You don’t have to spend long in the sailing-obsessed port of La Trinité-sur-Mer before you bump into Marc Guillemot, who remains as active in grass-roots sailing as he was when earning his living at the pinnacle of the sport. A regular fixture in the Open 7.50 fleet, as are many of his offshore racing peers, this is Guillemot still in the colours of Safran during Easter’s Spi Ouest racing extravaganza
But this was also the period when we
saw the first great leaps forward in the Imoca 60 monohulls, and a logical flow of talent towards this freshly invigorated circuit; not to forget the return of the Jules Verne plus some of the bigger trimarans being raced singlehanded again in events where length restrictions had been lifted. For a relatively limited talent pool (in
size, not skills), that explosion of projects could only mean one thing: not all of these highly technical circuits could survive. Marc himself transitioned: ‘My capsize with Gitana Xin the Fécamp Orma Grand Prix in 2004 marked a turning point in my relationship with the team, and I started looking at the Imocas. ‘Jean Le Cam’s and Roland Jourdain’s
boats [new-generation Marc Lombard designs – ed] drew my attention, even though I’d never really been tempted by the Vendée Globe as a competitor.’ Until then, Marc estimates, 60ft monohulls were one-trick ponies, sleds designed for down- wind performance only. When things changed with the 2004 generation Marc decided to get involved and was selected by the giant Safran aerospace group as skipper of their new Imoca. Next he was introduced to Guillaume
Verdier by Vincent Lauriot-Prévost. Both designers had been working on a new Imoca concept, prompted by Jean Maurel, and had come up with a lighter, narrower
58 SEAHORSE
design that was to become a striking counterpoint to the ‘brute force and maxi- mum beam’ school of thinking. A concept that, arguably, paved the way for mono- foilers as we know them, logically bringing them much closer to the more easily driven multihull philosophy with flight being the absolute ideal. ‘Working with these two guys and their
teams has been a privilege and it opened up my horizons,’ says Marc, ‘in a way allowing me to transfer some of the approach that had been shaped by a couple of decades spent toying with multihulls: monos were becoming sleek, aerial in spirit.’ Safran was arguably the most advanced example of that new philosophy when she was launched, and went on to win the 2007 Jacques Vabre, Guillemot having teamed up with the then already irresistibly rising Charles Caudrelier. Then came the 2008 Vendée Globe, and
with it the return of drama in Marc’s career. Ironically, shifting from highly strung, fickle and capricious multihulls did not allow the man to draw a line under a personal history marked by a series of unwanted life-changing episodes. Having put his own 2008 race on hold,
to circle around stricken fellow-skipper Yann Eliès who was lying in his bunk with a broken femur – finally managing to get close enough to throw a medical kit into the hatch – Marc had once more found
himself in the eye of a storm of human drama. It had all started with Jet Services IV capsizing on a delivery in 1985. Jean Castenet was lost at sea while Guillemot was seriously injured. The surviving crew waited four days before they were rescued. ‘Call it being young and foolish,’ he says
today, ‘but the thought of giving up on my offshore pursuits did not occur to me then… however traumatic the Jet Services episode had been.’ Physically, it took him two years to get
back into shape, so one can only imagine how he could relate to Eliès as 20 years later they were waiting for another rescue operation to unfold. In 1999 disaster had struck again when
Nicolas Florin, racing with Marc in the Europe Race, fell overboard in the Med and was never recovered. Then a few months later, in the Jacques Vabre, the Guillemot- Nélias tandem was called by race organisers to go to assist Jean Maurel and Paul Vatine, whose Orma had just capsized. The episode was documented by the
duo, and the audio is chilling. Only silence reverberates as the ‘Where’s Paul?’ cries get more and more insistent – and it’s not because Jean Maurel has not heard the question the first time. ‘It hit me differently because compared
to the Jet episode, when I was a rookie, Nicolas and Paul were my professional peers, guys who I’d evolved with,’ he says
FRANCOIS VAN MALLEGHEM/DPPI
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