Route du Rhum: Outremer 5X made from flax fibres is the first cat to cross the finish line

He has already sailed the Whitbread Race with Éric Tabarly and competed in the Vendée Globe a total of three times. For his fourth Route du Rhum, Frenchman Roland Jourdain, who is better known among sailors by his nickname "Bilou", came up with something very special: in collaboration with Outremer, he developed a very special version of the new 5X, the hull of which is made of 50 per cent plant-based flax fibres. "I actually wanted the boat to be 100 per cent flax apart from the mast foot and the main bulkhead," Jourdain explained to Tips & Shaft magazine before the race, "but the shipyard persuaded me not to go too far, so at least the entire deck is now made of flax."

With his "We Explore" project, the Frenchman wants to draw more attention to alternative boat building materials. A concept he has been pursuing since 2013. Back then, he succeeded in building a seven-metre-long trimaran from sustainable materials by using flax, cork and balsa instead of conventional materials. "If we want to save our oceans, we have to start upstream," Jourdain recently told the magazine "Voiles et Voiliers". It seems completely logical to him to use ecological products such as flax instead of fibreglass in boat building. "The hulls are a few percent heavier, but we don't pollute the environment as much as with conventional glass fibres." With the flax Outremer project, he also wants to encourage potential customers of the shipyard to think about the construction material of their boat. "They have the means to afford a nice boat and want to buy it because they enjoy being on the water and being in nature." It would make sense to stop polluting the oceans by producing more hazardous waste.

In addition, the last Vendée Globe was good proof that the material battle of the best-designed and, thanks to modern materials, extremely light boats should slowly come to an end. "It was the Vendée of all superlatives," he tells Tips & Shaft in an interview, "never before had there been such a high level of sport, so much media coverage, the sponsors were happy, the public was thrilled. The only thing missing was speed!" In fact, the winner of the 2021 Vendée Globe, Yannick Bestaven, was six days slower than Armel Le Cléac'h, the winner of the Vendée Globe four years earlier. With a time of 74 and 80 days respectively, that's a considerable difference.

"So we have really concrete evidence that there is no correlation between speed and the success of the show," Jourdain continues, appealing that the attempt to continue building boats even lighter and more extreme should instead give way to the ambition to manufacture boats more sustainably. "Even a small increase in speed is synonymous with an enormous increase in CO2: in materials, processes, maintenance and technology. These extra knots here and there cost a lot of CO2. If we don't prioritise protecting the environment instead, we're making a mistake."

The success of his Route du Rhum seems to prove him right. Jourdain is currently seven miles ahead of Loïc Escoffier and will cross the finish line off Guadeloupe in the next few hours. But of course Jourdain's Outremer is not a completely normal series construction, even apart from the construction material. For example, he dispensed with the steering wheels and made do with the tiller, installed two grinders for the purely manual winches and also tried to save as much weight as possible in other respects. While a standard Outremer 5X weighs between 17 and 19 tonnes, his "We Explore" weighs just 13 tonnes.

• Roland Jourdain's "We Explore" project
• Racetracker of the Route du Rhum