Left: 5kt but heading in the right direction as Sam Goodchild’s jury-rig drags him towards the Azores to meet the shore team, before starting the long tow home to Lorient and back into the shed (inset). With nothing left of the Imoca’s one-design spar, and spinnaker poles not used in the fleet for at least 30 years, there is little onboard a modern Imoca to put together anything much better than this. For several years the switch to one-design masts (and keel fins) in the class has improved reliability – but now these spars are having to cope with much more powerful boat and foil packages. Goodchild’s team, TR Racing, was not the only Vendée Globe project very keen to find out what had broken
trying to figure out a way through it all for a second time. We ultimately had to make a big call between going north or south and waiting for the wind to fill in. I chose the south group, which ended up with five days of upwind sailing to finish a transat… Not exactly what we’d hoped for.
We had already passed south of the Azores before, about 12 hours into our five-day beat home, it all came to an abrupt end for me. About 150nm southeast of the Azores we were slightly cracked- off upwind, averaging 16-18kt boatspeed in a building breeze which had reached about 25kt. There was a small but short sea state which made for an uncomfortable ride with slamming at relatively high speeds. But nothing we haven’t seen before. I was inside preparing some lunch when we dropped off the back of a wave and with a surprising lack of noise the boat suddenly came upright. A quick look out and there was my mast lying across the water to leeward. A rapid inspection and it was obvious that the immediate issue was the broken bits of mast smacking into the hull and, more worryingly, one of our precious Vendée Globe foils. So the first move was to retract the foil as fast as possible and only then start trying to free the boat from the wreckage around it to limit further hull damage.
Fortunately, after about five minutes the boat rotated itself around the broken spar and started hanging off it more like a sea anchor. At which stage I was able to take a bit more time to salvage as much as I could from the wreckage.
In all it probably took about an hour and a half to tidy things up, by which time the shore team had studied all of our options before
agreeing that heading towards the Azores was the best choice. I did, however, manage to build a jury-rig of sorts, with enough power for me to hit at least 5kt… But that was before the wind dropped completely, leaving me to continue under engine. Frustratingly, at the time of writing we still haven’t identified the culprit that led to the mast coming down. The process of looking into all the data with the engineers who designed the mast is ongoing; I really hope that we will find one clear element at fault that we can improve or replace before the next time we go sailing. The recovery of the boat was another impressive experience. We used a company called Oceanic Assistance, run by former offshore racer Adrien Hardy. He operates the old Cable & Wireless Adventurer, a 34m powered semi-trimaran designed by Nigel Irens that was launched in 1998 to beat a powered round-the-world record… which it did. Adrien has since added a rig to this impressive craft to reduce diesel consumption using wind power. With today’s packed schedule of long-distance ocean races, Adrien now remains on standby in Lorient on an almost permanent basis. And, sure enough, within less than hours of the call, he was on his way out to tow our boat home from the Azores.
Once all hooked up for the long drag back to Lorient Adrien took his time as there was no grave urgency. Even so just 10 days after dismasting the boat was back ashore in our team’s big shed. Having already qualified for the Vendée, the main consequence is our summer refit period starting a couple of weeks earlier than planned. Armel Tripon, who is building a new Imoca at the moment, has very kindly let us have his mast which was already finished. Which means that we have already got ourselves a new Imoca mast – these masts are one-design – and if all goes to plan we will get the boat back in the water mid-August, a couple of weeks earlier than planned. The loss of sailing time has therefore been minimal. That said, we do have a bit of rest planned soon. Because as soon as the boat gets back in the water we will then have just two months’ sailing before the start of the Vendée Globe… And that will fly by very quickly with new sails to test and adjust, the Défi Azimut and then all the rest of the immense preparation that goes into getting ready to race alone around the world!
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Performance Sailing Hardware SEAHORSE 39
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