At the last Vendée Globe, his boat sank in the Southern Ocean within a few minutes after it broke in the middle, but now he has a sailing boat again: Frenchman Kevin Escoffier launched his new Open 60 "PRB" at the weekend, with which he wants to win the Vendèe Globe 2024.
The boat is the first in a series of new builds, twelve of which will probably be built for the launch of the next Vendée - although only a few are genuinely new developments. A whole series are replicas of previously built ships, which will of course be modified, but only five will be completely new developments, including Boris Herrmann's new "Seaexplorer".
Escoffier's "PRB" is somewhere in between, as his team bought the hull of the boat from a US team that wanted to compete in the Global Race but had to cancel the project due to financial difficulties. The Verdier design dates back to 2020, saving the team around 1.5 million euros and, above all, a lot of time, otherwise Escoffier's Open 60 would certainly not have been ready before 2023.
Nevertheless, the boat is a new development for him, as he revealed in an interview with IMOCA Class: "We have developed a completely new bow, the front 4.5 metres of the boat are completely different, and Guillaume Verdier alone developed 23 different shapes for it until we decided on this one. We also made major changes to the cockpit to adapt it to single-handed sailing." As the original boat was developed for the Ocean Race with a crew, there was a lot to do. "And we developed the foils ourselves, it's going to be an all-rounder and I'm very happy with it."
In fact, Guillaume Verdier had announced precisely this all-round philosophy before developing his first designs for the Global Race. As the race has much more upwind and light wind content than the Vendée Globe, his design was precisely adapted to this. The subsequent modification of the bow of "PRB" is obviously adapted to the development of Armel Tripon's ex-"L'Occitane" (now Louis Burton's "Burreau Vallée 2") and Boris Herrmann's "Seaexplorer": The entire bow section has a lot of bounce, the boat should go easily over the waves, not too much through them. Otherwise, the boat simply falls off the foils too often in rough seas and brakes brutally. In an interview with YACHT, Boris Herrmann described this as one of the biggest problems of the last generation of foilers. Escoffier also seems to be following this path, albeit much more moderately than Herrmann.
After the spectacular loss of the old "PRB", the focus is understandably on the reliability of the new boat. The extremely lightly built boat had simply broken through at the height of the shrouds, was folded up like a jackknife and sank in a matter of minutes. Jean Le Cam later rescued Escoffier from the life raft.
There is no question that Escoffier is one of the best developers for such a project. The qualified engineer was the technical head of Ultim teams such as Banque Populaire for many years and played a key role in the development of three such boats. The Breton is regarded as an absolute top technician who, together with François Gabart and Charlie Dalin, is probably one of the best and brightest minds on the Imoca scene in this respect.
Nevertheless, he is certain that the new boat will also have its problems: "I have built three Ultims and three Imocas, and no matter what you do to have a reliable boat, you will have technical problems. The only question is how you deal with them and whether you make the right decisions afterwards. We've done everything we can to ensure that we can deal with them on our own in the future, even on the boat if necessary, and that we can check everything on board at any time to see any damage before it happens."
The new "PRB" is now afloat and, with a bit of luck, will start in the Vendée-Arctique race in June, but definitely in the Route du Rhum in November. Then she will also meet the first real new build in the class: Boris Herrmann's "Seaexplorer". This gives Escoffier around two and a half years to optimise the new boat for the Vendée Globe. The foundations for a successful race have been laid. After all, he wants to be the third skipper after Michel Desjoyeaux and Vicent Riou to win for the PRB team, which has been competing in the Vendée without interruption for 30 years.
Andreas Fritsch
Editor Travel
