Nine Short Months

It is Vendée Globe year and we have just nine short months until I line up with 39 other boats off the coast of Les Sables d’Olonne to take on the world once more.

This final year of our campaign needs to be focussed and meticulous, we still have a lot we would like to achieve but need to be careful not to overstretch, this year is going to be about finding the right balance and being smart with our resources.

2023 was about developing the boat. Our boat will be three generations old by the start of the next Vendée Globe race and we wanted to upgrade its potential and bring its performance in line with latest generation boats by switching to big foils. It was another huge step to make and challenged us again on every level. The project itself was incredibly complicated, blending engineering and boatbuilding, using three different contractors across different countries and the level of precision that needed to be present was immense. It was also a big step for us as a business. In making a decision to move to the big foils, we were committing to raising more funds to cover the costs. As a business we would need to take on that risk, stress, responsibility and work to cover these upgrades. The easy path would have been to stick with the boat we had, but I knew that our enormous potential would be capped then by the age of the boat. On every level I believed we were capable of more so we decided to make it happen.

The big foils were fitted in July and after seven months off the water I then had three races in the second half of 2023. Once again, our objectives needed to be tight to make the most of our time. I would be racing double handed for the Fastnet and TJV, with fellow British skipper Nick Bubb, then the Retour à La Base would finish the year off with a solo trans-Atlantic in December. We set the goals of getting to know the boat on the Fastnet and a snapshot of raw speed compared to the rest of the fleet. The TJV was going to be about proving reliability with the big foils, it would be the first chance we had to push for an extended period with the foils and we needed to identify and uncover any weakness or problems that had not revealed themselves in our training prior to the event. On the TJV I would learn what it felt like to push the boat, with the security of another person on board, I would get confidence in the new sounds and feelings the more powerful set up delivered. You can read about the Fastnet and the TJV in my previous blogs.

The Retour à La Base was my first chance to imagine what it will be like sailing our ‘new’ boat in the Southern Ocean for extended periods on the big foils. Although a relatively short hop across the Atlantic, it was in the winter, with big weather systems promising to make sea state and wind strengths similar to those we would experience in the South. After a good TJV finishing 12thdespite technical problems, I had good confidence in the boat and was keen to push myself to understand what I might be capable of. On paper, based on the age and design modifications Medallia should finish 14th or 15th out of the 29 strong fleet, so I benchmarked 14th as the position I wanted to beat.

The race was fast and delivered the tough weather conditions expected, with low pressure systems chasing each other across the North Atlantic, creating sea states in excess of eight metres in places and winds gusting over 50 knots. Not only was this race going to demonstrate the strength and reliability of the boat, but it would give me a chance to pick and execute routes around the systems, learning about where my lines of risk and reward would lie with this new boat and how that compared to the rest of the fleet. Living onboard Medallia when fully foiling is a brutal experience, an assault on all of the senses. The noise is incredible, howling, cracking, slamming, crashing and never relenting. The motion is unpredictable and erratic, there is no scenario where I could stand comfortably supported only on my legs for extended periods, I always need to be braced, holding on or on my knees ready to be thrown forwards when the boat suddenly drops off the foils and stops. Sailing with the big foils well is about maintaining fast averages, but on this short race I also wanted to understand where the limits were for how much this human being could endure.

I loved pushing the boat, and I learned more every day. Medallia is fast in her new configuration, my top speed during the race was 37.2 knots. Just writing that now seems incongruous and even though I was there I still struggle to imagine me sailing that fast alone. I learned to live with the instability, to protect myself, to back off when I couldn’t and not to be afraid of the dramatic noises that emanated every time the hull crashed down into a wave. It was stressful but I learned to love it.

I had technical problems during the race, which meant giving up precious miles on two occasions. I found it too hard to make repairs while the boat was fully foiling so had to slow down and take the hit. But each time I finished my repairs, put the bow back up to the wind and believed I could get my losses back again. It was physically tough but I could see Medallia was fast and I never stopped pushing. By the final day of the race, I had managed to claw back two of the places I lost and pulled up in to tenth place, with my old adversary Romain Attanasio taking a different route to the finish and coming in hot just behind me. The weather beat us up all the way to the end with gale force winds in the middle of the Biscay causing Romain to fall and cut his head, whilst on board Medallia the foil down line, which was holding my port foil in extended position broke when rounding Cape Finisterre. With 20 miles to the finish, I was leading Romain by three miles, and I saw him cross behind me on the horizon, the wind was dropping as we came in to the coast and I could see he had a bigger sail up than me. Because we had approached the finish from different directions, we had approached with different sail configurations and he had been able to change to a big sail earlier. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place; it would take me 45 mins to change my sail and during that time the boat would be sailing slowly downwind so I would lose at least 5 miles to Romain. If I kept my existing sail up, we had an hour and half of sailing left to the finish and he was averaging two knots faster than me. Unless a kraken leapt out of the water and pulled him down before the finish, there was little way I would retain my tenth place. It was gutting. It’s not the first time Romain has got the better of me in this way. In the Route du Rhum in 2022, I came into the top of Guadeloupe in 10th position, over 10 miles ahead of Romain, then sailed in to a calm spot in the lee of the island. Coming from behind, Romain could see I had stopped and was able to take a different route and sail around the patch that engulfed me, finishing in 10th place. In the Retour a la Base there was no kraken and Romain beat me to the line by 20 minutes. It was a well-deserved position, and he could not have been more gracious about pipping me to the post. But I will get him next time.

