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Extraordinaire


Jocelyn Blériot recounts the story of a rather remarkable sailing boat


With two round-the-world crowns, three Route du Rhum wins and a quiver of oceanic records to her name, Idec Sport is a breed apart. Launched in 2006, the VPLP-designed trimaran is to date the fastest round-the-world sailing craft. And just as Franck Cammas had done at her helm, Francis Joyon successively captured the Jules Verne Trophy (40 days) and went on to win the Rhum a few months later. We look back on the genesis, birth and evolutions of the most decorated offshore multihull on the planet ‘In hindsight,’ says her designer Vincent Lauriot-Prévost, to try to explain why this mighty trimaran continues to be just as successful 12 years after her launch, ‘I think it comes down to the fact that all the choices made during her conception were audacious ones. ‘Together with Cammas’s team, we


decided to go for things that had not been implemented at that scale before. Coming


36 SEAHORSE


up with what at the time was essentially a small boat to go around the world, combined with a big boat for singlehanded racing, was a risky bet, but it paid off.’ Perhaps one of the most striking points


is that Idec is virtually the same boat that won the Rhum in 2010 with Franck Cammas – usually, over such a period, boats tend to undergo extensive modifica- tions, which isn’t the case at all here. ‘If we look at Laurent Bourgnon’s smaller tri- maran, which won the 1994 and the ’98 editions of the Rhum, Idec is a completely different situation,’ says Lauriot-Prévost. ‘Laurent’s floats had been changed, the


beams had been lengthened, foils had been added… she had been through heavy modi- fications during the four years between edi- tions. Joyon’s boat is hardly different from Groupama 3 when we initially launched her: the only alterations have been the adoption by Cammas of a shorter mast allowing him to race her singlehanded, the mast that is still on the boat today, and the addition of small foil tips by Joyon. ‘Putting the structure’s integrity at risk


was out of the question, so we had to remain within all the load ranges originally specified. The rudders have recently been


fitted with small elevators, and that’s it. ‘When we started discussing this project


with Franck Cammas and Stéphane Guil- baud the offshore multis taking centre stage were big cats, Multiplast big cats to be precise. At that time Orange II held the round-the-world record with 50 days, and the Orma 60 class was starting to get a bit close to the cliff edge…’ On the Orma circuit Groupama 2 was


claiming victory after victory, while her opposition grew thinner almost by the week… Cammas and his sponsor knew something new had to be done to remain at the top of the game and to do that chal- lenging the Jules Verne holder seemed like the only move bold enough to be worth considering. ‘They came to see us with the clear intention of going against the grain!’ recalls Vincent. ‘The question was simple: what if we


took a different approach, and bucked the trend of systematically going for “bigger”?’ Orange II was a 38m beast, and her designer Gilles Ollier was thinking about going to 40m+ for a hypothetical successor, but Cammas wanted something different, bolstered by the big technological advance achieved with his latest Orma 60…


VINCENT CURUTCHET/DPPI


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