Sam Goodchild
It worked out OK (in the end)
A lot has happened since the last time I wrote! We have put the boat back together, sailed her to New York, raced the New York-Vendée back, dismasted, towed the boat back from the Azores, taken her apart again and put her back in the shed. It’s been a busy few months. The great news is we are officially qualified
and accepted for the Vendée Globe. At the start of the New York- Vendée I still had a further 1,000nm to race before being completely safe and sound in the race’s complex qualification process. Which was a bit more stressful than I had anticipated. Fortunately the box is ticked, so that’s a big relief. Big thoughts for James Harayda and François Guiffant who have not been accepted to take the start at the time of writing. The investment of time and energy for everyone to get this far is huge. We are happy with our decision not to compete in both this year’s
big transatlantic races. It took a lot of the pressure off during the commissioning period following our big winter refit; meaning we didn’t have to work weekends and didn’t have too much of a rush on. Our team then had a productive two-boat training session between
Lorient and Cascais, before the technical teams took over for a low- key delivery, primarily in trade winds, from Portugal to New York. A major aim of this carefully developed schedule was to avoid burning ourselves out with less than six months before the Vendée itself. I am pleased to say that goal has been met. The only downside… the weather on the New York-Vendée wasn’t
ideal Vendée Globe training conditions! But any time spent racing singlehanded is valuable so not a complete loss. Actually, the race home was a bit of an odd one. We had a race
start 100nm offshore, with no race committee, no start boat, no start buoys, just two GPS positions to mark the startline with a high- frequency tracker on each boat. That must be a first? We then all had to send in our GPS starting tracks for validation during the first
38 SEAHORSE
six hours of the race. In the end four boats were called OCS and awarded a mandatory three-hour stop-and-go penalty… another first. A reasonably successful trial… there were no complaints anyway.
But before we get too carried away suggesting that this is a new normal, there were helpful facilitating elements. We were single- handed, so always keen to avoid getting too close to anyone else; there was 5kt of wind, on a starboard tack reach with an unbiased line; the race committee decided that the start would be taken under Colregs and not under the racing rules of sailing. The last one was a big head-scratcher before the start, seeing
as the main purpose of Colregs is to prevent boats getting anywhere near each other… rather the opposite of a race start. But there were fortunately no issues. From then on we had a first few days’ trying to catch up and over-
take the front ahead. Meanwhile, the forecasts were all struggling to give us anything close to reality on a more local scale – something that has a huge impact when singlehanded on these big boats because sail changes consume so much time and energy. The momentum behind a sail choice is huge and so we rely a lot on forecasts to reassure ourselves in making what we hope are the correct sail choices. All this was further complicated by a Gulf Stream that sometimes helped us towards the east but also sometimes hindered us with a truly horrible sea state. The race-winning moment came when we managed to cross the
front and find the strong southwesterlies. The front started moving fast at that stage, so fast that only two boats managed to stay with it: Macif and Malizia – who finished first and second overall. For my part I slipped across nicely and the wind built quickly, but
again with a nasty sea state. I took in the first reef and then peeled from the J2 to the smaller J3. But by the time I was back up to speed the wind was already dropping, in part due to all the time lost in the manoeuvre. I was caught up again by the light, unstable winds to the west of the front leaving me to spend the next week
SAM GOODCHILD/TR RACING
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