What are the THREE most important things to consider when contemplating a voyage?

Planning, Preparation, regardless of your Experience.

The kind of sailing contemplated by the sailors described in the second half of this post can go nowhere without using all three legs of the seamanship stool: Planning, Preparation and Experience.

In Newport a couple of weeks ago I counted the following classes of boats:

Team Alvimedica, US ENTRY IN THE VOR  who were out Friday, doing the Around the Island Race as part of the NYYC annual regatta.

US entry in the 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race during their Naming Ceremony

There were various High Test boats, like the TP 542 Interlodge, Bella Mente, Rambler and others in town for the Bermuda Race.

The TP 52 Interlodge out practicing on Narragansett Bay prior to the NYYC Annual regatta

Daily half a dozen Etchells arrive in advance of their worlds.

There was a record turn out for the NYYC annual regatta (Regatta Number 160)

There were two different Around Jamestown Island speed records broken, one on the Mastrand 32 Cat and one in the large mono hull category (Bella Mente in fact)….Phew…

A few of the Class 40’s in town for The Atlantic Cup are on moorings or in the Shipyard patiently waiting for the Bermuda race.

Dragon, one of half a dozen Class 40’s in town for the Atlantic Cup seen here competing in the second to last race of the inshore series.

Another C40, Bodacious Dream, was coming in from a Circumnavigation.

Then there was the Clagett Memorial Clinic and Regatta, (one of the key regattas for sailors not as physically capable as many of us)

There were  kids arriving for a few days of coaching in the Booke Gonzales clinic for up and coming winners.

Oh, and the usual beer can, Shields, J-24 & sport boat racing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights and just so much more. In lots of sailing ports one can get lots of boats, but in my experience that are all of a similar species at any given time. Only in Newport can one get such a wide swath of sailing boats for different uses all at the same time. AND frankly this is kind of a slow year with only 3 world championships this year….Where else do you get that?

OK, NOW reference my second sentence, above:

ALL of the boats ands sailors in attendance for anyone of these events have the first two characteristics in common, regardless of the level of their third.

Sitting quietly in the midst of all this sailing energy there is one boat making hardly a ruffle where she is moored at the west end of the docks at the Newport Shipyard. This boat is the absolute epitome of preparation and planning

The boat in question is a 40-meter LOA (131 feet) trimaran.

Rarely do American sailors get close to the elite of the French ocean racing scene, unless of course that travel to France. This boat came to us and is seen here at the Newport Shipyard. Spindrift Racing are waiting for a “weather window” of suitable characteristics to give them a shot at breaking the all time and absolute Trans-Atlantic sailing speed record west to east, from Ambrose light to The Lizard in SW England

I speak of course of Spindrift Racing, the former Banque Populaire under whose colors she set the current absolute Transat-Atlantic speed record from Ambrose to the Lizard in 3 days 15 hours and change, including a 24-hour run record of 905 miles, which is averaging a small dollop of spray south of 33 knots. Moored as she is away from the cluster of huge (tall) spars with which the bulk of the 40 meter cruising yachts at the shipyard are rigged there is, to the practiced eye, an incongruity to her spar as seen from out on the lower bay. It is thick, as in like a wing mast yet not so tall. The wing section is not so long, perhaps a meter and a bit fore and aft. The entire spar has been modified for this record. The Spindrift team cut some large number of feet, I want to say 20 feet off the top and re-did the sails since, as Banque Populaire the last time, her crew sailed almost all the way with a reef in I am told.

The current owners and crew are of course waiting for that much discussed and worried over piece of equipment “essential” to setting and/or breaking Trans-Atlantic sailing records today, the “Weather Window”. According to the chap I was chatting with on Wednesday, said window is still a minimum 10 days out, so the crew was flying home to France (where else?). It is hard to absorb the scope of this boat from pictures but I try.

Standing next to Spindrift Racing, one’s mind is readily boggled by just how massive this boat is.

