One for the route
It’s not every day that you pick up an article you started four years earlier, unless of course you’re a dedicated world-class procrastinator. Yet even though I had all the material ready and was starting to string words together to tell Loïck Peyron’s Happy story in 2014, fate knocked on his door and parked a giant trimaran at the end of his pontoon…
So much, then, for taking it easy and slow, as planned, with his nicely restored Olympus sistership: ‘Ronan Lucas called me,’ recalls Peyron, ‘to ask if I’d replace Armel at the helm of Banque Populaire VII, as he’d injured himself.’ As Le Cléac’h noted at the time, ‘After an initial “no”, motivated by the fact that he had his own programme, Loïck swiftly said he’d take it on if I was ready to help him get to grips with the boat and provide all the insights I’d gained over the months at sea, and be part of the shore-based strategy team.’ For any other skipper this would have been impossible to refuse – but Peyron had
34 SEAHORSE
turned his back on solo sailing aboard big multis, partly due to the fact that the 2002 Rhum had seen him battle 80kt winds and a boat that disintegrated beneath his feet within a few hours while he calmly relayed events to his ashen-faced shore crew. The Rhum had always eluded Peyron, who’d won just about everything else including the Jules Verne, and in 2014 it’s fair to say that he had given up any hope of winning it, the traumatic 2002 episode hav- ing played a big role in this state of affairs. In his mind, yes, he was going to be on the startline in St Malo in 2014, but with the intention of setting off for an old school crossing, paying homage to the great pio- neers, and particularly to Mike Birch, whom to this day he still calls his ‘Master Jedi’… and who of course was the winner of the very first Route du Rhum in 1978. That was the intention, but as we all know it never materialised, and when Loïck eventually finished in Pointe à Pitre it was aboard a giant tri, having not only won the event but also broken the race record (7d 15h 8m 32s). ‘This time,’ said the man as we caught up with him in late September, ‘I can’t see anything derailing my plans, and I’ll line up as an invited entry due to my status as a previous trophy winner. ‘I suppose the idea germinated in my head when I started thinking about
reliving that special feeling of remoteness and adventure I had experienced in the Mini Transat ages ago. Going back to Minis therefore seemed logical, but I wanted a more playful way to do it, some- thing I could also share as it unfolded. And of course I had had the opportunity to sail on Pen Duick, which gave me the idea of doing the Ostar “à l’ancienne” too.’ By 2010 the Royal Western Yacht Club had reignited the original Ostar event, but Peyron was proverbially ‘otherwise engaged’, this time with Artemis on the Cup. And that’s when the story that occu- pies us today starts to take shape (we got there eventually, thanks for your patience). ‘I was helming one of the test AC72s in San Francisco, in 2013,’ recalls Peyron, ‘and I spotted a small white trimaran bob- bing along close by. It reminded me of Olympus… and I suddenly thought that, of course, a few sisterships had been built.’ The man did not need more than the ini- tial spark of the idea to start trawling the net, looking for a nice little project. ‘Lo and behold, I found the sistership, built just in the wake of Olympus as I was to discover later, for sale. Once back in France from the US, I jumped aboard a ferry and headed to Devon where I found her under an oak tree: inside, there was a plaque stating she was A Capella 2, built by Greene Marine in
JEAN-MARIE LIOT/DPPI
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