Small Foil Swan Song
The Route du Rhum is the final race of the year and will be an incredible event to be a part of. The race is run every four years, it is open to six classes of boat and attracts the world’s top solo sailors. The race starts in St Malo (France) and finishes in Pointe a Pitre Guadeloupe (Caribbean). The course is just over 3500 miles and will take us IMOCA sailors around two weeks to complete. There will be 138 skippers taking the start line on the 6th November, among them some sailing greats; like Catherine Chabaud the first woman to finish the Vendee Globe Race, Francis Joyon the current holder of the Jules Verne Trophy (fastest crewed non-stop circumnavigation (40 days, yes! I said 40)) and Armel Le Cle’ach, previous winner and record holder for the Vendee Globe Race.
The IMOCA class will see the greatest number of boats ever racing with 38 entries from the class and the range of design and configuration is great. There will be 14 non-foiling boats and 24 of us with wings. There are seven newly launched boats who will be racing trans-Atlantic for the first time, which will be incredible to watch. Of the foiling boats there are now only six of us left with small foils – the new bigger foils are about double the length of mine and will lift twice as much weight out of the water.
It is incredible how quickly design moves on and how many new build projects have been activated since the end of the Vendee Globe race. It makes the class exciting to be part of but really hammers home that we made the right decision to fit bigger foils at the end of this year. I love the fact that we can take a 2016 generation boat with a good pedigree and are still able to develop it to keep up with new builds and I am confident that after a year of learning I understand how to work with the foils. But for this race, despite all my extra learnings, on paper I will be over half way down the fleet. Medallia is a strong, well-designed record-breaking boat, but with new boats being launched every couple of months and other projects changing to big foils ahead of our timeline, I need to accept that my small foils will limit race performance this time.
So how do you approach a race when you know you will be back in the pack? It is a question I know the answer to well having thought about it a lot before the Vendee Globe race in 2020.
The answer is to create my own definition of success. I will sail and own my own race. This is my boat; these are my circumstances and I will race with what I have. I will arrive at the start line as a 48 yr. old woman, late into racing and having self-propelled my way to the dizzy heights of Vendee Skipper. As a team we made the decision to buy a small foil boat and aspired to change the foils mid-way through our project, allowing me enough time to learn on the existing boat, and allowing us as a team enough time to raise the funds, plan the refit and work out exactly what we wanted to achieve from a big foil program. It was the right decision. We have consistently developed and made progress towards our goals and when I get back after the Route Du Rhum, we will arrive straight to Carringtons in Hythe, with the pre-work done, the drawings scrutinised, foils cases already part built and everyone lined up to make the change.
So what does my success look like? There are a number of goals I have. One is to sail the boat I have well. I can benchmark against similar boats to my own, still with the small foils. On paper the boat is ranked about equal 23rd in design and speed so anything above this number will be good to me.
However, there are bigger objectives at play for this race. With the Vendee Globe race attracting more entries than ever, racking up qualification miles has become essential and the pressure of needing to finish races weighs heavy on me and other skippers. The Route Du Rhum is one of the key qualification races for the Vendee Globe so we all will want more than anything to finish the race and bank the miles.
It is a good time for us to test some of the developments we have made this year, upgrades to systems onboard, modifications and tuning. But also, for me. I have been weight training a lot this year and am the heaviest (and bulkiest) I have ever been. I must admit this feels uncomfortable and I prefer to be slimmer, however I feel strong and two weeks of racing will put my body properly to the test. We can assess my weight loss at the end of the race and that will help develop my diet and training schedules going forwards.
The weather for the start is looking difficult and I think there will be conditions that will challenge all of the boats with strong winds and cross seas, so above all I want to keep the boat in one piece. Test my seamanship in difficult conditions and get to Guadeloupe with the boat in good condition so we can turn around and sail it home promptly afterwards.
This year has been an incredible learning experience for me and I have enjoyed working with coaches and other sailors to understand how to get the most out of the boat. We have been on the treadmill, early season we went straight from training to racing with no break in between. We have grown as a team, both in number and in experience. We may not be on the podium at the end of the race, but our podium will be a clean race, with both skipper and boat in good condition at the end of two weeks on the Atlantic.