When simply looking at a picture of Spindrift it is not possible to gauge the scope or the scale of this boat.

For starters the lashings for the cap shrouds are 25 mmm spectra  based on being roughly half the diameter of my water bottle.

Compare the size of my water bottle, roughly 2.0 inches wide and 9 inches tall with the lashings for the side stays.

One can commonly can stand on the dock and get a good idea of the on-deck workings of a boat. NOT so with this one whose working area/cockpit is perhaps 10 feet up on the air. This, “flight deck”  one is tempted to call it, has all the sail controls and is contained inside a hemisphere the arc of which is outlined by the mainsheet traveler. The outboard ends of the traveler are fixed to the aft cross beam about half way between the side of the main hull to the inside edge of the Ama (the name of the outside hulls on a Tri) on each cross beam. The traveler describes an arc around the stern and lands on the corresponding point on the opposite cross beam. I asked one of the crew about the loads on the mainsheet when the boat was fully loaded….About 15 tonnes he remarked.

A glimpse onto the flight deck

The bulk of this working area is trampoline netting. There are two wheels of not particularly large diameter connected by, and operating through, large motorcycle chain, roughly from a 1000 cc Super bike I’d reckon.

Spindrift giving a good impression of a slumbering Giant or Sea Monster, just waiting to be unleashed

Inside this platform live both the crew waiting on benches under the spray cowlings. OF the 13 crew members to be sailing aboard, three do not stand watches leaving two watches of 5 hands apiece.  On the Flight Deck there are,  well as the primary winches with their grinder pedestals, sailing instruments, misc. winches, control lines and the steering wheels and a p air of large suitcase shaped heavy material canvas bags. Their purpose I was told is to stow the tails of the various lines. The mainsheet is EIGHT to ONE and one end of it probably goes to a long hydraulic piston in the boom, unless they have removed it in the chase to make the boat lighter for this record attempt. The traveler is atop the radius at the back of the work platform and so the traveler adjusts the angle to the wind and the mainsheet adjusts the twist.

This image may give an idea of the size of things on this boat. These are merely the traveler blocks and my starboard paw for reference.

On Wednesday I took some pictures from the causeway adjacent to the Shipyard, the best place to actually see “down” onto the boat albeit giving up 50 yards of proximity.

There were a few guys working on the boat and I captured this picture of one of the guys standing on the dock next to her. You have to really look for him, which is remarkable because he is a stand out dressed in team uniform black and is standing on a largely light colored dock. For another reference, the white boat on the other side of the dock is a 75 foot cruising boat

It took me a few minutes to find the image with the crew member standing on the dock, so small is he relative to the boat. The white boat is 75 feet LOA.

Alongside the reduction in the mast height & weight (and the sail track and sail weight) in other weight savings, Tim Carrie, the only non-French part of the team and in charge of the considerable logistics support this caper requires, rattled off a long list of things they have done:

Taken the engine out, one dagger board The one on the starboard side) removed and the hole plugged up, shortening the port one and reducing it’s weight by 40% plus the reduction in mast height and a few other modifications which escaped me.

Reflect if you will on sailing this boat. To average 33 knots, one is sailing at or over 40 knots basically all the time.  Next time you are bored grab a mate with a pick up truck, rig up some safety lines or similar mechanism in the back and have yer mate drive down an empty road on Sunday morning, at say 45-50 miles per hour with you hanging on while standing on the truck bed. To really get the effect, do it when in the midst of a downpour

Then do it for 3 days, with only 13 mates.

If you WERE to be steering Spindrift at 40 knots, this is where you would be standing. The B&G meters are about 80 feet away

What are the two things that these guys are doing that ANY sailor can do, regardless of their own EXPERIENCE, the passage to be undertaken or the boat aboard which they will undertake it?

PLANNING

AND

PREPARATION.

It is absolutely just not possible to take on an exercise of this magnitude without planning of the highest order and the finest mesh. The good news is there is nothing special about planning and preparation for going sailing it just needs to be done.

