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Dean Barker and his SoftBank team have been sailing in Bermuda since last summer. Having been recruited to the Cup via a strong business relationship between SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the Japanese team has been further helped along with a design-sharing arrangement with the US Cup defenders, the two teams regularly testing together. With the might of the Oracle team in the background, Barker is in theory now better resourced than his former employers at Team New Zealand… in theory
Soon people began to suspect that there hadn’t been a foil failure, that the British skipper was just playing some nice ‘head-games’! Some of the Hugo Boss team said that Alex was carrying a spare foil that he would soon fit; in fact, a week later the British skipper admitted there was no spare foil but the ‘story’ perhaps helped to keep the pressure on Armel. In any case the black boat was often still foiling faster than Banque Populaire…
So did Alex have a problem? Hard to say, but by the halfway stage no photographs of the ‘broken’ foil had been published by his large team in England… We may know in February!
Away from the mystery, this Vendée Globe duel feels like a repetition of what occurred four years ago between François Gabart and… Armel Le Cléac’h, with just a few hours between them at Les Sables d’Olonne, to the benefit of François Gabart helming Macif. Only now the match is ‘France/Angleterre’. It is possible the chronometer will go under 70 days for the Vendée
finish in early 2017. Which is huge considering that 23 years ago the sailing community thought it was unlikely that a big multihull sailed by a complete crew could ever round the planet in under 80 days. That was the debut of the Jules Verne Trophy… Another story!
First… to finish
The key to success in the Vendée Globe is to avoid big damage. At first Vincent Riou was the only man skilled enough to keep his non-foiling boat close to the new foilers, driving his ‘old’ boat beau- tifully in the leading pack. However, on exactly the same day in the race as four years ago, PRBsuffered a collision with a ‘UFO’. Last time it was a drifting steel buoy that damaged the hull and composite stay of the outrigger, forcing Vincent to retire to Salvador de Bahia. Four years later the consequence of the collision was a damaged keel, forcing the gloomy Vincent to retire and head for Cape Town. Collisions with unknown objects or big mammals are the main reason for retirements in this race. Morgan Lagravière (Safran) broke a rudder (this may have been a technical failure, we shall see) approaching South Africa and Sébastien Josse lost his second place behind Alex, also to repair a damaged steering system.
16 SEAHORSE
Later on Josse suffered a big incident with a foil due to a collision… with the sea. Sébastien explained: ‘There was 35kt of breeze and the seas were beginning to get heavy with waves of around 4m. While we were surfing the boat powered up to 30kt and then stalled suddenly to 10kt as she buried into a wave. ‘It lasted a matter of seconds. I was under the cuddy and when the boat powered back up I knew that something was wrong and I quickly saw there was an issue with the port foil. It was in the water but I had been sailing with my foils raised… I went to open the foil casing hatch inside the boat and saw the breakage. The point where the line attaches to the head of the foil, which is a carbon part designed to withstand huge loads, had given way.’ After a long talk with the Gitana Team neither the sailor nor the team wanted to expose themselves to the risk of the foil pulling out of its housing and the resulting water ingress so far out at sea. The decision to retire and head safely for Australia was taken on day 30. At the time of writing the worst incident in the race so far happened to the Vendée veteran Kito De Pavant when he was approaching the Crozet Islands in the Indian Ocean on his Bastide Otio. Early on 6 December the 55-year-old called race HQ in Paris to say: ‘I was sailing at around 16kt with two reefs in the main in very heavy seas when the keel hit something hard.
‘It was a violent shock and the boat came to a standstill. The rear bearings of the keel were ripped off and the keel is now hanging under the boat kept in place simply by the keel ram, which is in the process of cutting through the hull… The keel housing has been destroyed and there is a huge ingress of water… I have 40kt of wind and 5-6m waves. The boat has stopped. I have my survival equipment ready. Someone is going to have to come and get me.’ Very fortunately the Marion Dufresne, a 120m oceanographic vessel, was just 110nm away and rapidly came to the rescue. This was the third time the unfortunate Mediterranean competitor had entered the Vendée Globe, after two previous retirements (for a broken mast in 2008 and a collision with a fishing boat in 2012). Every sailor in the Vendée Globe knows he will frequently have
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MATT KNIGHTON/SOFTBANK
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