. Out there alone on the ocean blue, he wouldn’t have to worry about quarantines, masking or hand-sanitizing. That sounded good. And at 32, in the prime of life, he was fit and ready for anything.

Plus, he had a mission. Gibbons-Neff, who trained local troops and conducted intelligence during his deployments in Afghanistan and the Middle East, did not personally suffer from post-traumatic stress due to combat, but he knew plenty who did. He’d become involved with a stateside organization, US Patriot Sailing, that introduced veterans to racing as a way to help them transition back to civilian life. He figured he could raise awareness for US Patriot Sailing by flying its flag in the race.

The boat was in good shape, he determined. There are two classes in the Mini Transat—fiberglass, fixed-keel production boats that are largely standardized to limit cost but still plenty sporty, and prototypes with lots of carbon fiber, canting keels, foils and other pricey gewgaws. Gibbons-Neff’s boat, which he renamed Terminal Leave in honor of his transition, was a competitive eight-year-old ­production model that a local racer had used for the Bermuda One-Two and other offshore events. Neither of the two masts was class legal, so a new one was in order. All the electric wiring needed replacing, and sails, rudders and brackets, standing rigging and a host of other items begged for refreshing. He was hard at it all winter with his girlfriend, Jane Millman, who runs the Basic Sail Training for Midshipmen at the academy.

Gibbons-Neff has plenty of sailing experience. His late father, Peter Sr., campaigned a Farr 39.5 called Upgrade on the Chesapeake and in offshore races in the early 2000s, and Peter Jr. worked the bow starting in middle school. The family lived outside Philadelphia, but young Peter spent summers in Annapolis with cousins, ­racing dinghies at Severn Sailing Association. At the academy, he was on the offshore sailing team for four years and skippered the TP52 Invictus in the Bermuda Race his final year.

As for singlehanding, he’s done none. He’s banking on his service to help with the challenges of sleep deprivation. “There’s a lot of sleepless nights in a war. You have to keep track of nutrition and concentrate on decision-making. As an officer, you get that experience,” he says.

Gibbons-Neff should have plenty of sea time by the day the race starts in September 2021. He put Terminal Leave on a ship to France in April. Summertime promises a grueling regimen of first finishing up the boat and then training. To qualify, he must complete 1,500 nautical miles of shorthanded racing in Europe and a 1,000-mile solo qualification sail across the English Channel to Ireland and back.

Only 84 racing slots are available, about half set aside for prototypes and half for production boats, and 125 or so entries have preregistered. Much still can go wrong to short-circuit Gibbons-Neff’s bid, but he is upbeat about his prospects.

He has a stable of sponsors led by Fawcett’s Boat Supplies, the venerable Annapolis chandlery, along with Gill, Harken, New England Ropes, Switlik safety gear and others. Jeff Miller, general manager at Fawcett’s, says the company does not generally sponsor racers, but in this case: “We loved his story—a local guy from the Naval Academy, his service in the Marines, and an avid sailor, as was his father. We felt like we could help keep him safe.”

Gibbons-Neff doesn’t expect to win the Mini Transat, but even that is not impossible. “It’s a boat race, after all,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. Whatever the outcome, it’s one of those events that make you bigger and prouder just to try, and prouder still if you can bash through the breaking waves and make it to the finish.

Peter Gibbons-Neff is now racing offshore in his first European training race. Follow his progress at SoluSport.

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Gone is the idea of skippers disappearing over the horizon and then finishing hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart, having surfed entirely separate weather systems in the Southern Ocean. From now on, we can expect sailors to prepare for the Vendée Globe as a sort of giant fleet race when the great capes—Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn—function as little more than buoys on the course. This pandemic-era Vendée Globe ­featured not only revmarkably close racing all the way around the world, with a front grouping of 10 boats each in contention for the podium for three months, but it also set a new precedent with a finale that was easily the most dramatic in the event’s 32-year history.

Those closing stages, on a breezy and cold Bay of Biscay, saw five boats capable of winning right up until the last 24 hours of the 28,000-mile race. In the end, the first eight boats finished within 19 hours of each other after 80 days at sea. And for the first time in the history of the race, the line honors winner, Charlie Dalin on Apivia, lost on corrected time—by only two and a half hours, to Yannick Bestaven on Maître Coq IV, who was third across the line.