So the “Alex Dilemma” seems to have diffused a bit.

He gets to be the good guy and demonstrate that it is possible to be a gentleman and competitive at the same time. Frankly that is a relief.

He looks to be able to take his Third and perhaps an 80 day Voyage too (Yogi Berra rule though is sill in play)

The latest report on the VG site reports Thompson lightening the pressure on the GO pedal so as to stay within Jack Aubry’s proverbial  biscuit toss of JP Dick until it is clearer what the impact of the conditions out there for the next 24-30 hours are really going too be.

JP Dick has a good man at his back, or at least close enough to his port  side, that if he submerges the Windex, he ought to not have too long to wait for part of the Cavalry to arrive, and well dressed they will be to boot. Not quite sure about the drill for recovering someone in the conditions they may be forced to face though. My guess is that a 60 will not be manageable, have steerage way, at anything under about 5-7 knots of boat speed and so getting a line to JP, without fouling one or both boats and then getting JP aboard….well lets not get too far down that track.

I guess this is one time that both skippers would be glad to not have deck spreaders.

Position wise, as defined by DTF, Alex is now, 3 miles ahead of JP, but 40 miles roughly to the north of him. Both are still SW of the Azores.

The leading edge of the front with the Big Wind, is about 350 miles to their NW.

The BBC High Seas forecast maintains Storm Warnings for 6 areas.

I wish this race would hurry up and end-I gotta get back to work….

Bon Courage.

At the 1400 (Paris time) position report on Friday 25 Jan, Alex Thompson still has not passed the keel-less JP Dick. The calculated DTF is down to 16 miles but Thompson is to the NW of Dick by about 90 miles and a little abaft his beam. It looks as though they may be splitting the Azores: Thompson West, Dick East. That Thompson will sail by Dick cannot be in doubt, I think (I reserve the Yogi Berra Rule), but the present positions/conditions are the easy part.

Roughly 600 miles to the west and a bit north, weather on the tracking site shows a large low shaping up. That is separate from the already 50 knots plus low directly north of them

A look at a N.O.A.A. high-seas forecast–you have to look at both parts-The divide is 45 degrees west…gives you some idea of what is shaping up. West is here: East part over the Azores is here. This is the 12 Z forecast for Friday. I read this as a  984 mb (so far) low,.

Then looking at GRIB files, Oh Boy. It is gonna get ugly out there. I make this low to be generating hard weather from the longitude of roughly the west end of Iceland all the way to Halifax and from 48 N to 32 N. 16 degrees of latitude, almost 1,000 miles. So in terms of area? Mebe eighteen hundred miles by a thousand, so 65% of the North Atlantic?

Gcaptain, a commercial shipping blog shows a map here, that does not do justice to what I am seeing on the grib files.

And the BBC shipping forecast site has issued gale warnings for the bulk of the West coast of Ireland out to the SE corner of Iceland. The BBC  High Seas forecast shows storm to violent storm, Force 9 to11 in the areas they call East and West central sections.

In any event, it is going to be windy to the finish, for all four of the leaders. We have all been in situations where the risk/reward decision tree get pared pretty thin. I would not like to be in Thompson’s sea boots right now let alone JP Dick’s.

Bon Courage.

With the failure of a second keel in the Vendee Globe, that of Virbac-Paprec skippered by JP Dick, Yogi Berra’s old adage is never more to the fore.

Dick is closing in on the finish with less distance to sail (c 1800 miles at 1400 eastern) than an O.S.T.A.R,. A couple of days ago, third place JP Dick reported that his keel had fallen off. After he stabilized the boat he did the ET thing and phoned home via satellite phone to report the loss. Personally the fact that over oh, 15 years or so, these IMOCA 60’s have evolved to the point where they can sail, close to up wind, WITHOUT a keel, at 10-11 knots yet, is mind-boggling in the first place. And then (surviving) to call the race organizers to tell them the keel fell off has the air of calling your credit card company to report a lost or stolen card.  Although it is also probably worth contemplating that his design is the “same” as the first boat to lose its keel, Safran, skippered by Marc Guillemot whose keel fell of inside the first 50 miles of the race back in early November.

