TJV - Franco-Spanish duo set to seal spectacular comeback

by Transat Jacques Vabre on 16 Nov 2017 Lalou Roucayrol and his Spanish co-skipper Alex Pella, on Arkema are due to arrive in the Savaldor de Bahia at around 07:00 UTC on Thursday morning to win the Multi50 class of the 13th edition of the Transat Jacques Vabre. That would smash the race record to Salvador for the Multi50 by over four days.

The race has also confirmed Pella’s thoughts in Le Havre on the quality of the boats and how competitive the Multi50 has become.

At the 15:00 UTC ranking, Arkema had 331 miles to go to the finish in the Bay of All Saints and were 127 miles ahead of FenêtréA-Mix Buffet. Both were reaching at 23 knots in 15-17-knot westerlies off Recife, north-east Brazil.

Latest ETAs

Ultime: Prince de Bretagne – Thursday, November 16 at 01:00 UTC

Multi50:

• Arkema – Thursday, November 16 at 07:00
• FenêtréA-Mix Buffet at 11:00
• 011Réauté Chocolat at 23:00

Imoca:

• Winner, Saturday, November 18 at 10:00

Multi50: Attack is the best means of defence

“We're going fast; speed is stress,” Lalou Roucayrol said this morning. “But the sea is flat and we’re under pilot, to allow us to trim the sheets. We’re sailing with spikes of speed at 30 knots. We’re balancing pacing ourselves with extending the gap and preserving the boat. But saying that, we lost the protective screen on the port helm cockpit. We’ve widened the gap with the others, the conditions are quite lively. Alex and I don’t have much time for chat during watches – we’re concentrating on the basics.”

The victory will cap a stunning reversal that saw them overtake the favourites and multiple winners, Erwan Le Roux and Vincent Riou on FenêtréA-Mix Buffet, who had a 100-mile lead as the entered the Doldrums.

In the space of 42 hours over Monday and Tuesday, Arkema took 160 miles off FenêtréA-Mix Buffet.

Any chance of catching Arkema, seemed to evaporate on Wednesday morning as FenêtréA-Mix Buffet slowed in the shelter of the island of Fernando de Noronha, 200 miles off Natal, Brazil and Le Roux climbed the mast to replace the gennaker halyard that snapped on Monday when they were in Doldrums.

The operation took an hour and a half. Roucayrol and Pella, who have both finished second in the Transat Jacques Vabre, but never stood on top of the podium, kept attacking.

Ultime: the lone boat

With only 90 miles to go the finish line at 18:00 UTC, Prince de Bretagne, should enter the Bay of All Saints around midnight. It will be the third boat home and complete the Ultime class.

The consistent trajectory and speed of 25 knots from Prince de Bretagne leave no room for doubt: Lionel Lemonchois and Bernard Stamm are obviously in a hurry to finish and definitely would not want to be caught by the Multi50. As lovers of high speeds and competitive sailing, Lemonchois and Stamm will complete a Route of the Café where conditions and technical issues on the boat – and two giant rivals ahead of them - have not made it a competitive race for them. A pit stop in the Azores to replace a halyard and energy problems left them closer to the Multi50 leaders.

Imoca: St Michel-Virbac prosper from Doldrums but face upwind battle

With 1,000 miles to the finish St Michel-Virbac are holding a 71-mile lead over their ever-keen pursuer, SMA. Its lead is a cushion, but not a comfortable one, according to Yann Eliès, co-skipper on St Michel-Virbac: “We’ve headed west, so now we're up close. We know from the training with them in Port-La-Forêt that they go one knot faster at this angle (headed by 13-15-knot south-easterlies). We have 48 hours until Recife before it favours us.” That disadvantage has only cost them five miles so far today.

Having been caught up during the first few hours of the Doldrums by SMA on Tuesday morning, St Michel-Virbac had felt the heat, but not for too long. “It's always a relief to exit the Doldrums,” Yann Eliès, St Michel-Virbac’s co-skipper said. “But we managed to anticipate the sequences and not to change the sails too much.” First to exit, St Michel-Virbac accelerated first.

182 miles behind the leader, Des Voiles et Vous! is still in the Doldrums and looking over its shoulder at the phalanx of five boast behind them.

They have stabilised the gains made by Malizia II, who were very fast overnight but have lost 18 miles during the stay and are 68 miles behind in fourth. The rear group, led by Vivo A Beira, entered the Doldrums this morning.

Class40: 6 skippers, 3 boats, 1 mile

The 13th edition of the Transat Jacques Vabre, could provide its closest finish. At one point this morning (Wednesday) just a mile separated the three boats that are fighting it out at the front of the Class40 fleet. At the 15:00 UTC ranking it was still only five miles, with the Anglo-Spanish duo of Phil Sharp and Pablo Santurde, always marginally in the lead as they prepare to enter the Doldrums overnight.

