COMMENT
WHY KNOWING WHEN TO HIT THE BRAKES IS AS IMPORTANT AS BEING COMFORTABLE WITH MIND-BENDING SPEEDS ON TO DAY ’ S ROUND THE WORLD WEAPONS
Among the elite band of rock star offshore sailors that do a solo lap of the planet there’s one basic yet counterintuitive rule they swear by: ‘To go fast you have to understand how to go slowly.’
Wherever you look into the history of fast passagemaking, the accounts of those that were seeking to set new records always include frequent references to looking after the boat. And no matter how clunky and old fashioned those boats might look today, in their time they were most likely at the cutting edge of design and materials available.
Being heavy and slow by today’s standards didn’t make them any safer, robust or any less of a challenge when it came to going the distance. Indeed, being hefty and sluggish brought its own problems that modern day skippers of carbon rocket ships don’t have to worry about, not least the inability to sail away from the path of a nasty depression.
The irony is that in the relentless quest to go faster, never has the skill of sailing slowly been more important. The Arkea Ultim Challenge Brest was a fascinating example.
This extraordinary solo non-stop race around the world in 32m trimarans saw five of the six entrants complete the course. This in itself is incredible – few would have given odds on that before the start. The Ultims are notoriously fragile machines, plus the risk of hitting something in the water and doing serious damage is not measured by chance, but by certainty. (How skippers deal with the constant stress of this is beyond me.)
There were staggering average speeds well into the 30s among some of the boats. One skipper reported hitting 47 knots at one point, on foils, alone, and deep offshore.
But for all the impressive speeds across the fleet it was Charles Caudrelier’s regular and obvious slow downs on Maxi Edmond de Rothschild to let weather systems pass in front, like children on a zebra crossing, that I thought were particularly amazing [see profile on page 44]. On an Ultim knowing how to slow down is one thing, these beasts take off like a scatty race horse at the least provocation, but they need a lot of sea room too and take a while to turn around. As a result, the tactics of pulling in the reins to just 10 knots need to be combined with giving yourself room to manoeuvre while maintaining this ‘pedestrian’ pace.
At one point Caudrelier did stop completely. On his approach up through the Atlantic his ETA had him conflicting with a serious weather system in the Bay of Biscay. His decision was to wait in the Azores.
