Just nine lives?
The giant catamaran cluttering up a corner of the harbour at Brest made a sad sight. Stripped of its rig and all its deck gear, its hulls stained and battered, the crippled yacht looked unkempt and unloved. One British sailing magazine described her as a ‘forlorn hulk’ and an ‘expensive big piece of marine litter. ‘It’s hard to see how anyone would even
dispose of it,’ the article went on, conclud- ing that ‘as the boat was built largely of Kevlar sandwich you’d need to take a chainsaw to it to break it up.’ Only the diehard afficionados would
have realised that this was one of the most successful boats in sailing history; once the biggest and fastest sailing yacht in the world and the holder of countless records. For this was the yacht that, as Formule TAG, first broke the 500-mile a day barrier with Mike Birch at the helm; the same boat
42 SEAHORSE
that, as Enza New Zealand, claimed the Jules Verne Trophy with Robin Knox- Johnston and Peter Blake in charge; the boat that, as Royal & SunAlliance, attempted another round-the-world record with Tracy Edwards; and that, as Team Legato, set a new South Atlantic record with Tony Bullimore. She was, quite simply, a floating legend –
now reduced to an outsize piece of flotsam. It was an ignoble end for such a once mighty war horse. But luckily not everyone was ready to write the old girl off just yet. Born in St Malo, Victorien Erussard
was a former merchant navy officer and sailboat racer, who counted among his many accolades becoming European Hobie Cat champion in 1999 (aged 20), third in the Route du Rhum in 2006 and second in the Transat Jacques Vabre in 2007 and 2009. It was during the Transat Jacques Vabre that his generator broke down, making it almost impossible to sail the boat. The absurdity of the situation led to a moment of realisation. ‘Despite having all these natural energy
sources – wind, sun and seawater – around me, I was still dependent on fossil fuels,’ he says. ‘That’s when I decided to create a clean smart boat, that would be able to produce its own energy thanks to nature… without harming it and without wasting it.’ The idea of building a ‘clean smart boat’ soon grew into a much bigger project to
promote sustainable energy sources and, in particular, the astonishing but still largely untapped potential of hydrogen. Victorien recognised that the flaw in
most sustainable energy systems, such as solar and wind, is their intermittency. If there’s no sun or wind you have to depend on the energy stored in batteries, which themselves have limited range. By turning seawater into hydrogen, using surplus wind and solar power, the hydrogen can be stored on the boat and turned into electricity when the sun and wind are not available. And so the boat can transfer and trans-
form its energy sources in a sustainable and potentially never-ending virtuous circle. The trouble is you need quite a big ship
to install all the gismos needed for such a complex (and largely experimental) system – a big ship that is also relatively light and easily driven to derive maximum perfor- mance from the available power. Which is where the old war horse lying at the dock in Brest came into the picture. Formule TAG was created at a pivotal
moment in yacht racing history, when multihulls were taking over from mono- hulls and Kevlar and carbon were taking over from fibreglass and aluminium. Canadian sailor Mike Birch was part of that revolution. He surprised everyone by finishing third in the 1976 Ostar on his tiny yellow trimaran Third Turtle, just a day behind the 73ft monohull Pen Duick
ANTOINE DRANCEY
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