Vendee Globe- Musings of a Naive Sailor

by Jimmy Cook on 12 Jan 2009 Sailing out here on a Sunday afternoon, enjoying the sunny breeze, watching for the squall that has been promised, and thinking about sailing, as I often am, I can't help wondering about that Vendee Globe.

It doesn't seem much of a race, somehow, when more than half those iron men have had to retire. So the winner will never know whether he or she (O yes, there's a 'She' in fourth place) really WON it, or was just the best of the rest.

Reading the news from the sidelines, it seems more as though these quite good and brave sailors are just fall guys for the yacht designers, who are doing a little experimenting.

When I am not sailing, I am an accountant, so you might accuse me of wanting to count everything. I did it any way, a couple of days ago, and this is what I can tell you.

Six of those great monohulls that they're sailing were dismasted. Now it might seem like a naïve question – or I'd rather be likened to the boy who watched the Emperor without any clothes on – but if they are going to send yachts into the Southen Ocean, where I hear the waves are big and the wind is strong, why don't they make stronger boats? It might sound simple, but you can't win a race unless you can finish it, and it would save all that rescuing that has to go on.

There's another curious thing about the boats that retired. Another six of them had keel and rudder damage, and most of those incidents happened before you could possibly accuse an iceberg. One boat actually claimed he had two collisions with USO's. The first one took one rudder off, then some days later he lost the last remaining rudder to a second collision. There must be a lot of whales out there. It's good to know that at least the planet's attempt to save the whales is working. But is it working as well as that?

Of the other boats that retired, there was a mast delamination (Maybe he didn't tell the designer where he was going); another boat claimed Halyard problems and automatic pilot failure; then there was a boat that started to sink due to a hull crack from an earlier damage; another had to retire because of damaged spreaders.

Shit happens I guess, but if I were going into the Southern Ocean, I would want the best chance of both the boat and me coming out of it in one piece. Then, only then, would I have a chance of winning the race.

While I have been scribbling here I can see that promised afternoon squall starting to develop on the horizon. It's probably a good idea to put a couple of reefs in before she hits, and send this off in an email, hoping someone will print it.

Sail-World Cruising has, Jimmy