Who’d have thought that someone could invent a boat that made the VO65 feel like a palace? writes Andy Rice.
Even Annie Lush, who broke her back in the last Volvo Ocean Race when she was firehosed by a wave of white water across the deck of the VO65 Team Brunel, wondered whether that brutal experience on deck might be preferable to living inside the cramped astronaut capsule of an IMOCA, such was the bucking bronco ride the five teams experienced in the opening stages of The Ocean Race, which departed from Alicante on 15 January.
Even for the hardiest of offshore veterans, the unpredictable motion of a foiling IMOCA is plumbing new depths of seasickness, as Lush (among others) discovered. She raced on board GUYOT Environnement – Team Europe, skippered by Benjamin Dutreux, for Leg 1. Not only does the bucking bronco ride severely test the sailors’ mental and physical constitution, but these new generation IMOCAs are often in danger of being too fast and frisky for their own good.
The potential fragility of the IMOCA fleet was put to an early test almost straight out of the start in Alicante. With 40 knots winds forecast to hit the five IMOCAs and six VO65s right on the nose, it brought to mind the opening night of the 2005/06 Volvo Ocean Race out of Vigo, northern Spain. That was the debut of the Volvo Ocean 70s, when big first night breezes decimated the fleet. The attrition rate of the VO70s was a wakeup call that you couldn’t go pedal to the metal all the time.
The same is true of the modern breed of extravagantly foiled IMOCAs. It came with some relief that the whole fleet made it safely through the Strait of Gibraltar: an early but very important milestone for The Ocean Race to build confidence in its brave choice of IMOCA after the highly reliable VO65 one-designs of past races.
In at times potentially boat-breaking headwind conditions, Kevin Escoffier’s crew on Team Holcim-PRB set the early pace by winning the first leg of the race to Cabo Verde. In one video from the boat Escoffier quips: “39 knots (windspeed), that’s easy conditions, no?” They’d seen gusts well into the mid-50s. However, for much of this race knowing when to back off is going to be arguably a more important skill than pushing the boat full bore.
THROTTLING BACK
Knowing how cautious to be, particularly in the Southern Ocean, is “a very difficult equation,” according to Escoffier. “It’s why I have brought people from a multihull as well as a monohull background, because I think that the IMOCAs we’ve got right now have the same issue we’ve got with multihulls. We are very fast sometimes but due to the sea state we sometimes have to decrease the speed and to go for reliability and to finish the race, instead of trying to gain an extra
