The Ocean Race Europe

When the Bureau Vallée team invited me to do a leg of The Ocean Race Europe onboard their new IMOCA I didn’t waste a second in consideration before saying Yes. The race was a whirlwind from start to finish, for Louis and his team battling to get a newly launched boat to the line and then race it against well-established teams. I was teleported into an unfamiliar world, it was my first experience of foiling, I was sailing an IMOCA fully crewed for the first time and not in my native language. It was another opportunity to throw myself in at the deep end and just rely on the fact I had to swim.

I was full of nerves arriving in Cascais (just outside Lisbon, Portugal) to join the crew. I have met Louis Burton (skipper of Bureau Vallée) a few times in negotiations to buy his old boat, but I did not know the rest of the team, and I had only seen their new boat in the shed in St Malo. I came straight from the airport to the marina, stepped onboard and within half an hour we were out of the marina getting ready for the coastal race. For a while it felt like I had made a bad decision. The whole boat seemed alien to me, I was standing amidst a French whirlwind of activity and I struggled to see how or where I could add value.

Map of The Ocean Race Europe

That first short leg of the first race gave me a proper experience of foiling. Flat water, over 20 knots of wind on a close reach. The minute the breeze hit us we sped off, then lifted off. We were clean out of the water doing 29 knots. It was incredible. The sensation was not violent like I had imagined, I was only aware that we had lifted out of the water because the noise under the hull changed. We strolled past the non-foiling IMOCA like it was standing still. The speed was so incredible, my jaw was on the floor.

For the rest of that race we stayed on the water and fought through the challenges of managing a 60ft boat round a race track with a crew of five, three of whom had never sailed it before. We finished last which I know disappointed Louis, but from my side it had been a success. That brief glimpse I had of the boat in full flight foiling, watching the manoeuvres, unpicking what was going on around me entirely allayed all my doubts about jumping up to the next level. Nothing on that boat felt like it would be too much for me to manage and I was excited to learn as much as I could from Louis and the team in the leg to Alicante.

The offshore racing was a mixed bag, we started with a decent amount of wind off Cascais and had a great downwind ride under spinnaker to Cape St Vincent. The racing was close and we were crossing gybes with both the Vo65’s and IMOCAs passing within tens of metres at closing speeds of 35 knots. This was all valuable learning for the team, the first time they had lined up against the other 2020 generation foiling IMOCAs so it was a great opportunity to see how they compared.

Our route into the Mediterranean took us close into the coast of Morocco and here the tack line on the J3 broke, causing the sail to fly up into the air like a parascender, then it whipped backwards and punched a hole in the mainsail. This put the brakes on for a while and we limped along under storm jib and three reefs until repairs could be made. The Mediterranean brought us little wind and so we had to search out accelerations around headlands to get to the finish.

The team asked me to stay on for leg three so of course I said yes and this leg proved to be a challenge. It was very hot and there was little wind which is the worst conditions imaginable for a black, wide, foiling boat. From one perspective it was frustrating knowing that all the incredible potential I had encountered a glimpse of was out of reach because of conditions. But on the other hand, it was a great learning leg. We were sailed closely with the other teams, and had several hours of tacking duals to compare speeds and sail selection. We were also managing transitions, crossovers between sails, foils in, foils out, rake, keel positions. Every time we made a change I asked Louis why, took photos of settings, made notes on my phone. Transitions can be the hardest things to get right. They can be the difference between keeping speed up or grinding to a halt and they are difficult to learn; so, sailing with someone who has experience in a foiling boat in these conditions was invaluable to me.

The leg was long and hot and we parked up outside Genoa for three hours in no wind trying to get to the finish line. It hadn’t been the high-octane sleigh ride of my dreams but I walked off the boat having experienced valuable. Not only had I learned a lot but it had eradicated any nagging doubts about stepping up to the next level. Sailing the new Bureau Vallée had been something so different to my old Superbigou, but so familiar as well. It took me no time to learn the basics of how it worked and I could feel the boat in the same way. But most of all I could imagine myself handling that boat alone and it felt good.

Now the Ocean Race Europe is over and as a team we are ready to move on. While I was away racing Medallia was being sanded back to carbon, primed and painted in her new colours. Over the next month we will be painstakingly putting the new Medallia back together. The months ahead are as ever busy and I can’t wait to get our new boat wet.

Pip