(One cannot but help being reminded of the late Mike Plant).

Apparently Dick has not (yet)withdrawn and as of Wednesday 23 Jan at the 0907 (Paris time) report Dick appears to be continuing on towards the finish and, sans keel, is still doing 11 knots…..

It is perfectly possible for Dick to be balancing his previous 6th place finish in the 2005/6 race with an ABD in this one. Given the preposterously huge amount of work this race now takes, the 47 year old sailor must be doing some serious soul seeking.

The phrase “Alex’s Dilemma” was the subject line of about 15 of my morning emails. The gist of the traffic is interesting and in a larger way is a commentary on the state of the world: Doing the “right thing” versus acting solely for ones’ self interest.

The discussion seems to have been initiated by Jerry Freeman, O.S.T.A.R. vet, prominent solo/DH sailing advocate and voice of the solo/DH community in the south of the UK, the Solo Ocean Racing Club.

In short, the question of “Alex’s Dilemma” revolves around RRS rule one-helping other competitors in distress-Should Alex Thompson (presently having his best showing in a Vendee Globe- in a strong 4^th place) close in on Dick to render assistance- versus pressing on and (presumably) finishing in third. As of the 1400 (Paris Time) tracking fix, Thompson is about 130 miles south of JP Dick and a bit to the west.

Comments in the Petite Bateau Forum, from whence the emails come, run the gamut from: JP Dick has neither retired nor requested assistance, nor (it appears after sailing without his keel for more than 24 hours so far) does he seem to be in any tearing hurry to do so, thus Thompson ought to press on. The opposite extreme is that Thompson ought to stand by while Dick gets to safe harbor which as of about 1100 EST Wednesday morning is the Azores roughly 750 miles to the NE. As of the 1900 Paris time report on the VG site, Dick is in communication with his team and the boat’s designers to figure out a solution which I guess has two answers: Sail on OR abandon to the Azores. Apparently the weather is going to deteriorate as Dick heads further north with the leader presently expected to finish in 30-35 knots and 5 meter seas.

Two comments are firmly in the “Alex should go on” side of the ledger- “It is a race, not a cruise!” One other concurred and added that Dick might easily be collected by another vessel and added the idea that JP Dick ought to be protested since the boat now longer complies with the IMOCA rules for stability……

In the “stand by to help” column were three succinct comments: “seamanship trumps silver every time”

Thompson was quoted on Tuesday in the British paper the Daily Telegraph as hectoring the IMOCA leadership for allowing the design of keels that cannot survive the life of the boat. So some comments in the email exchange suggest Thompson does not have a choice, being so safety conscience, other than to sail over to Dick and offer assistance.

The fence sitters propose:

That Thompson offer assistance, have it refused and then press on for a third and so receive adoration on both counts. A top three finish AND helping a distressed seaman. A third would be Thompson’s best finish, in fact his only in three attempts, so he is pretty keen too. It is further observed that Thompson will be in the vicinity of Dick for a couple or three days as he sails by him by which time Dick will be pretty close to the Azores and so presumably safe(er). The speed difference Wednesday afternoon, Newport RI time, has JP Dick sailing at about 10 knots to Thompson’s 14-15Kts.

Some propose Alex offer a version of stand-by, then ask for redress and so presumably place third and possible be still credited with a sub 80-day voyage. This comment opines that if he merely goes to JP’s aid without a request, then the redress hearing might be “muddy”.

What does one raised in the old school do about all this-What is one to make of the situation and comments? Why might a redress request based on complying with the (most basic) RRS (1.1) be “Muddy”? How might a “muddy” ruling in this case effect a dinghy skipper not assisting a fellow sailor since the distressed sailor did not ask for help? Is it to be so ruled merely in the fact the boats are out of sight and asking for help is required since it is not obvious to the competitors that a boat needs help?

