Above: Sam Davies on the way to a fine 4th place in her first Vendée Globe in 2008/9 aboard Roxy, the well-travelled Finot design that had already won the race twice, first in the hands of Michel Desjoyeaux and then with Vincent Riou (Davies’s French moniker of ‘la petite Anglaise’ took hold during this race). Four years later (left) and a less happy outcome when Savéol was dismasted early in the 2012 event during a storm north of Madeira. It is sadly instructive that success with Roxy did relatively little to subsequently ease the path to new sponsorship and money for 2012 was very hard to find. Volvo skippers know about this situation all too well
allowing me to learn to race my boat to 100 per cent of her potential before attack- ing the ‘big one’.
After my first Vendée Globe in 2008/9 when I gained a fourth place I had high hopes to continue and try to raise the sponsorship to build a new boat for 2012. Unfortunately, despite chasing numerous leads (over 100 companies saw the pro- posal and I managed to present my project to the directors of about 15 companies in total) time ran out and I did not manage to raise the budget for a new build or even for a recent secondhand boat. However, at the end of 2011 I did manage to raise enough budget to buy an older Imoca 60; that left me with 11 months’ preparation time which was short, but given my previous experience do-able…
This time I had a multi-sponsor project: Savéol put in half of the budget and the other half was made up by 17 smaller sponsors, plus some money raised through private investors in a company that I had created for the task.
To manage this kind of project one needs a lot of patience, diplomacy, time and energy. Luckily I was well supported by a great team.
The objective was to ensure that every
single sponsor had achieved their aims in terms of ROI before the start of the Vendée as that relieves the skipper of a lot of pressure – and I can assure you that,
given the race’s reputation, you need to be able to leave the dock with a clear head and 100 per cent focused mind. To do this meant that my team and I had to do a lot of sponsor sailing, media requests, photo shoots and other commitments that took valuable training time away from the pro- gramme. But this is the reality – if you really are motivated to do this race you have to make sacrifices and compromises. For example, in my team a good day of sponsor sailing comprises up to six outings with guests continually being transferred by RIB. Ideally we had six guests at a time but sometimes that got pushed up to eight (all weather dependent of course.) So that is 36-48 people per day…
Every guest gets to helm for a few minutes and every guest departs with a USB stick of photos of the day. Of course I was always onboard and my team were great as they ‘played the game’ and inter- acted well with the guests to help me show them exactly what life was like onboard. To make all this work smoothly it is essen- tial to have a skilled RIB driver and at least one team member who can use the camera well. As you can imagine, the day is pretty tiring for the whole team, and we some- times did five or six days like that in a row. Media days were similar, sometimes sailing, sometimes doing crazy stuff to get that different story from the others (Alex Thomson and Hugo Boss are the kings of
this domain.) Occasionally the media came onboard during training but generally that tends to divert everyone’s focus from the training session so I try to avoid it. The best bit, of course, is when you can finally go and do what you are there to do: train onboard your Imoca 60 for the Vendée Globe.
I am part of the squad at Pôle France Finistère Course au Large and we have a detailed programme leading up to each of the big races in the calendar. In 2012, despite all my sponsor commitments, I still managed to take part in most of the training sessions. On the water we had short sessions of daysailing, to practise manoeuvres and speed-test; other times we’d combine day sailing with a 24-36 hour leg, plus the longer offshore sessions that sent us out into the Bay of Biscay for 3-4 days at a time. Generally, we had 5-11 boats taking part. In these sessions we were in ‘false solo’ mode, with at least one other crew onboard for security. Generally for the day sessions we take more of our shore team to be able to change sails, ballast and stack configuration quickly if the objective is performance oriented and not manoeuvre oriented.
The Pôle FCL employ dedicated coaches, usually one or two in the RIB to lay the startline and marks and take video and photos, plus another Pôle coach who will randomly choose one of the 60s to sail
SEAHORSE 29
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GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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