This was a race that was supposed to offer a showpiece for the latest foiling designs, but predictions that they would storm away from the older-generation boats with foils, and the even older ones with ­daggerboards, proved wide of the mark for a variety of reasons.

Among them was the fact that the ­newest boats seemed to disproportionately experience collisions with debris or structural failures. Of the seven new rocket ships aiming for glory, two dropped down the fleet after repairs or restarting, including Jérémie Beyou’s Charal and Armel Tripon’s L’Occitane en Provence. Three retired with damage: Nicolas Troussel’s Corum L’Epargne, Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss and Seb Simon’s Arkéa-Paprec. The two that made it all the way around were both handicapped by losing the use of one foil: Thomas Ruyant’s LinkedOut and Dalin’s Apivia.

Alongside the damage and retirements, weather conditions seemed to work against the latest foilers. They struggled to show their paces because either wind angles or sea states were not ideal. When in the Southern Ocean, those skippers with lifting foils found them too dangerous to use in big seaways and strong winds. The result was the foilers from 2015 were more than just in the mix in a race, when for only the second time in Vendée Globe history, the winning skipper did not break the previous record. Bestaven took the spoils on corrected time on the 2014 vintage Maître Coq IV; Louis Burton finished third overall in a 2015 boat, Bureau Vallée II, and Boris Herrmann, the only German sailor and highest-placed non-French skipper, finished fourth after surviving a nighttime collision with a fishing trawler in the Biscay, on the 2015-built SeaExplorer-Yacht Club de Monaco.

While the earlier-­generation designs were in contention, even more remarkable were the old daggerboard-configured boats, some of them ancient warhorses that had been cleverly optimized with weight taken out, ballast capacity augmented and new sail plans added. Among the best performers in this category were Jean Le Cam, fourth on corrected time in the 2006 vintage Yes We Cam!; Damien Seguin on board Groupe Apicil, which was built in 2007, who finished seventh; and Benjamin Dutreux in the 2007 vintage OMIA-Water Family, who finished ninth.

The sheer competitive intensity of the race underlines just how far the IMOCA class has come. There is now a solid calendar of short-, medium- and long-distance events leading up to the Vendée Globe, a rule that combines one-design aspects with scope for innovation and entry requirements that ensure that both boats and skippers are up to the job. By the time the first 12 boats had finished, it is to the class’s credit that only eight of the 33 starters had retired, far fewer than the norm in the Vendée Globe.

The race also indicates that the all-­important autopilots on IMOCA yachts, which steer not just to wind angle but heel angle as well, are now superbly nuanced bits of durable kit that can drive the sport’s most powerful 60-foot offshore monohulls in any conditions, 24/7, far better than any human could manage.

This ninth Vendée Globe did not lack human drama either. This time it was the rescue of Kevin Escoffier after his much-strengthened PRB broke up and sank in the South Atlantic. The popular Volvo Ocean Race winner had just minutes to deploy his life raft, having sent this text to his shore team: “I need assistance. I’m sinking. I’m not joking.”

After three skippers were diverted to search for him, it was none other than “King Jean” Le Cam himself who succeeded in finding him and safely getting him aboard, before dropping him off five days later after liaising with a French naval vessel. The incident made worldwide headlines and introduced a note of uncertainty about the final podium, which only increased the ­tension as the race reached its climax.

But whom to pick out in a race where—to coin a phrase—everyone was a winner for just getting round the world, alone, and in one piece. Should it be Dalin, who sailed a mature and controlled race, much of it from the front to take line honors? Or the hard-driving, ebullient and unfancied Bestaven, who led throughout the Southern Pacific, then dropped back while climbing the Atlantic, but never gave up and swooped in to take the glory at the end? Or perhaps Le Cam, the senior sailor in the fleet at 61, a living legend and gnarly old French sailor who happily refers to himself in public as an “asshole” and who appeared in his onboard videos looking like Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones?

It could be any of them. But my choice for MVP in this epic is the only competitor in the fleet who you might call a genuine singlehander. Damien Seguin was born ­without a left hand, yet he managed not only to take part against the best solo racers in the world, in a very old and poorly rated boat, but also race right up there in contention almost all the way around the world.