There are the Rules of the Sea, ancient and unwritten and the recent and formalized version covered in the RRS.  As a practical matter all the skippers of these boats are “Professional Mariners” and RRS aside (maybe) they might be questioned by a skilled lawyer as to why they did not render any and all assistance to a vessel in distress.-This issue was raised in one comment: If Thompson “ignores” offering assistance and Dick dies, might Thompson be brought before a court for his involvement or lack of? Might the interested parties of JP Dick bring civil suit against Thompson for neglect?

Ocean racing in general and the Vendee Globe in particular has seen more than its fair share of  commercial and military ships involved in the recovery of solo sailors in all manner of conditions admittedly mostly all after a call for help. The competitors have also gone to the rescue of other competitors too. This incident though seems to be a bit outside the range of normal since Dick is demonstrably at a disadvantage sailing his boat without a keel, yet he is still sailing upright, and pretty fast for now. As of this writing neither from his team or the VG administration does there seem to be any indication of which course he will take.

Nowhere, in any race or regatta in the world, is this basic requirement of assistance more required than in the Vendee Globe. In a sense all sailors rely on each other for support but alone in the grey trackless wastes of the Southern Ocean is this not merely a “Rule” but must, still surely, must it not, be a basic act of humanity? OK the warmer part of the North Atlantic 750 miles away from the Azores is not the Southern ocean, and Dick is a supremely skilled, experienced and talented seaman, but sailing is governed, more than most, or any, sport by precedent and actions of the competitors.

Do we really want to participate in a sporting activity (Or has professional environment changed the form of sailing that much?) where it is possible to ignore a “wounded competitor”  Unlike say an Ironman, where there are helpers and medics following and spread out on the track, sailing, the VG  in particular, demands a camaraderie unseen elsewhere.

As for the idea of protesting Dick for anything related to this incident- Some refer to the DSQ handed to Swill sailor Bernard Stamm based on his activities in southern NZL fixing stuff. Rules are Rules and so stability is a rule and absent it, a DSQ is appropriate goes this theme. But Mike Golding was apparently protested in this fashion for the same reason-finishing sans keel and the protest was tossed out, so Dick might be protected in some way by this precedent.

What will be the outcome? Might Dick be criticized in the event he decides to press on, past the refuge of The Azores? The latest update on the VG site says Dick will postpone any retirement decision until after the Azores. A day north of the Azores, he is still two days to the Spanish/Portuguese coast, if the winds remain favourable. What if he finishes, a fourth is most likely-the 5^th boat is 1700 miles astern as of this writing- this works out to five and a half days at 300 miles a day averaging 12.5 knots. Will JP Dick be seen as a national hero (in France) or a hazard to good, and bad example of, sound seamanship? What happens if he presses on past the Azores, and crashes? His team and sponsor must have contingency plans in place, or perhaps this point is part of the dialogue now burning up satellite bandwidth today. What happens if he crashes and dies? Sailing is still the last arena where the individuals rely almost totally on their decisions and the implications of such decisions. Will people (family & friends) really let Dick’s decision to carry on past Safe Harbor and then die, be the end of the discussion?

Regardless of the outcome of the race proper, this edition of the Vendee Globe will set the bench mark for a nail-biting finish, with performance that was barely 20 years ago the sole domain of the 80-120’ Cats with full crews. And that does not even include the (Likely-Do not spook the herd yet) victory of a photogenic and youthful first timer in the guise of Francoise Gabart. I reckon there is at least one insurance company in the world today very happy with at least one of their recent decisions. A discussion for a different post is, what does Gabart do now or next? Take on the solo Fastest Around The Blue Marble time in a 120 foot Tri?

Perhaps the alternative to this entire event is the reprise of the Golden Globe, the original solo circumnavigation race-Back down here on earth.

And just in case all this great racing gets you inspired to try your hand at solo/Double handed sailing, read my latest column in WindCheck Magazine on the subject here.