Rob Weiland
11th Hour’s new ‘dual-purpose’ Ocean Race/Vendée Globe Verdier design, Mālama, had a very poor TJV, finishing 13th, a big reminder of how much working-up these complex boats need to hit full pace. Following the 2008 Vendée Globe, when fully two-thirds of the 30-boat fleet failed to finish, some wise voices were predicting the end of the Imoca 60 Class. Costs had started to explode with the appearance of the first ‘big teams’, and when half of a smaller 20-boat fleet retired in the next race in 2012 the naysayers seemed to have a point. But the Imoca Class, like the Class40s and Minis underneath them, do not sit around when something needs changing and the introduction of beefier one-design keels and rigs contributed to increased reliability in later races as did some more stringent scantling requirements. Today a new boat costs €5-6million, but confounding the doom-mongers there will always be a commercial market for danger and adventure and no fewer than 13 new boats will line up in 2024. Yet there is now a new issue causing concern in the class – with the immense righting moment available from the latest powerful foils, a once bullet-proof one-design rig is being put under more load than was ever anticipated. 11th Hour’s other Imoca, Alaka’i, was one of two foilers to be dismasted in the 2021 TJV…
Facts and figures
Just a few weeks after I wrote my last Seahorse column the 11th Hour Racing Team published its ‘Sustainable design and build report’ describ- ing the design and build of their new Imoca 60,
Mālama, for participation in The Ocean Race 2022-23. The design and build were jointly undertaken in Brittany using marine architect
Guillaume Verdier, boatbuilder CDK Technologies and technical and performance partner MerConcept. Besides the obvious advantages of partnering with respected
companies in the heart of Imoca territory, there were also benefits from the sustainability point of view connected to the choice of Brittany for the project, including the short distances between the boatyard and the majority of the suppliers, France’s relatively low electricity emission levels (due to its extensive use of nuclear power), plus CDK and MerConcept already being highly motivated to max- imise onsite sustainability. The design of the boat started in April 2019, and the actual build
in early 2020. With some delays caused by Covid the boat was finally launched at the end of August 2021, and raced for the first time in September 2021 in the Défi Azimut. Considerable time and effort were spent on measuring and assess-
ing the environmental impact of building this Imoca boat, a logical first step to identifying better practices with less environmental damage. The team’s report is in part an effort to trigger marine industry-wide action to align with the Paris Agreement, which calls for organisations and industries to achieve 45 per cent reductions in emissions by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050. It should help us to understand what boatbuilding and performance
sailing might look like in a net zero world… and how to get there. A hardly surprising conclusion of the report is that, in my words, one-off design and custom boat and equipment manufacture are by far the most inefficient and environmentally unfriendly way to go yachting. Certainly at the highest level of composite construction, where – often disposable – female tools and moulds are fabricated over five-axis milled male plugs to achieve the near-perfect outside shape that results in a near-zero need for fairing. For most it will come as a surprise that actually producing those
plugs and moulds represents about 50% of the build process of the finished hull, and about 25% of the complete boat launched and ready to sail, when measured by greenhouse gas emissions. Of course building one or two more boats from the same moulds
then represents a considerable improvement in time, energy use, waste and so on. Only it means you are no longer unique – for some hard to accept… Two ‘life cycle assessments’ were made during the 11th Hour
project, using MarineShift360 software, one to determine the theoretical footprint of an Imoca build and the other to determine the footprint of the actual build of 11th Hour’s new boat; these were undertaken to help to develop a new industry benchmark and to make recommendations for future builds on how to better align the industry with the Paris Agreement.
Key findings of the theoretical study l The total estimated footprint calculated was 586 metric tons
of CO2e. l Construction (hull, deck, moulds, assembly and structure) components accounted for 50% of total build emissions.
SEAHORSE 35
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