With a modest budget from French ­insurance company Groupe Apicil, Seguin sailed around the planet 19 days quicker than his boat’s time in the previous race in 2016 and, most impressive of all, he was the first nonfoiling skipper to finish on the water, in sixth place. He dropped one place once Le Cam’s 16-hour-and-15-minute time compensation for rescuing Escoffier had been factored in.

A 41-year-old married father of two kids with a wife, Tifenn, who backs him all the way, Seguin was one of the plucky early nonfoiling leaders alongside Le Cam as the boats split at Cape Finisterre. He was inside the top 12 all the way down the Atlantic, but it was in the Southern Ocean that he started to impose himself and establish Groupe Apicil as a regular top-five contender. He was fourth crossing the ­latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, fifth at Cape Leeuwin and then fourth at Cape Horn.

A big man with a big heart who sometimes struggles to pace himself, Seguin brings an intensity to his sailing that marks him out even in this Vendée Globe. It was born out of his early experiences in the Paralympics, where he won two gold medals, and he has the Olympic rings tattooed on his arm to remind him of it. What is fascinating about him is that he manages to execute the myriad tasks of a solo racer on a powerful monohull, even though there are only two pieces of specially adapted kit on his boat to compensate for his lack of a hand. One is a device that he designed to help him empty a packet of freeze-dried food; the other is the cockpit pedestal grinder that has a socket into which he can place his left forearm when spinning the winch. In all other respects, Seguin has adapted himself to his boat and to the requirements of an elite solo racer.

Anyone who has sailed inshore or ­offshore, solo or as part of a crew, knows how often two hands aren’t enough and the importance of the old adage “one hand for you, one hand for the boat.” The enduring mystery in my mind is how Seguin manages. His great friend and sailing partner Yoanne Richomme says it is important to understand that Seguin has a wrist on his left arm, and that gives him some articulation. When you sail with him, Richomme says, you barely notice that he is missing any facility. “He can tail a halyard, as if hand-over-hand,” Richomme says. “He does a half-turn around his wrist and, when you are with him, you can barely see it when he is doing it. That is a good example of how smart he is with what he’s got. It is hard to see a difference compared to a sailor with two hands.”

All finishes of a Vendée Globe nonstop unassisted circumnavigation are emotional occasions, but none more so than that of Seguin, who achieved a final ranking that few foresaw. He had also demonstrated that people with disabilities can compete with the able-bodied on the same playing field without any special compensations, an example that underpins his work with his own charity, Hands & Feet, which helps young people with disabilities.

Standing on the foredeck of his boat, dressed like Captain Hook in a red tunic with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder and his left arm bearing a pantomime hook, a beaming Seguin breathed it all in as French race fans lining the canal into the harbor at Les Sables d’Olonne applauded his outstanding voyage.

“There is nothing simple, nothing given in the Vendée Globe. You really have to push yourself in all areas,” he said after he stepped ashore. “You have to earn it. Every step you take, every day you take is a small victory. In the end, it’s a great reward for everyone.”

Look out for him next time because Seguin is not finished with the Vendée Globe. He is already planning his second tilt at the world’s toughest yacht race and wants a newer foiler to enable him to ­compete for the top prize.

If Seguin takes my MVP nomination, a close second is Seguin’s fellow Frenchman Louis Burton, another relentlessly determined individual who pushed himself and his boat from one position schedule to the next, with an intensity few others in the fleet could match.

Burton was sailing the yacht that won the previous race under the colors of Banque Populaire, in the hands of Armel Le Cléac’h. With relatively little upgrading work since that race, the boat still proved a potent weapon, with sponsorship from French office-supplies company Bureau Vallée. A laid-back character ashore, Burton was not particularly rated going into the race, his third Vendée Globe, after finishing seventh last time. But he should have been.

Once the fleet got into the Southern Ocean, the sailor based in the English Channel port of St. Malo put his foot down and dropped right onto the border of the ice exclusion zone. Throughout the big south, he was often the southernmost of the leading boats. But his race seemed to be over as a contender for the podium when ­autopilot trouble culminated in him blowing off the top section of his mast track in an ­uncontrolled jibe. He also had a major issue with a jammed halyard lock.