Only time and luck will tell who has taken the best entrance to the notorious Doldrums with Imerys Clean Energy to the west, V and B, which finished second in 2015, to the east and Aïna Enfance and Avenir in between. The three boat have a lateral separation of just 26 miles, but those distance are enough in the in this zone (officially the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone), where boats can come to a standstill while ones within sight go past them.

Sharp is due some luck. As well as parrying flying fish and keeping an eye on the attendant circling birds, he continues to be unable to download satellite images and weather files, because of bandwidth restriction on his spare satellite phone (the primary one is down after antenna failure last week).

See Imerys Clean Energy’s analysis of the Doldrums here.

Pit stop

Eärendil (Class 40) will take a little longer after breaking the lower bracket on its starboard rudder and informing the race office that they will be stopping in Cape Verde to make repairs.

Esprit Scout (Class40). After a technical stop in Tenerife (Canary Islands) with delamination of their hull on the port bow, they relaminated the hole in the boatyard and headed back out for Salvador de Bahia at 17:30 UTC.

Quotes:

Phil Sharp, skipper of Imerys Clean Energy (Class40)

“It's great, these are conditions you dream of for crossing the Atlantic; flat sea, 15-20 knots of wind, a tailwind, it’s like the books you read. Yesterday, the sun was intense, I was at the helm and wow, it was hot, fortunately there were some clouds. The sea is very hot, there are a lot of flying fish. We’re just south of Cape Verde, we’ve had some unbelievably close racing. It's just amazing to be next to other Class40s after more than 2,500 nautical miles. We have 2 boats next door, it's very intense, we’re pushing the boat to its limits. It’s 24/7. It's like a Figaro on boats that are a little bigger and more fun. If it stays like this for the remaining 2,000 miles until the finish, it's going to be very tight, so we're going to look to get the advantage in the next few days in the Doldrums. “Through the night we were matching speeds with Aina, who are just to the east of us. We came quite close during the early morning and could see their masthead light, but now they are over 10nm away and out of visual. It’s incredible sailing conditions yet again! Flat water, 15 knots downwind, and it is overcast so not too hot. The cold front we passed west of Brittany a week back seems now like a distant memory.

Aymeric Chappellier and Arthur Le Vaillant, Aïna Enfance et Avenir (Class40)

Cape Verde is quite far in our wake now, we spent the day (Tuesday) heading south downwind towards the gateway to the Doldrums, which is looking pretty sticky both to the east and to the west. We’ll refine our trajectory tomorrow in the morning and after that we will hope that Aeolus (the Greek god of wind) is with us. Otherwise, after a downwind speed test of day, it's difficult to say if one of the boats has an advantage. In any case nobody is holding anything back on either side of us. It's almost like training With Tanguy - Aymeric et Arthur.”

Erwan Le Roux, skipper, FenêtréA-Mix Buffet (Multi50)

“As planned, we stopped at Fernando de Noronha to make the repair. We changed the halyard that we broke in the Doldrums on Monday. We don’t know what happened. This is the first time I’ve been faced with this type of technical glitch on this boat. We will analyse what happened once we’re back on land, but in the meantime, what is important for us is to be able to sail again under gennaker because this is sail that’s needed for the last few miles to Salvador de Bahia. 'In total, I think between an hour and a half and two hours. I had to spend 45 minutes up the mast and this is added time it took pass round the island and the DIY. We did it as quickly as possible. We didn’t see much because it was dark, but the island of Fernando de Noronha looks like a real paradise on earth.' 'We have between 20 and 24 knots of wind and a horrible sea, much like the one we had at the start - crossed and wild. We’re getting shaken around in all directions. Our arrival? In my diary, I’ve written 15:00 UTC tomorrow.”

Servane Escoffier, skipper, Bureau Vallée 2 (Imoca)

'We’re never really happy with the Doldrums because we have a boat which is good for sailing at 20-25 knots and for 48 hours now or more, it’s been very slow for us. But we’re trying to get the best position in the south of the Doldrums and we don’t know if we’re east enough, but we didn’t really have the choice with the very slow light wind that we had two days ago. We will do our best with this position. 'When you’re offshore racing, you never can tell until you’ve crossed the finish line, because you can have a mechanical problem, or a wind hole, and we’ll try to do our best to get the third place but to be realistic I think Des Voiles et Vous! Is now out of the Doldrums and I don’t see how once they are off we can catch them, but nobody can tell. We will keep pushing until the finishing line and we want to finish in the best place we can. 'Like all skippers doing a transat we’ve had some little words, but really, really little and we are still friends and still boyfriend and girlfriend I think, (shouts to Louis) yes, are we still boyfriend and girlfriend? Yes, I think it’s OK. We’re fine, we know each other very well, so, when once of us is in a bad mood the other is supportive.'