News Around the World
FRANCE Cut in two! On Sunday 25 May the CIC Normandy Channel Race, sailed two- handed on Class40s with a record of 32 entries, left Ouistreham in the English Channel. Even before the starting gun we lost VSF Sports (Pep Costa and Pablo Santurde del Arco) and Wasabi (Stéphane Bodin and Loeiz Cadiou) – the latter withdrawing after dismasting during practice: two premature retirements and the beginning of a long list of withdrawals. In all, half of the 2025 fleet will be forced to retire for technical
reasons, mostly due to strong weather conditions. The most extra- ordinary accident, and also the most concerning, occurred during the night of 27-28 May aboard Thomas Jourdren and Cédric de Ker- venoaël’s Pogo 40S4. The boat was at the SW tip of the Ushant sep- aration zone and reaching at a steady 15-17kt towards the Fastnet Rock. The SW wind was blowing at 25kt and the swell was about 3m. It was a dark, moonless night. Tired after a particularly uncom-
fortable start to the race aboard Scow #191, Cédric is stretched out on the windward bunk. Thomas divides his time between the cockpit and the nav table below, closely monitoring the progress of a nearby merchant ship some way off to leeward. Cédric, current president of the Class40, tells us what happened next: ‘I went to lie down in the bunk, keeping my oilskins on and trying to hold on as tightly as I could. ‘I heard Thomas talking on the VHF to a man onboard the Ital
Bonny (a 200m container ship out of Anvers heading for Piraeus in Greece) advising him that his course was converging with our boat. The man acknowledged Thomas’s message: “OK, we change our course,” he replied. It all seemed clear so far and so I closed my eyes… ‘Then, a few minutes later, I heard the same voice on the VHF
saying: “You’re not a sailing boat, you’re going too fast, you take me for a piece of shit...” ‘Looking at Thomas dumbfounded, I told him: “There’s something
18 SEAHORSE
wrong here. There’s a problem, isn’t there?” I could see that he didn’t fully understand what the man on the ship had just said. So I immediately get out of the bunk, grab the VHF microphone and confirm: “We are a racing sailing boat, that’s why we are very speedy, but we are a sailing boat. I repeat: We are a sailing boat.” No reply. ‘I called Cross-Corsen (the Western Channel surveillance and
rescue operational centre) on channel 16. No answer there either. I looked at the computer screen. We might be on a collision course. Without taking the time to check the scale displayed on the screen, I asked Tom if he could see the Ital Bonny outside through the night, and he shouted: “It’s not coming through, it’s not coming through…” ‘I went out into the cockpit and saw a dark mass coming towards
us with an incredible noise… The mast fell in our faces and the mainsail covered us in the cockpit… I tried to get inside the boat but it was impossible. It is completely split in two across at the mast. I wondered if the keel was still in place, if the boat was floating thanks to the large foam-filled buoyancy tanks or because there was an air bubble? ‘In hindsight, I said to myself, that it was a good thing I wasn’t
still in the bunk when the collision happened. The boat was already underwater. Miraculously, I recovered the survival canister along with a self-inflating lifejacket. Thomas managed to grab the Epirb from the bulkhead near the companionway and we took refuge at the back of the boat, our legs in the water, clinging to the pushpit. ‘The bow was completely underwater. I got out the emergency
VHF. Thomas immediately sent out a Mayday. No response from Ital Bonny. Instead Pamela answered [Pamela Lee and Jay Thompson were just behind in their Class40 Empowher]. She had heard our calls. She asked us about the situation. We explained that we were sinking. She said: “OK, I’m coming, I’m close by.” ‘But we were still beneath the mainsail covering the cockpit,
trying to disentangle ourselves. If the boat sank we still had to get out of it. We took the knife from the survival pack, cut the mainsail
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