Burton tried to climb his mast while underway south of Australia, but he got bashed around and realized he needed shelter. He sailed into the lee of the lonely east coast of Macquarie Island, 800 miles southeast of Tasmania, and set up the boat under a J3 staysail, sailing on a north-south axis under his misbehaving autopilot. Burton climbed the mast several times to execute a complex repair but emerged triumphant, even though his race was effectively over, with the leader nearly 940 miles ahead of him.

But the 35-year-old, who is married to French round-the-world sailor Servane Escoffier, did not know he was beaten and set about catching up, once again hugging the southerly limit of the course. By Cape Horn he was sixth, and going north up the Brazilian coast, he was again vying for the lead in a boat that was back in almost mint condition. “I can’t quite get over my whole journey,” he said at that stage. “When I look at what I’ve been through since I left Macquarie Island, I feel like it is surreal. I had not thought I would get back to the group I’m in. I am extremely happy—it feels like I am in a daydream.”

Burton continued pushing hard to the ­finish, taking a northerly option into the Bay of Biscay that could have brought him overall victory. In the end, he arrived in second place—just four hours after Dalin—and was corrected to third, an astonishing achievement given what he had had to contend with.

At Les Sables d’Olonne, there was some nervousness in the air about how it might look if a sailor raced around the world, then crossed the finish line first but was not adjudged the winner, a routine occurrence in handicap racing but unprecedented in the Vendée Globe. The sailors themselves ­diffused that issue.

Dalin made it clear that he was happy to have taken line honors as he waited for Bestaven to come steaming in to take the win. Then, when the Maître Coq IV skipper reached the finish, he chose the perfect formula to sum up what so many others were feeling. “There are two winners of this Vendée Globe,” he said, capturing the spirit of a race between sailors whose respect for one another is one of its hallmarks.

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The summits – an integral part of The Ocean Race, the prestigious round-the-world sailing race dubbed ‘sport’s toughest test of a team’ – build upon the series of award-winning summits during the last edition of the race. The conference in Genoa will examine the vital role business has to play in stemming the flow of plastic into our seas.

Taking place in the iconic Italian port city on 20th September, the international gathering will hear from political representatives from the EU, Genoa, national and international businesses, the sport of sailing and NGOs.

Staged in the historic Porto Antico area at the Centro Congressi, speakers at the interactive event include renowned sustainability expert Dr. Wayne Visser; Anders Jacobson, Co-founder & CEO of Blue; and Angela Wiebeck, Head of the UBS in Society Program Office. All are expected to offer their expert insights into how wide-ranging collaboration is vitally important to address the challenge of restoring ocean health.

Delegates will also hear Giulio Bonazzi, the Chairman and CEO of Aquafil; Moby Ahmed, CTO, Ambercycle; and Dr. Giulia Gregori, Strategic Planning & Corporate Communication Manager, Novamont, give practical examples of cutting-edge practices to implement sustainability at the heart of business operations.

The Ocean Race Summits form a key element of the ‘Racing with Purpose’ Program, in collaboration with Premier Partner 11th Hour Racing and supported by Official Partner Bluewater, embedding sustainability at the heart of the race.

“Genoa provides a perfect opening stage for The Ocean Race Summit series – convening business, sport, science, and government in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, where maritime trade history unfolded. These waters, which are still pivotal to Europe’s history and economy, are now under severe stress and require urgent collaborative action to be protected and restored to a healthy state,” said Alessandra Ghezzi, Communications Director, 11th Hour Racing. “I look forward to meeting the solution thinkers, innovators, visionaries, and the next generation of leaders that will gather in Genoa to catalyze this positive change.”

The half-day conference will also explore the impacts of plastic pollution on the Mediterranean Sea and future trends business can adopt to move away from a reliance on plastic.

Olympic and offshore sailor Francesca Clapcich (ITA) and veteran of The Ocean Race Mark Towill (USA) will provide their views and share their first-hand experiences on the effect plastic pollution is having on our seas.

Italian adventurer Alex Bellini, who will provide the inspirational opening to the day, said: “It’s the first time that Italy will host this event that is organized by The Ocean Race, the iconic race that, since 1973, has fascinated sailors from all over the world.

“Today the real challenge we have to face, the race we must win at all costs, is not to cross the finish line first but to save our seas from plastic pollution.”

Dr. Wayne Visser added: “Over the past few years, The Ocean Race Summits have been at the forefront of the fight to protect and clean-up our oceans. This includes tracking the evolving science on plastic pollution and the growing response by business, governments and civil society. If you want to stay on top of the latest trends on sustainability and the marine environment, The Ocean Race Summits are the place to be.”

To complement The Ocean Race Summits, an Innovation Workshop concept has been introduced as part of the program of events. These seminars challenge industry leaders and experts to find new ways of working on a range of issues that link their value chain with ocean pollution. The topics to be examined in Genoa are ‘Sustainable Fashion & Textile’ and ‘Sustainable Boat Building’.

“Ocean plastic is a planet-wide crisis with microplastics now found in the food and water chains, which means we all need to get involved in saving both the planet and ourselves. At Bluewater we believe passionately in harnessing human ingenuity to develop the water purification tech that allows consumers and businesses to apply our here-and-now-solutions to access safe, clean water in a sustainable way in their homes, at work and in public places,” said Anders Jacobson, co-founder and CEO of Blue, the impact led investment company that owns Bluewater.

The race’s vital scientific program to advance knowledge on ocean health is continuing over the summer as part of The Ocean Race European Tour, a series of summer pro-am sailing events around the continent. The tour boats will be stopping off at the Genoa Boat Show which takes place at the same time as the summit.

Five of The Ocean Race Summits will take place before the next edition of The Ocean Race sets off from Alicante, Spain, in autumn 2021, with at least five more scheduled during the race period.

To find out more, register to attend for free or sign up for the interactive livestream experience.

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We believe that personal safety equipment is essential for any team. The Crew Watcher device and app makes peace of mind more conventional and essential than ever. The app based system means never losing focus worrying about the safety of your teammates. The CrewWatcher is a high tech virtual lifeline, registering the point of loss and live location. Connect up to 5 beacons to your smart device with an easy set-up process, and that device will constantly monitor crew to make sure they are safe. If for any reason a crew member were to unexpectedly go overboard within a 400-foot range of the smart device, the CrewWatcher beacon will activate as soon as water is sensed, the only product on the market to do so, and trigger the Man Overboard alarm within 3 seconds. The CrewWatcher is hard to trigger on accident, the device is capable of distinguishing between waves or rain and a legitimate MOB event.

Once the MOB alarm is triggered, it gets increasingly pressing with each second that passes, even if your device was on silent. In addition to an alarm, your phone or tablet will vibrate and flash its camera strobe light. After an alarm is confirmed, the app then guides the user back to the MOB’s locations, requiring zero input. The screen simply displays an on-screen vessel image and the icon moves relative to your boat, steer it dead ahead and the green icon will increase in size as you approach the victim. There’s no map reading involved. The CrewWatcher has been tested to perfrom 30x faster than an AIS beacon and is small enough to fit anywhere on a sailor’s gear. The CrewWatcher boasts an incredible battery life, lasting more than three years even with regular use. At just 89.99, with no subscriptions fees and the app included, you can’t put a better price on peace of mind and safety, especially when offshore.

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The Offshore World Championship 2018 will take place in the Hague, specifically from the port of Scheveningen, in July 2018. An innovative solution will be used for the first time to unite the two largest offshore racing fleets.

London and Milan — Baltic, North Sea, Mediterreanean, Atlantic and English Channel-based yachts along with rated offshore racing boats based everywhere else in the world, will have the chance to compete for the ‘best in the world title’ in a World Sailing-sanctioned offshore World Championship.

Racing using a handicap or rating system is a way for yachts of different size, shape, age and performance profiles to compete together equitably on the same race course at the same time. There are many handicap and rating systems in use around the world but the two most successful in terms of numbers of subscribers are ORC and IRC. Together the two have rated over 15,000 boats in over 50 countries worldwide in 2016.

There have been World Championships run since 1999 for yachts handicapped under the Offshore Racing Congress’ IMS and ORCi rating systems, while for the first time since being sanctioned as an International Rating system by World Sailing in 2003, IRC scoring will be used in a World Championship.

