Sail with New Freebooters

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Vincent Riou’s sponsor PRB has decided to seek compensation for the uninsured damage and recovery costs which resulted from Riou clipping the keel of the upturned VM Matériaux when he rescued Jean Le Cam during the 2008/9 Vendée Globe. The cost of shipping PRB home and repairing the damage to her rig has been assessed at around 750,000 Euros, and PRB are seeking to sue whoever they can to recover this: the race organisers, VM Matériaux, even Jean Le Cam himself.

At first sight, this sounds as if America’s Cup attitudes have spilled over into round the world racing, but I believe the situation is totally different. America’s Cup litigation is all about a struggle between very rich and powerful men - PRB’s move may be about financial survival in the current economic crisis. PRB is a small business, and its recent sponsorship experience has been financially painful. It is behaving like a US company one step away from filing for Chapter Eleven protection from its creditors.

The problem is that the case is addressing a taboo subject. To quote Yachting World’s Elaine Bunting in her recent blog post:

This dispute is over who should bear the financial consequences of saving a life at sea, something that until now no-one has dared publicly place a price on.

The unspoken worry is that potential rescuers will become litigation-conscious in the same way as landlubbers, and ‘cross the street’ to avoid getting involved. A far cry from the attitude displayed by Captain Ferro, master of the 113,000 ton tanker Overseas Yellowstone, in the recent rescue of the 38-footer Fleur during a storm off the west of Ireland. As reported in the July 2009 issue of Yachting World

… he had never been involved in such an operation before, and was proud to have helped

This despite the fact that his own ship was in ballast, with seas rolling over her and putting his own crew at risk.

On the face of it, PRB doesn’t stand much chance. It made the commercial decision not to insure for anything other than total loss of the boat (as did many Vendée Globe competitors). Full insurance is available, but it’s expensive - for a very good reason.

My feeling is that, even if PRB were to win even partial recompense, the negative publicity would outweigh any temporary financial advantage. I can’t believe that they don’t know this. This could become a very sad affair.

Jim Murrant, author of The Boating Bible Manual of Seamanship, includes an excellent video of what happens when you use various different means to fight an oil or fat fire in a pan on a galley stove. Just about everybody knows that you should not use water, but this video shows how much better it is to use a fire blanket to smother the pan than to use a powder fire extinguisher.

The problem is that fire extinguishers send out a powerful jet. Although the video shows the fire extinguisher killing the fire instantly, it also shows chunks of the pan’s contents being blown all over the galley.

My apologies to those of you who have been checking for new posts on this site. It looks as if I cannot commit to the steady stream of output characteristic of a true blog - my life just doesn’t work that way. However, I want to assure you that I haven’t given up and gone away - there’ll be another burst of activity in a week or so.

A very quick look at one or two events that I was following fairly keenly until the interruption:

The 2008/2009 Vendée Globe prizegiving featured a huge firework show. The record crowd of 120,000 people thronging the beach were lucky - the afternoon’s thunderstorms faded away before the ceremony.

29 contestatnts have already signed up for the next race, in October 2012, and many of them are competing in this year’s Figaro.

Speaking of the Figaro, Jann Eliés took his first tentative steps at returning to competitive singlehanded sailing after his serious fractures in the Southern Ocean. He couldn’t take it easy though - he won his first race and the next one. His orthopaedic surgeon must be shaking his head in despair.

Meanwhile, the committee that  controls the rules for the Vendée Globe boats is having discussions about the number of canting keel system failures competitors suffered. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the way of rule changes - something on the lines of giant ski-bindings, perhaps? There has been a range of different failure modes, so it’s going to need some serious study.

Hilary Lister is back in action again, now round Land’s End, past the south coast of Wales and across the sea to Ireland. Most of her problems last year were caused by lack of wind, but now the team is facing rougher conditions. The procedures for coping with this are sometimes dramatic, so we shouldn’t be surprised when some of the reporting becomes sensational or controversial. For a dose of reality, check out Hilary’s (proxy) blog posts and Tweets.

By comparison with all this, my life has been rather easy. On a trip to the UK, I managed to meet Russell Ferriday (his site only works with IE, not Firefox, sadly) and even motored a few hundred yards round to the berth where Russell was planning to step his mast. A month later, Phyllis and I attended the Lee-on-Solent Centenary Ball at HMS Sultan and met many old friends, including one who assured me that the pound would recover some of its value against the euro by the end of this month. It’s beginning to look as if he was right, for which I am immensely grateful because my pension is paid in sterling and I live in France.

Some while back, I met Rick Willoughby on a forum at http://www.boatdesign.net . I was a little skeptical of a thread dedicated to travelling downwind faster than the wind, powered only by the wind - until Rick guided me through the associated physics.

Later, I discovered that for Rick this was only something that fell out of his work on a much more serious project which should interest anyone concerned about the way we waste energy in today’s world - but click on the audio player below and listen to him talk about it rather than getting it second hand from me:

On Saturday 11th July 2009 at 13:00hrs, three 67ft steel hulled yachts - Adventure, Challenger and Discoverer - crewed by Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force personnel, will set off from a start gate off Southsea Castle. They’ll be bound for the Canary Islands, on the first leg of a year-long round-the-world Tri-Service Adventurous Sail Training Exercise open to all UK service personnel, Regular and Reserve.

The event is organised by the Joint Services Adventurous Sail Training Centre (JSASTC), whose mission is:

to develop the personal qualities essential to members of the British Armed Forces through adventurous sail training in the Service environment.

The circumnavigation is planned to include participation in the Rolex Sydney to Hobart Race in December 2009 and Antigua Race week in May 2010.  All legs will be conducted as Adventure Training expeditions and will be either cruises in company or races in the spirit of Corinthian competition, with the emphasis on safety, seamanship and teamwork. Each crew consists of a skipper, a mate, and 12 others divided into two or three watches. Skipper, mate and watch leaders will all hold relevant qualifications and have done the required amount of sea time in their roles.

The boats are Challenge 67s, designed by David Thomas and Thanos Condylis, of which Devonport Management Ltd. built 10 as the one-design class for the 1992 British Steel Challenge. Two skippers placed in this race have been in the news recently - Mike Golding (second) and Pete Goss (third).

By 1996, the race was known as the BT Global Challenge. There were now 14 boats and Mike Golding won.

I’ll be in Gosport (the home of JSASTC) myself in April and in early June, so I hope to be able to take a look at the boats before they leave UK shores. They will probably have changed quite a bit since they were first designed and built - for a start, we’ve learned a lot about preventing the rigging failures caused by the incessant slapping and banging on long ocean passages. Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV’s stainless steel mast tangs suffered from metal fatigue en route to Australia, and several of the original Challenge 67s suffered rigging screw failures in both 19923 and 1996/7.