Transquadra: One team without autopilot, the other without data - both happy at the finish line
Tatjana Pokorny
· 16.07.2024
This first leg of the Transquadra for over 40-year-old soloists and two-handed amateur sailors had it all. Anyone who had expected the opening leg of the two-part Transquadra from either La Turballe or Marseille to Madeira to be a gentle overture to the second Transat leg from Madeira to Martinique, which will start on 1 February 2025, was in for a blue, and initially mainly grey, surprise. "It wasn't quite as advertised in the organisers' brochures, according to which you actually pull up the spinnaker in La Turballe and only take it down again off Madeira," said "Sharifa" co-skipper Cord Hall with a laugh shortly after crossing the finish line.
In terms of the effort factor, it was on a par with stage two" (Rasmus Töpsch)
"In terms of the effort factor, it was on a par with stage two," agreed Rasmus Töpsch. Together, the "Sharifa" owner and skipper Töpsch and his sailing friend Cord Hall from the Strander Yacht Club - well known to the German sailing scene as the fathers and organisers of the Baltic 500 double-handed race - had been preparing for the two-part race for a long time. They opened leg one with their JPK 10.10 on 7 July off La Turballe after a brief stumble at the start, just like the brothers Benjamin and Christoph Morgen from the Norddeutscher Regatta Verein on the JPK 10.30 "Momo".
A German Transquadra boat from Marseille
Boat builder Benjamin Morgen and lawyer Christoph Morgen decided to start the Transquadra rather late and spontaneously. At a friend's 50th birthday party in September last year, Christoph Morgen heard about the over-40 two-parter across the Atlantic and was electrified. He asked his brother whether they should do it as a joint project. After getting the green light from their families, the Hamburgers had already identified two used JPK 10.30s in Europe within four days of the initial idea and bought one of them in Marseille shortly afterwards.
Four joint training sessions off Palma and a weekend in Kiel had to suffice for the brothers' first joint regatta outing on "Momo". Neither of them had ever sailed double-handed before. While Benjamin Morgen is otherwise active in the Dragon and Waszp classes, Christoph Morgen "sailed a lot of big ships" after Opti and Pirat in and with the Hamburgischer Verein Seefahrt, regattas such as Pantaenius Rund Skagen or even to Copenhagen, before he hardly got round to regatta sailing in the past two decades for professional and family reasons.
We steered by hand for eight and a half days" (Benjamin Morgen)
The brothers wanted to change that and enjoyed it. However, the fact that their autopilot failed four hours after the start of the first Transquadra stage was not planned. "We steered by hand for eight and a half days," reported Benjamin Morgen after crossing the finish line. Nevertheless, they crossed the finish line as the second boat in the largest "performance duo" classification group of 17 double-handed crews, only having to let the dominant Frenchmen Eric Guigne and Tangi Caron on the JPK 10.30 sister ship "Ose" pull away.
This stage had a fairly high proportion of crosses" (Benjamin Morgen)
The French group winners mastered the course from La Turballe to Madeira in 8 days, 13 hours and 50 minutes. The Morgen brothers needed just under three and a half hours longer before crossing the finish line tired but happy as group runners-up after barely more than two hours' sleep a night. Benjamin Morgen said in an initial assessment: "It was challenging, on the first four or five days it was always grey and rainy. There were winds ranging from zero to 35 knots. This first leg had quite a high proportion of crosses."
French occupy the podium
The French "Ose" crew remained in front with their calculated lead, sharing the podium with their compatriots. The Hamburg duo Morgen/Morgen sailed to a calculated sixth place. Right behind them in the handicap classification were Rasmus Töpsch and Cord Hall with their JPK 10.10 "Sharifa" in seventh place. The duo from Strande finished the leg in sixth place after a few setbacks and with a lot of fighting spirit in the final sprint.
"They sailed so well until the split," said "Momo" skipper Benjamin Morgen, paying tribute to the "Sharifa" crew in the harbour. By the "split", the Hamburg native was referring to the decision of compatriots Töpsch and Hall, who were in the leading group in the first half of the race, to pass a traffic separation zone (VTG) off the Portuguese coast on the inside and close to land. The "Sharifa" team was convinced that they would be better able to avoid a growing high-pressure block approaching from the west.
What many observers on land did not realise straight away was that the Iridium connection on board the "Sharifa" had failed. Rasmus Töpsch and Cord Hall were only able to carry out routings with increasingly old data. "We were pretty much blind for about 48 hours," said Rasmus Töpsch. One of the reasons they chose the VTG inner track was to be able to receive weather data once again close to land. When they realised around Lisbon that the fleet had not followed its course as expected, it became clear that the weather information had obviously changed significantly.
Then we could see that we had really got ourselves into a mess..." (Cord Hall)
Cord Hall said: "We got the weather for the last time on Thursday evening. Two out of three models had seen the inside track as better. On Friday morning we routed again with the same data. We didn't have any others. The advantages in favour of the inside remained. In view of the clear routings, we had to assume that the others would follow. We still had zero new weather information and zero positions of our opponents. Otherwise we might have reconsidered our tight course southwards. On the other hand, being close to land also offered us the only chance to get weather data again."
Wild race, happy ending
When the "Sharifa" crew finally got the Iridium connection back under control at the weekend, "we could see that we had really got ourselves into a mess," says Cord Hall. They had initially fallen well out of the top ten. While the rest of the fleet sailed on a south-westerly course towards Madeira close to the layline, the North Germans finally decided to make a sharp right turn on their southern course, followed and put in a race to catch up that was as strong as it was exciting for their fans in the Whatsapp group "Sharifa traverse l'Atlantique". Many well-known sailors joined in the excitement.
With the initial "fog like an Alaskan race" (Christoph Morgen), "twelve hours of seasickness like never before" (Cord Hall), a broken autopilot ("Momo") and a defective Iridium connection ("Sharifa"), demanding doldrums and a lot of pressure in between, after lows and highs, this first leg of the race was a memorable one for amateur sailors over 40 years old. Cord Hall's summary: "We were pretty down on Friday evening, but then happy at the finish. We didn't break the boat. And neither did we."
