It is probably the most exciting Vendée Globe of all time: Five skippers took the lead after the initial phase, changing places again and again, leads of 800 miles on the field melting down to 100 in just a few days. Almost all the skippers are repairing themselves around the world, and thanks to the increasingly detailed video updates from on board almost every competitor, the fans understand what a lot of work it is to keep an Open 60 in race mode and how much is constantly breaking down.
But the really exciting thing is that the new foilers are far less able to dominate the race than all the pre-race predictions. Boris Herrmann has been battling tenaciously for thousands of miles against seemingly technically inferior opponents such as Jean Le Cam ("Yes We Cam"), Damien Seguin ("Groupe Apicil") and Benjamin Dutreux ("Omia Water Family"). Louis Burton cuts through the field like the proverbial hot knife through Breton salted butter in a boat from 2016 with small foils. And at the very front, Yannick Bestaven in an equally old boat with the same foils seems to be controlling the race at will - even though his pursuers Charlie Dalin and Thomas Ruyant have been travelling on the hull side with intact foils for days.
Boris Herrmann always provided part of the explanation for this in the weekly interviews that he gives from on board via Zoom: "The old boats like Jean Le Cam's are no slower than us in pure VMG downwind running. The foilers really come into their own in upwind conditions when the sea is not too rough." And there have hardly been any so far. To illustrate: the new, larger foils add around 400 kilos to the weight on board; many teams then realised that the structure was unable to cope with the forces in some areas and reinforced various bulkheads and areas. The team leader of "DMG Mori" once said that practically every newly built foiler was later extensively re-laminated. Each team easily took on 200 to 300 kilograms of extra weight. What's more, in winds below 10 to 12 knots, the appendages on most foilers tend to slow you down rather than increase your speed, as they are not fully retracted.
And: the non-foiler competition has not been idle: Ryan Breymaier recently told us that Jean le Cam had done everything he could to get his Open 60 with the bow further out of the water. He runs the mast 7 degrees aft so that his boat does not dive into the waves too early with the bow tip in rough seas; it has also been weight-optimised. If it gets rough, the old master can keep his foot on the gas for longer. It was also noticeable that Le Cam sometimes travelled much deeper than Boris Herrmann on rough courses and was therefore faster because he was slower but took the more direct route. It is therefore not surprising to hear that Damien Seguin's "Groupe Apicil" was also optimised by Le Cam's team.
Second problem: Two boats were sailing at the top of the list whose foils had broken without colliding with flotsam ("LinkedOut") or almost levered the centreboard out of the hull ("Apivia"). One boat actually broke under the weight of the foils in rough seas ("PRB"), another had a massive delamination of the force transmitting structure ("Hugo Boss"). It is quite clear that the new, huge foils, some of which are almost three times longer, have the power to completely destroy the boat. As a result, their skippers have been sailing like raw eggs for some time now. "I sail with the foils completely retracted," Boris Herrmann often admits, especially in the Indian Ocean. Many boats have load sensors that are supposed to kick in and protect against overloading. Obviously, they often do.
Only two boats seem to be different: When Yannick Bestaven sailed shortly before Cape Horn in already very nasty weather and Charlie Dalin couldn't keep up, it was just one sentence in a video from on board that made people sit up and take notice: "My 'Maître Coq' is enormously strong, I'm still sailing with a full foil," he said in a subordinate clause. The much shorter appendages of his Open 60, the old "Safran" by Morgan Lagravière from 2016, can apparently still be ridden when the modern competition is already starting to catch up with them. This also explains the speed of Louis Burton's "Bureau Vallée 2" quite well, as it is a sister ship, the old "Banque Populaire" of the last Vendée winner Armel Le Cléac'h.
With this in mind, it will be all the more exciting to see what happens after Cape Horn, which "LinkedOut" and "Groupe Apicil" passed tonight as the third and fourth boats. Because then the conditions for the foilers should come: not too rough seas, stable winds in the trade wind range and a lot of upwind. Boris Herrmann has already announced that his boat is still at 100 per cent performance and that he will attack once he has passed the magic landmark. As two boats, "Apivia" and "LinkedOut", are sailing in front and will no longer be able to use the statistically more important port foil on the way back, things could get really exciting once again.
Andreas Fritsch
Editor Travel