A pragmatic and innovative solution now opens the door to allow an offshore fleet derived from ORCi and IRC-rated boats to assemble and compete for their discipline’s ultimate title, ‘World Champion’. By using a combined scoring system, this combined fleet will, in 2018, be able to compete on the water against each other for the first time using both systems.

The compromise reached at the sport’s international federation (World Sailing) conference in Barcelona last November calls for each boat entering the world championship to have a measurement certificate from each of the two systems, ORCi and IRC. ORC had previously approved the proposal bid from organizers from The Hague to be hosts for the World Championship based on the ORC’s standard week-long championship format, however the details of format and scoring will be re-examined by a Working Party formed from IRC and ORC to examine the options.

Stan Honey, chairman of World Sailing’s Oceanic and Offshore Committee said, “It was really important to come up with a solution to find a way for the two most important fleets of offshore yachts to compete for a world title. By using both systems conjointly for the event’s scoring neither group is compromised and both groups benefit from the dual system solution that we agreed upon in Barcelona last month. I’m looking forward to the return on experience from this event in 2018. I’m sure it will be a popular and successful event.”

Based on the experience from this exciting new cooperation between these two systems, further evolutions and convergence are envisaged in the future.

Marcel Schuttelaar, Chairman of The Hague Offshore Sailing World Championship 2018, “We are extremely pleased that the two major rating systems of the world are agreeing to make our event a pioneer in future cooperation for the World Championship. Our venue location is ideally suited to attract a strong turnout from both cultures, so we look forward to working closely with ORC and IRC on building the framework for a successful championship event.”

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Francis Joyon may have just shattered the Jules Verne record on IDEC Sport , but his latest offshore victory will likely be short-lived, he says. As a new generation of foiling giant trimarans are launched in the near future, it is just a matter of time before crews will be able to best Joyon’s already mind-bogglingly fast world circumnavigation in less than 41 days.

But Joyon certainly owes his latest record to more than just have one of the world’s fastest boats. The successful skipper breaks down the factors that went into IDEC Sport ‘s speedy circumnavigation.

How much did your success in the Jules Verne attempt depend on finding the right weather fronts?

It’s been said in the past that it was impossible to sail faster than the low-pressure zones. But, in fact, we are now able to sail with the low-pressure zones — it’s what we look for. They do not all move at the same speeds, but anywhere from 40 knots to10 knots.

At the end of the Indian Ocean, we were in a low-pressure zone sailing at 35 knots with ideal wind speeds of 25 to 30 knots, and we were able to remain inside it. Our speed was roughly the average maximum speed we were able to maintain with IDEC , while sailing over 900 miles per day. But when this weather front began to lose speed south of New Zeeland, we had to change course in search of another weather front farther south.

In the future, finding ultra-fast low-pressure zones will largely determine when records are broken. A weather front moving at 45 knots and a boat able to sail at the same speed during very long distances could certainly translate into the next around-the-world record.

What kind of boat designs are required to reach average speed of 45 degrees?

Our boat certainly can’t maintain those speeds. Our maximum was a consistent 35-38 knots. Sailing faster than that would have caused major problems. But the next generation of boats will fly like the America’s Cups boats do. They will begin to reflect the true potential of foiling designs and other technologies for offshore sailing. I expect these boats will be able to maintain speeds of 45 knots or even faster.

Boat designers such as Vincent Lauriot-Prevost, who was IDEC‘s architect, are developing these new designs. It is just a matter of time before offshore trimarans will have foils that will lift them out of the water like the current-generation of America’s Cup boats do now.

What are the limits of maintaining 40-knot speeds for days at a time?

I consider myself a good judge of knowing when to hold back. I can say this because I have survived capsizing on one of these boats. I know firsthand that it only takes one or two seconds for these giant trimarans to crash. Someone who has never capsized on one of these boats cannot know exactly when the limit has been reached. It’s a double-edged sword — this awareness creates fear, but it also enables you to know just how far you can go. If you are courageous enough to use this sword, you can go a lot further than you could if you haven’t survived a crash.

This came into play in the Indian Ocean when we were sailing with the low-pressure zones at 35-knot speeds. There was a near-constant risk of capsizing during those weeks. That was when I relied on my first-hand awareness of knowing when to hold back.

