Portimao Global Ocean Race solo sailor Michel Kleinjans unstoppable

by Oliver Dewar on 7 Apr 2009
At 04:05:30 GMT on Friday 3rd April, 45 year-old, Belgian solo sailor, Michel Kleinjans crossed the finish line of the Portimão Global Ocean Race Leg 3 on his 12 year-old Open 40, Roaring Forty, after 41 days, 02 hours, 50 minutes and 30 seconds and 7,500 miles of racing from Wellington, New Zealand.

To the amazement of the double-handed entries, Kleinjans remained in touch with the Class 40 fleet throughout the Southern Ocean, even taking the overall lead of the fleet on Day 6 of racing and only losing ground in the descent from the Pacific Ocean Ice Gate at 45°S to Cape Horn at 56°S.

His balance of fast racing; skilled boat handling and boat preservation; accurate weather analysis took Kleinjans very close to the double-handed fleet in the final 48 hours before crossing the finish line. One week before finishing, Roaring Forty ran into the southerly-flowing Brazil Current, stalling briefly before picking up the pace, polling the highest speeds in the fleet furthest offshore and reeling in third place Class 40 Team Mowgli skippered by the British duo Of Jeremy Salvesen and David Thomson to 30 miles and trailing the race leader, Beluga Racer, by just under 200 miles.

Two days later, as the double-handed fleet slowed in light airs, Kleinjans held the breeze longest, stalking Salvesen and Thomson as the fleet waited for fresh wind from a cold front working slowly northwards along the coast of South America. 'Just before the front passed, I closed into 15 miles of Mowgli,' recalled Kleinjans shortly after arriving in Ilhabela. 'Then, in the next few hours they moved off to 30 miles in front and I just thought it’s impossible to catch them. Being further west, they got the breeze before me,' he explains. 'I had the big kite up and full main and the breeze came and I started really going. I was expecting maybe some problems, but it was OK and I was handsteering, but I had to check the weather information so I had to put a reef in and use the pilot.'

Repeating the finely-judged caution displayed throughout the race, Kleinjans backed-off: 'I checked the position poll and we were averaging 14 knots and although I’ve been that quick on this boat before, I’ve never done it alone,' he confirms. 'I thought I could put up a big spinnaker and try and catch them, but I realised it was a bit stupid. I haven’t broken anything so far in the race, so I thought it was just better to finish nicely without destroying the boat.' The result of this wise decision was finishing five and a half hours behind Team Mowgli and 15 hours behind the double-handed leg winners, Felipe Cubillos and José Muñoz on Desafio Cabo de Hornos.

However, the Belgian yachtsman did lose ground upon reaching the eastern limit of the Leg 3 Ice Gate: a situation filled with cruel irony as having dodged high-pressure systems for two weeks above the Ice Gate, a rogue low-pressure system blocked the route south delivering headwinds on Day 21 of racing. 'There was a low-pressure in the north moving south in front of us and the idea was I would pass over it,' says Kleinjans, although conflicting meteorological models were confusing. 'The American and European weather files were not agreeing and one of them predicted 50-60 knots, or something, but I was already heading straight for it. So I decided to back down a little bit and the guy doing my routing said the same, but it didn’t materialise and there was only about 40 knots.'

With south-easterly breeze, Kleinjans was forced to head north-east while the double-handed fleet, further ahead, could squeeze around the Ice Gate’s eastern waypoint and head south towards the Furious Fifties. 'But by then, I’d already lost six hours sailing at 50 or 60 degrees. Then I tacked and went south.' At the time of the tack south at midnight on 13th-14th March, Roaring Forty had dropped to 99 miles behind Team Mowgli – a loss of 25 miles in 48 hours. Once clear of the Ice Gate waypoint and heading south, there was no respite: 'Then the wind was on the nose and I got tired,' admits Kleinjans. 'If I’d been double-handed, I wouldn’t have lost that much…it is fatigue that always catches you out.'

One week later, Kleinjans was still battling fatigue as he rounded Cape Horn at 1425 UTC on 20th March after four weeks at sea, but still only 91 miles behind the British duo. 'Coming into Cape Horn I was the most southerly of all the boats,' he explains: a precarious position as news arrived from MRCC Punta Arenas predicting boat breaking conditions for the area. 'The Chileans were giving us 60 knots with gusts to 80 knots,' continues Kleinjans. 'Where I was, it was 45-50 and 60 knots in the gusts and built up a little in the night before the Horn.' As the breeze increased, the solo sailor’s enemy appeared on the scene: 'I was getting really tired,' he admits. 'It got to Force 9, then Force 10 and the seas were getting steeper and steeper. You push the bow straight into the wave in front, then the wave behind picks you up.'

Unable to fight his growing fatigue, Kleinjans crawled into a pipe cot down below while the storm raged. 'Some of the waves were much bigger than others and in the middle of the night, one of them got me and just threw the boat over on its side,' he remembers clearly. 'It all happened so quickly. I’d stacked all the stuff inside the boat to windward and there’s really not much space left, so I slept down to leeward - which isn’t very clever - but I was really tired.' The result of the broach was an avalanche of sails, ropes, gear, food supplies and spare parts. 'I got everything all over me! By the time I’d got out of the mess, the boat had recovered and we were going again.' Having extracted himself from the heap of assorted chandlery, Kleinjans assessed the situation. 'I thought maybe it’s time to slow down a bit and I took the mainsail down for six or seven hours until it got light. As we got closer to the cape, the wind dropped a bit and I moved up to two reefs.'

Kleinjans is unique in the Portimão Global Ocean Race for being the only competitor to have already sailed around Cape Horn; racing on fully-crewed Rucanor Tristar in the 1985-86 Whitbread Round The World Race. 'When I went round the Horn in the Whitbread it was also quite windy, but when I saw the Horn on the horizon this time, it was a real relief,' he confesses. 'It was like I’d made it and the pressure just fell off me. I didn’t realize how much it meant and I got really quite emotional and had tears in my eyes,' continues Kleinjans with a broad grin. 'It was only then that I realised I’d been under pressure for quite a while, especially in the last ten days to the Cape. There was a lot of fear and the Southern Ocean makes you very humble. But that’s why we do these things…our life is too easy ashore. There’s no real way to share this with anybody,' he says with feeling, before adding with a huge laugh: 'I was actually really proud of myself!'

With two legs of the race remaining from Ilhabela to Charleston, Carolina, starting on 25th April, then across the North Atlantic to Portimão, Kleinjans and Roaring Forty are in excellent shape for the rest of the voyage, but the Belgian solo specialist admits that he had initial doubts: 'The low point of the voyage has been the first leg where I broke a lot of things,' he confirms. 'There were a lot of questions in my mind about if the boat was really up to the race. Then we fixed everything in Cape Town, but I still wasn’t too sure of the boat or of myself so I went a little slow, but it’s better to finish a leg in one piece.' However, having crossed the Indian Ocean, confidence was restored. 'After the second leg, I knew the boat could sail well and it was all coming together properly. All the problems we had were sorted out in New Zealand and Hakes Marine did a really good job, so we coped with Leg 3 much better than I though.' Despite a successful, solo transit of 5,000 miles of Pacific Ocean, Kleinjans reco