The race starts now - Team Malizia prepare for the The Ocean Race with 6 months to go
by Will Harris 26 Jul 2022 11:57 PDT
Malizia-Seaexplorer touches the water for the first time in Lorient, France © Ricardo Pinto / Team Malizia
I wanted to give you an insight into what it's like to be part of an Ocean Race team, seen through the eyes of myself, Will Harris. I'll be Co-Skipper of Malizia-Seaexplorer for The Ocean Race and have been a part of Team Malizia since 2019.
>We are just under 6 months away from the start of The Ocean Race (formerly the Volvo Ocean Race) and our new IMOCA 60 Malizia-Seaexplorer has just been launched. We're about to do our first days sailing on the new boat and expect to be training on the water non-stop for the next 5 months.
It's taken us 18 months to get to this point of launching the boat. After our German Skipper Boris Herrmann finished the Vendee Globe in January 2021, he and our Team Director Holly Cova got straight to the commercial work of finding partners to launch the next campaign and build a new boat. They did an amazing job. It's by far the hardest part, finding partners to back you for a sailing campaign, mainly due to the difficulty of creating enough media value when sailing is not such a mainstream sport such as football or Formula 1.
We were in a race against the clock since it usually takes two years to build an IMOCA 60 from initial conception to launch. If we wanted to have some time to test the boat before the start, we had to cut this down to 18 months and secure the funding before pressing the GO button on the build process. Until this huge commercial task is ticked off, you are living off a dream of doing the race.
By uniting several companies around a message 'A Race We Must Win! Climate Action Now' the value of our campaign and our climate message was realised by many. By April 21 the design process was well under way, and the dream was becoming a reality.
Being involved in the design process of the boat has been fascinating and nothing like what I expected. There is an unbelievable number of parts to design and perfect and we estimated a total of 80,000 hours of work for the overall build process. Since you are building a custom boat, all the parts must also be custom and must be designed in lightest and strongest way possible.
The timeline of the build is also a huge task. Last summer, we mapped out the process of each stage of the build to estimate that we would be able to comfortably launch the boat on 19th July 2022. I think we are the first new build to be able to launch on their expected time without delays, but it was far from easy. We have had round the clock work on the boat over the last month to get the final jobs in the shed finished and we still have quite a few systems to install now we are on the water. But I cannot be prouder of the team for achieving our expected launch date.
Using our previous experience from Malizia II, we developed a boat with designers VPLP with a goal to utilise the foils and get the boat flying in the most difficult of seas. This has always been the challenge with the later generations of IMOCA 60s and often you must slow the boat down to avoid losing control in big seas.
By making the bow of the boat much more rounded the boat becomes less likely to plough into the back of steep waves and you have less risk of losing control in a nosedive. We also lifted the stern of the boat meaning you can further get the bow out of the waves. The boat has therefore quite a 'banana' shape. It will penalise us in lighter conditions where the boat is non-foiling (less than 12 knots wind) however ones the wind and waves are up, we should be able to push the boat faster.
The foil is also a big part of the design process. With the complicated build process, it takes around 6 months to complete one set of foils, so we had to leave plenty of time for this.
We found with our previous IMOCA the foils would not work so well when the boat was flat and a lot of heel was needed to get them working. This is fine for most conditions, except for downwind when sailing with a lot of heel becomes challenging because of the larger headsails. We therefore designed our foils so they go much deeper into the water, meaning when the boat is flat it can still utilise the full effect of the foils.
The main design choices for the foils and hull were made over a year ago, once you've made them there's no going back and we will have to wait and see for the first sailings how they work out. The focus for the rest of the year then turned to the finer details.
Our cockpit had to be designed for both five people in the crewed races and the single-handed Vendee Globe. It's quite a challenge to do this since you want enough space for people to live comfortably and exploit the boat to its full potential. But at the same time extra space usually means more weight since more structure is required. We spent a long time discussing and modelling the cockpit and living space. By putting the cockpit in front of the living area and keeping it enclosed and protected, we optimised the space better and also the aft cabin has helped us with the IMOCA Stability tests set in place for the safety of the boat in the event of an inversion.
As sailors, we must understand the boat to the finest detail. It's almost guaranteed we will have some sort of technical problems while racing so being able to diagnose and fix these problems are invaluable. Rosalin Kuiper another of the sailors onboard will be focusing on the boat systems and spares while I'll be more focused on the electronics and sensors. With a crew of only four sailors, we will have to be multi-skilled and operating in a slightly short-handed mode.
The next steps for us are sea trials and testing. To go sailing on the boat for the first time will be fantastic, but also quite a tense moment. We have 6 weeks until the first race to test and get the boat up to speed. Being efficient with our time on the water will be key and we have already laid out a schedule (weather dependent) where we sail during the night so the shore crew can still work on the boat in the day after our feedback from the sailings. The race is really starting now!