We finished the Retour à La Base in 11th position which is the highest positioning I have ever achieved in an IMOCA race and a huge validation of the effort and energy my team have put in over the last year, as well as the decision we made not to stick with the status quo but believe we could be better and change to the big foils. Overall, the team finished 13th in the IMOCA globe rankings for the year, which takes in to account we missed one race and finished very poorly in the Fastnet. Once again, a huge validation for a team with only two full years of training and performance behind them.

Those who follow our social media will know that the delivery home after the finish of the Retour à La Base was not such a happy event. I made the wrong decision to sail home alone after finishing the race and the following morning ran Medallia aground on a beach in Cornwall having been unable to stick to my established sleeping routine. We were incredibly luck. Lucky that it was not worse, lucky that the RNLI were on hand to assist, lucky that no one was hurt and the boat was not badly damaged.

It was a horrible way to finish what had been such a positive end to the year, but as a team we have had to face up to this mistake and learn robust lessons in our risk management and decision making. Personally, I will never get over the memories and feelings associated with that morning, but it has been important to address every aspect of the grounding, to understand what happened and why and I know it will make me a better skipper and team CEO in the future. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who sent messages of support and donated to the RNLI at the end of last year. Your non-judgemental kind words really helped me to get through a difficult time.

This year will be different again. We have a short run now to the start of the Vendée Globe and our objectives for the year are to improve performance and perfect reliability. This is going to be a huge balancing act, between the resources with have and what we hope to raise, time on the water and in refit, making sensible changes that can be tested, qualified and established before the start of the race. We need to balance my desire to sail as much as possible with our technical team’s desire to have the boat in their hands for as long as possible. We need to race, to ensure we maintain our position in the mileage ranking tables and keep our place on the start line of the Vendée Globe, and to uncover any weakness’ we have not yet seen. But we don’t want to put the boat at risk of a critical failure this close to racing around the world. It’s going to be a tightrope walk and we will have to make compromises but this is normal when you set out on a journey like ours.

At the moment our schedule will see us in refit until the beginning of March, then I will have six weeks of training time, based from our home in Poole, to try our new mainsail and the increased mast rake (leaning the mast back more) which we are setting up now and hope will stop the boat from nose diving so much. At the end of April, we are expecting to take delivery of our new mast, installing it in Lorient then immediately sailing across the Atlantic to New York. At the end of May, I will race in the New York Vendée race, finishing in Les Sables d’Olonne. The official entry list for the Vendée Globe Race will be announced on the 1st July, we are safe in our rankings right now so have no reason to worry we will not make the cut. Through July, our second refit of the year will see Medallia back out of the water so the bottom can be faired and painted to perfection to go around the world. In August I will take delivery of my new sails and then have 2 months to practice with them and record our new performance. In September we may take part in the Defi Azimut, a week of speed runs and short races based in Lorient, France. I have never done this event and would love to take Medallia there as it is a great opportunity to line up often against our competitors and learn how our improvements and new sail plan have changed our performance. We will have to see how the rest of our program works out.

By October we must be in the race Village in Les Sables d’Olonne, ready for the November 10th start

This year is already a month in and running away fast. I am nervous and I always wish for more time. I want to get this right and I know that every decision we make as a team now will have impact on what happens to me over those three months of racing. It’s a hard reality. But based on our progression to date I have faith and confidence we will do this right and will be able to pivot and recover if we take a wrong turn, that is the nature of what we do both on and off the water.

I look forward to sharing the year with you and building the excitement to our race around the world.

For those of you considering a trip out to the start, it might be worth thinking about booking accommodation in Les Sables d’Olonne as things are already becoming scarce. The race village opens on the 19th October and there will be an opportunity for the public to see all of the boats, and tour the huge exhibits and interactive displays for three weeks prior to the race. Entry to the village is free of charge. Start day is the 10th November and previous in person attendance has been over 350,000 people both on the water and on the land. It is an incredible spectacle to see and be a part of. Imagine if the general public were allowed to walk around the paddocks of an F1 event? This is the sailing equivalent. A trip to the race village during the week, early on would give more time to absorb it all with smaller crowds.

If you can’t make it in person then we will do our best to share the race village atmosphere with you as we always do.

Strap in for 2024 folks, we are flying already and it is only going to get faster.

Pipx

Time is of the essence

The big leap forward