In your role as a skipper, how much of the actual helming did you do?

The lads did more of the helming than I did. I largely focused on plotting the course, meteorology, and managing the crew. I was lucky to have been at the wheel as often as I was.

How were the watches organized?

Each crewmember had three hours to sleep. They had an hour and a half of standby time, when they wore their gear and were ready to react quickly when necessary to complete maneuvers. They also spent three hours on deck, taking turns every half an hour by helming or managing the sails. There were always two crew members at all times on deck.

My schedule was different. In many ways, it was as if I were sailing solo. I slept in increments of 20-30 minutes or sometimes for an hour around the clock, for a total of about four to six hours per day. That way, I was able to interact directly with all of the crewmembers at some point each day. Whenever I heard something that didn’t sound right, such as when the boat suddenly slowed down, I would leave my hammock.

How much of a factor were breakages during the Jules Verne this time?

We just had the expected number of breakages, which is par for the course. We did have some problems with a component used to orient the mast, but that did not slow us down too much.

At one point, I had to climb below the net to fix a problem with the spinnaker pole, which attracted a lot of the public’s attention when the video was broadcast. It had to be fixed because the spinnaker pole left dangling began to leave holes in the hull in just a few minutes. Some of the holes were at water level, which made fixing it more of a challenge.

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In late 2013, the members of Gitana Team embark on an adventure that is as thrilling as it is complex: overhauling the Multi70 Edmond de Rothschild, a 70-footer initially built to race in crewed configuration on a one-design circuit, in a bid to become the first flying offshore trimaran. It is an ambitious project. Like Rome, which wasn’t built in a day, the transformations to Gitana XV call for over two years’ research and innovation to satisfy the objectives of the five-arrow team. However, everyone agrees that the interplay is very worthwhile. Just a few days ago, equipped with her new appendages, the Multi70 Edmond de Rothschild definitively took flight, racking up some 43 knots on the speedo in 20 knots of breeze and thus validating the efforts of a whole team, supported by the passion and commitment of the boat’s owners, Ariane and Benjamin de Rothschild.

There is nothing new about the idea of flying… but the 34th edition of the America’s Cup, which was held in 2013 in San Francisco, revived this quest to such an extent that it has changed the face of contemporary offshore racing, modifying the vision and the ambition of the sailors who shape the milieu. The spectacular images of the AC72s, the winged catamarans created during the last Cup, quickly find an echo within Gitana Team. However, true to the aspirations which guided its creation in 2000, the stable founded by Baron Benjamin de Rothschild is keen to gear its sights towards the open ocean. We review the team’s perfectly choreographed ramping up of activities.

2014, the Rhum launch pad

In this way, from late 2013, a series of studies is launched with a view to a participation in the Route du Rhum in the main Ultime multihull category. In a bid to do well and stand a chance of keeping pace with the class’ XXL competitors, which measure between 30 and 40 metres compared with Gitana XV’s 21 metres, all the appendages (rudders and foils) need revising, as does as the sail plan. However, there isn’t much time left and the full jobs list is abandoned in favour of enhancing the boat’s reliability in a manner that is more coherent with the sports programme: T-foil rudders replacing the classic rudders. A new genre of appendage for an oceanic trimaran, they are the result of a close collaboration between the Gitana design office, naval architect Guillaume Verdier, who is as talented as he is modest, and the members of Team New Zealand, Jamie France, Bobby Kleinschmit as well as the Pure Design company. The intended speed gains are considerable. However, as ever, the theory still has to be transferred to the water. Sébastien Josse’s very fine third place in the famous transatlantic race between Saint Malo and Pointe-à-Pitre has a rather positive ring to it for the five-arrow team.

“ The system of lifting surfaces developed by Gitana Team, in collaboration with Guillaume Verdier’s team, has clearly proven itself and the rudders have made it to Guadeloupe intact. This transatlantic has enabled us to validate the system’s reliability in rough weather over the first days of racing, as well as throughout the remainder of our journey. The T-foil rudders create an indisputable turbo effect on the boat on certain points of sail. They are also appealing in terms of safety as we’ve made solid gains in stability, which notably enabled me to go on the attack during the first few days in the big breeze, without feeling that I was putting myself in danger. Gitana Team’s gamble was a daring one given the short amount of time we had for development and making her reliable but the experiment is a success. There is still considerable room for improvement and the next stage of the adventure promises to be thrilling,” Sébastien Josse comments on his arrival in Pointe-à-Pitre on 11 November 2014.

