Life in the cheap seats
Travelling through hell and high water… and that’s before you even get afloat. Mini Transat runner-up Jörg Riechers is operating at the ‘lower-profile’ end of singlehanded racing
I am sitting in my apartment in the rain- beaten town of Caen and reading another announcement for the Vendée Globe. A 30-year-old with limited offshore experi- ence getting a top-of-the-range Imoca 60. However, the sponsor said the selection was an easy one because the fortunate skipper comes from a well-known family, studied successfully at a super-expensive private school and while there also launched a technology start-up. I am sitting in front of that announce-
ment feeling like a dinosaur just after the impact of the comet that created the Gulf of Mexico and led to our extinction! I ask myself where have the good old
days gone, when sailing skills and a good sense for design were the key ingredients for finding a sailing sponsor. Would Eric Tabarly or Eugène Riguidel
32 SEAHORSE
find sponsorship these days – probably not. They only ever had one thing in mind: getting the fastest boat onto the water and sailing it as fast as they could without breaking it. They were not even talking on the VHF. That created the mystery around them for the public that only increased their fascination in these pioneers. The last of this type of skippers is
Francis Joyon. I loved his Queen Elizabeth quality of celebration when he won the Route du Rhum last November. Politely restrained joy and the minimum of fuss.
Fossils So why are all the old dinosaur skippers like me still out there doing this sport? Lurching from one short-term sponsorship to another, never really sure how they will earn their money in two years’ time. Short-handed offshore racing is very
different from the money-soaked world of owner-driver classes like the TP52s, Mini Maxis and Wallys, where the daily wage for a tactician is the same as a good monthly wage for a Mini 6.50 or Class40 skipper – if they are lucky. Money is obviously not the reason to start a career as a singlehanded skipper. So
what is the driving force behind all these talented sailors?
Need for speed Getting the fastest boat under their feet is the goal that kept and keeps everybody – including me – going especially in hard times. You have to have a passionate vision inside you of what ‘your boat’ should look like and imagine what you could achieve with it. You have to be a bit extreme in your visions and a bit crazy. You start to make your visions become
reality with a Mini, because you can build your boat and done well this can still be rather cheap (relatively anyway!). If you are wrong with your ideas, unlike with an Imoca, you and your designer are not sinking 5million euros into the deep of the Atlantic Ocean. What works in the Mini you try in the
Class40. That is the reason why scows are spreading into the Class40 now; in the Mini 6.50 class they are dominating both the Proto and the Series class already. Last November’s Route du Rhum showed that the scowy Lombard design was the fastest Class40 around and all of the new-build Class40s for 2019 are scows.
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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