Opposite: Jérémie Beyou and his much modified VPLP-designed Vendée Globe challenger, Charal, and race newcomer Armel Tripon (above/inset) and his Manuard design, L’Occitane. Less obvious than Charal’s enormous foils are the substantial hull modifications made to Beyou’s boat with a fuller bow being grafted on during the winter. Few if any other skippers had either the time or budget to effect hull changes and it is interesting that Charal have moved in the direction of Manuard’s scow-influenced design for Tripon, both designers quoting similar reasons – that touchdowns and lift-offs should be smoother and when pressed the extra buoyancy forward reduces the instances of the bow pushing deep into a wave, rapidly bringing the apparent wind aft and kicking off all sorts of trouble for the helm and pilot. Charal is much the slimmer of these two boats and by Beyou’s personal choice is ‘absolutely foil-dependent’
JB: They will be re-checked in the new housings and tested to ensure that there are no kinematics problems; they did have to be slightly modified to fit the new set-up. The plan is to carry out a full structural test of the new foils when we lift out after this month’s race across the Atlantic. If all is OK we will have a spare pair of foils on the shelf if necessary. We also ordered the spare mast in case an incident occurred between now and the start of the VG. SH: What are the principal numbers you watch when sailing? JB: The ‘classics’, to which I add the apparent wind, performance/ polar percentages and rigging loads, and I have alarms for the foil loads measured through the cases. But I don’t continuously monitor all the information from the many sensors around Charal (all linked with optical fibres) because there is just too much information… The screens were built for us by Garmin. We have a waterproof
touchpad outside with all the navigation information, plus data from the Exocet pilot (Pixel sur Mer) and also a set of 360° Garmin cameras attached on the top of a stanchion on each side to monitor the sails and bow. This is fine to check if the sail is correctly rolled or properly trimmed. SH: How much do you helm the boat? JB: I am less and less at the helm. Pixel have worked hard to develop the Exocet Silver pilot (issue 483), a very efficient open-source tool that allows the user to develop his own control overlays. You input whatever you want with the tolerance bands you want. We were piloting it from a computer screen and this year we’re doing it from a remote control with shortcuts that are informed by our experience
– these are then overlaid by things like the speed of the boat, angle of heel, trim… You can also pair up extra settings, such as simul- taneously adding a heel angle to the wind angle; this helps you foil better. The variables have to be adjusted, but once you’ve entered the right variables and the right tolerance ranges the automatic pilot is a very, very good helmsman. SH: On the VG how much will you fly this time? JB: Foils are now used all the time except in light weather. The new version of our foils, whose geometry can be compared to that of the Verdier design, generates less drag because they retract more than the previous ones. Though they are slightly shorter, we kept enough shaft length to give us a large range of foil extension. We found this interesting on the version 1 to be able to regulate the height of flight and the power of the boat by fine-tuning the amount of foil we extended. We will do it again with foil 2, though less than with Version 1 because the shaft is shorter, but still more than on some boats whose shaft length is further reduced. We now have more intermediate settings (a tackle is used for
retracting/extending the foil with hydraulics for adjusting the rake and so the incidence of the foil). Our foil itself is still very big, which is a choice because of the weight penalty. From 11/12kt of wind at 80° true wind you can access flight mode – sailing at 17kt. From here we can then go very fast with a little more wind and on a flat sea. It may affect the route we follow during the Vendée Globe; now the idea is not to look for the 35kt of wind in the deep south (laughs). SH: What about the take-off procedure – and then flying steadily?
SEAHORSE 21
PIERRE BOURAS/DPPI
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