A great adventure that became a great ocean race, but the Vendée Globe still carries enough whiff of perilous challenge to help keep a big chunk of the French public intimately engaged. The prizegiving following the race is huge (above), the send-off in Les Sables is huge (opposite) and the daily video hook-ups between competitors at sea and the race headquarters in Paris attract big crowds taking their lunch hour. Note to designers: deck spreaders give walking the pontoons (right) their own little frisson of Vendée danger
on to co-ordinate the session by VHF (once we get going it’s often tricky for the RIB to keep up).
I will dive into the Pôle FCL life in more detail in another article for those who are intrigued… As well as training on the water I did as much fitness training as possible; my prior- ity in 2012 was a little different from usual as I was also getting back into shape after the birth of my son, with a big focus on core stability to protect the body and strength to sustain three months’ non-stop sailing. The weird thing with the Vendée Globe is dealing with how the body changes during three months with very little walking and a lot of grinding; my experience from 2008/9 was feeling a lot more susceptible to injury towards the end of the race as my body was not only tired and suffering from lack of real food (supplements don’t quite replace fresh food), but also rather unbalanced from repeating certain movements and lacking others such as walking and running. Then there is the theoretical side of things – studying the weather, the software we have to use, routeing, polar file creation and so on. This takes time, days and weeks of dedicated work.
We also have to know our boats inside out. That requires yet more time, working with the shore team – dismantling, repair- ing, servicing, electronics, software, hydraulics, composites, winches, sails,
30 SEAHORSE
hydro generators… the list goes on. In the Vendée Globe there is obviously
no onboard reporter, so the skipper also has to be able to film, edit, compress and send all the images and material to share the race with the public. Obviously we understand the importance of this for our sponsors, so it is not forgotten or allowed to slide down the priority list; do this well and a sponsor may sign up for another race, do it badly and they may decide to go with another sport altogether. So we need to spend time practice filming as well as training with the software and the other media equipment. More time required. There is also the compulsory training required by the race organisation: medical training, sea survival, media training, plus all the compulsory briefings and press conferences (yes, more than one…) during the year leading up to the race. I think that as you are reading this you can realise that the big challenge is to fit everything into the programme, and often a Vendée skipper wishes that there were 10 days in a week and 30 hours in a day. When I was preparing my races I spent my evenings building my polar files and analysing my sailing data on my PC because there wasn’t enough time during the day. Luckily my husband is also a sailor so he understands the problem (even more so now, as he is entered in the Vendée Globe this year… but that’s another story).
So the ideal project has a large enough budget to be able to employ a team that can take a lot of the weight off the skipper’s shoulders. If you are lucky enough to have one sponsor that can (and wants to) finance the perfect project that is even better, as this makes a lot of other things much simpler (like sponsor sailing, logos, boat name and so on). This ideal project would, of course, also be part of a longterm programme that enables you to roll over from one Vendée Globe to the next, using the experience gained in the first race to design and evolve the best boat for the next race. Obviously this means a very significant budget and only a handful of skippers manage to get to this level.
One thing that frustrated me as a sailor
in the 2014/15 Volvo race with SCA was that the VO65 fleet was so small. If the Vendée could only be achievable with a big budget, then this would be the case here too. Luckily, there are different levels of doing this race with budgets ranging from €10m (new build, four-year cam- paign) all the way down to €500,000 (Vendée only, old-generation boat.) Unlike many big boat races, the thing about the Vendée is that it is not necessar- ily the biggest budget or newest boat on the podium, as I proved in 2008/9 with an old-generation Imoca 60 Roxy achieving fourth place (only 1h20min from third…)
JM LIOT/DPPI
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