Vendée Globe: "I will campaign for an alternative race"

Originally, a big press conference was planned for today in his home town of Hamburg. Vendée Globe challenger Boris Herrmann and his team Malizia wanted to announce the plans for their participation in the toughest single-handed marathon around the world and the Transat races taking place beforehand and officially present the logistics company Kuehne + Nagel as the second partner of the campaign alongside the Yacht Club de Monaco. Kuehne + Nagel intends to cooperate closely with the team in the core areas of ocean research and sustainability, among others. Now, in times of the coronavirus crisis, many things are no longer as planned, which is why the presentation had to be cancelled. Instead, YACHT online spoke to the 38-year-old skipper, who can also see good sides to his current stay in Hamburg, as he is expected to become a father for the first time at the beginning of June and will be able to spend a few days with his wife Birte Lorenzen.

Boris Herrmann explains the upgrade for his Vendée Globe yacht

Following the cancellation of regattas around the world, the Imoca scene is now also expecting the two transat races from Brest to New York and back to the Vendée home port of Les Sables-d'Olonne, which were planned this year as a qualifying prologue for the Vendée Globe, to be cancelled. The Imoca Class Association is working intensively on the rapidly changing situation during the coronavirus crisis. A planning meeting is due to take place in around two weeks' time. An alternative course from Brest to Les Sables-d'Olonne is being discussed as a replacement regatta for the Transat races that are likely to be cancelled, which could possibly take the soloists around Cape Verde or the Azores or even to a fixed point in the Atlantic and back. "I would lobby the Executive Committee in favour of such an alternative race," said Herrmann, who would have the length of the Bermudes 1000 race from April 2019 in his sights for such a replacement regatta.

Herrmann himself may have met all the qualification requirements for the Vendée Globe 2020/2021, which will not start until November, but some well-known and potentially powerful skippers such as Armel Tripon ("L'Occitane en Provence"), Nicolas Troussel ("Corum L'Epargne") and Kojiro Shiraishi ("DMG Mori") still have plenty of miles to prove with their new boats. They wanted to do this as part of the Transats. If these are cancelled, the only option is the planned replacement race, in which some of the soloists will have to act with appropriate caution, as getting through would be more important to them than finishing. However, due to the difficult circumstances, Herrmann can also imagine that the Vendée Globe organisers, as independent decision-makers, might relax the qualification conditions somewhat via their rules. However, such measures remain to be seen. There are currently 35 candidates competing for 34 Vendée Globe starting places. "Unfortunately, I assume that one or two teams will still be hit by the crisis because their sponsors are no longer doing well," says Herrmann, explaining the additional difficulties that many an ambitious team is currently facing.

In Brittany, work at the shipyards is now being severely curtailed or even stopped altogether. Multiplast, for example, ceased operations today, Wednesday. This was reported by Boris Herrmann, whose boatbuilding team, reduced to four men under the on-site management of boat captain Stewart McLaughlin, was only just able to pick up the foils from Multiplast and can now continue to work on the refit of the yacht step by step in a small, powerful team in Lorient. By the time Herrmann's Imoca yacht is afloat again, around 12,000 man hours will have gone into developing new foils and refitting the boat. The original plan was to test the boat on the water for twelve days after the refit and before the first transat launch in May. If the transats are cancelled, there will probably be more time for testing. However, this all depends on the further course of events and the respective national and regional measures, orders and bans in the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic.