The second Vendée Globe in 1992/1993 and Bertrand de Broc is goose-winged in the Southern Ocean on Groupe LG’s first entry in the race. A powerful 60-footer racing singlehanded through the Southern Ocean… look at that spinnaker pole on deck and shudder. De Broc later suffered keel problems and after painful debate between the skipper and his shore team he retired from the race – only adding to the sad woes of designers Bouvet-Petit, Vendée Globe winners in 1989/90 now with two very public failures to their name
attention of Banque Populaire who offered her helm of the boat with which François Gabart won the VG and which Paul Meil- hat used so well afterwards as SMA. The Verdier/VPLP design, maintained
in tip-top condition by the very profes- sional Banque Populaire Team, is the refer- ence among the Imoca boats still with dag- gerboards (actually the appendices on the boat are not vertical but angled inwards), while Clarisse has proved to be worthy of the backing she enjoys. A victory in her ‘category’ would be a fine result and a top-10 overall finish is quite possible. Miranda Merron, 51, is not able to win
the VG with her boat, an Owen Clark plan built 14 years ago… but one would be tempted to write that if there were to be only one woman/boat combination to finish the race, this would be the British sailor who has a huge ocean experience starting at the end of the last century on the Transat Jacques Vabre with Emma Richards. Miranda then continued on the Volvo Ocean Race in 2002 followed by the Route du Rhum and a decade spent in Class40s with her companion Halvard Mabire, a true sailing expert. Frenchwoman Alexia Barrier, 40, has
been sailing for a very long time and fought to be at the start of the Vendée Globe with her boat, which was supported by TSE at the last moment. This is the Lombard design built for Catherine Chabaud in the Vendée Globe 2000. Since then the boat has sailed six times around the world, including four VGs. In short, the boat knows the route! At 45 years old, the British Pip Hare dis- covered solo navigation less than 10 years
56 SEAHORSE
ago. Nevertheless, she has a respectable number of miles on the clock! Indeed, to her credit, tens of thousands of miles on a 38ft cruising yacht, two Mini Transats and a Transat Jacques Vabre in the Class40. Her boat is more than 20 years old…
Designed by Pierre Roland and built by its skipper Bernard Stamm, she dominated the golden era of the Velux 5-Oceans Race and had already covered an incredible number of miles before successfully com- pleting the last Vendée Globe 2016 in the colours of La Fabrique, skippered by the young Swiss sailor Alan Roura.
Thirty years and eight editions At the start of the first edition of the race created by Philippe Jeantot, half of the 13 entrants had already battled the rigours of the South Seas in the BOC Challenge. The winner Titouan Lamazou and Jean-Luc Van Den Heede, third, are good examples. Loïck Peyron – the images of whose rescue of Philippe Poupon’s Fleury Michon X from his Lada Pochwill be seen all over the world – was on his first planetary round but the man is gifted and finishes second. Three years later Alain Gautier is back
with this time a composite boat designed by the Finot-Conq office. Variously nick- named ‘pie shovel’, ‘aircraft carrier’ or ‘keeled surfboard’, his ketch-rigged boat presages the superiority of powerfully hulled sailing boats with flat bottoms and formidable potential reaching/running. Alain will only do one VG but one is enough if you win. Of the 15 sailing boats at the start in
1996 there are only six at the finish. Very harsh conditions in the south decimated the
fleet – several boats capsized and the Cana- dian Gerry Roufs lost his life. Christophe Auguin won with a record lead but it is the time no longer to count your laurels but rather to examine your conscience and above all establish new rules to make it harder to capsize these boats and make it easier for them to self-right when they do. It is the advent of the AVS Worst Case
(angle of vanishing stability, when the boat naturally inverts). The fact is that since 2000 and Desjoyeaux’s first victory no VG boat capsized completely except those that lost their keel – which became rather a ‘consumable’ before the Imocas decided at last to standardise it and the mast (Isabelle Autissier did go upside down in the 1998/99 Around Alone and was unable to get her PRB upright even using both the canting keel and the maximum water bal- last). However, it should be noted that some boats losing their keels have been able to reach land or even the finish line by their own means, thanks to the prudence of the skippers and skilled use of liquid ballast. The fourth edition (2000-2001) has a
record number of 24 starters, 15 of whom will be ranked. If we had to remember the three major events of this VG, it would be the first victory of Michel Desjoyeaux, the excellent performance of Ellen MacArthur (second), and the extraordinary repair of Yves Parlier who managed to build himself a makeshift mast by putting together the three pieces of carbon recovered after dis- masting in the Ocean Indian while hunting down Desjoyeaux. The operation took place in the calm waters of an island south of New Zealand where Yves also scraped mussels off the rocks to eat to avoid
BERTRAND DE BROC/DPPI
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