2015, foils on guard

The feedback from the Route du Rhum backed up the theories put forward by the naval architects and reinforced Gitana Team’s choices. For all that, Sébastien Josse and his men are only at the start of their journey. Now free from any sports programme, the Mulit70 Edmond de Rothschild is to become a fantastic test laboratory. With the appendages trialled during the Route du Rhum proving to be super efficient, it’s time to switch to the second phase of the initial project, namely equipping the trimaran with new foils. Favouring a research approach, it is decided that these appendages must be asymmetric: L to port and C to starboard. This highly informative and promising test phase results in the boat’s debut flights offshore.

2016, the realisation

The third and final phase must enable Gitana Team to take the project to another level and live up to the expectations of the original project. To achieve this, the members of the technical team have to make structural modifications to the platform, particularly around the foil casing. These will be the main focus of the winter refit. Meantime, new foils with profiles more geared towards flight are built. On 22 March, Gitana XV puts in her first tacks as the 2016 iteration: the sensations are excellent as are the speeds! With many miles in flight making between 35 and 40 knots, the boat racking up a record 43 knots in 20 knots of breeze and the shared sentiment that they have a lot more to discover… The first part of the gamble has paid off: the Multi70 Edmond de Rothschild has just taken flight!

““Theory is one thing, putting it into practice is another. Despite the calibre of the project’s contributors and the ground we’ve covered in terms of digital calculation, nothing replaces miles on the water. Being in a position to benefit from a platform like Gitana XV throughout this period of reflection, followed by the construction of the future Maxi, is an incredible opportunity, which we’ve been able to make full use of.”

“Dedicated to flight, this second test campaign has proven to be more than positive! The sea trials we’re carrying out right now are just incredible, so much so that I never thought I’d see the day… With our new appendages, we’ve exceeded speeds we hadn’t expected to reach in this configuration, or at least not as quickly! Speed is a very important thing, but on top of that these latest sea trials have also taught us a great deal about how the boat handles, which is clearly very different to our understanding thus far. The boat no longer floats, she flies along on two blades… We’ve passed a very important milestone. We’ve also learned very interesting lessons about what steps to avoid in the future in terms of both our architectural choices and the on-board systems. As such, the design office has a significant amount of data with which to continue its research. The work never stops and the sea state is still something we need to make progress with!”” explains Sébastien Josse

However, the incredible sensation of flight on such a machine, as pleasant as it is to be powered up at over 40 knots, is not Gitana Team’s only objective of course. Following the announcement made in May 2015, the five-arrow team also began construction of a maxi-multihull at the Multiplast yard in Vannes, south-west Brittany back in November. This craft, the twelfth in the history of Gitana Team, will reap the full benefit of the trials carried out on the Multi70 Edmond de Rothschild from 2014 to 2016. Indeed, Sébastien Josse and his men have been able to build the future on the water rather than solely at a desk.

“”Today is massively satisfying and I feel immense pride for the entire team that I manage. The project seemed a bit crazy when we began in late 2013 but once again, within Gitana Team, we benefited from the unfailing support and enthusiasm of the owners of the boat, Ariane and Benjamin de Rothschild. When we presented the project to them, they immediately understood the challenges and the appeal of staking out the future and they didn’t hesitate an instant in encouraging us along this pioneering route. We were in a transition phase because we were at the dawn of major technological change. Indeed, the switch from sailing in Archimedean mode to flight mode might be compared to the switch from steam engines to combustion engines. Although the America’s Cup had gone a long way to showing us the direction things were heading in terms of flight in inshore racing, transferring that knowledge to offshore sailing was a whole new ball game as the very philosophy of flight is different. It’s a far cry from simply getting big multihulls to fly around the world as the AC72s did in San Francisco bay… It’s something else entirely, but the expected gains are huge and this is where the future’s at. We’ve passed a milestone and a new adventure is opening up in front of us!”” admits Cyril Dardashti, Director of Gitana Team.

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