Death of yachtsman off Cap-Ferret

Brest, 12 September 2011.

On Monday 12 September at about 09:00h , the Cap Ferret signal station was alerted by the fishing boat “Atalante” that a sailing boat “Karantez VI” – a Pogo 2 class 6,50 – was under full sail with no-one aboard. The boat was adrift 8 nautical miles (14 km) from Cap-Ferret.

The Bordeaux customs plane carrying out maritime surveillance was rerouted to pinpoint the boat’s position. The security helicopter “Dragon 33” was sent to the area to do the initial man overboard searches.

Around 10:00h, the body of a man about 40 years old, wearing integrated buoyancy clothing displaying the name of the boat, was found on Lège-Cap-Ferret beach by a yachtsman.

A fisherman has moored the boat off Cap-Ferret. It is now being watched over by the Cap-Ferret signal station.

Weather: wind SW 4 knots (7km/h). Heavy swell 3.5 5 metres.

The drowned man was Mini-Transat entrant Jean-Marc Allaire, who was actually in his thirties. This reduces the number of starters on Sunday 25 September from 80 to 79, and cannot help but be at the back of their minds for all the competitors.

View Mini-Transat competitor lost at sea in a larger map

The top blue marker is where Jean-Marc Allaire’s boat was found. The lower one is the starting point for Emmanuel and Maximilien Berque’s voyage in the 5-metre catamaran Micromégas.

Cap-Ferret is on the northern side of the Passes d’Arcachon – the narrow strait through which the Arcachon basin empties between huge sandbanks.  A comment on the website for local newspaper Sud Ouest points out that this region is extremely dangerous during heavy Atlantic swells, with at least one serious accident per year.

The surf along this coast, including the entrance to the Bassin d’Arcachon, makes it a favourite with jet-skiers, as shown in this amateur video:

Yacht racing is becoming a spectator sport, thanks to some big technological advances. It’s been a while now since modern materials made possible the IMOCA 60s and 70s, which are driven hard on the open ocean just as if they were dinghies racing round the cans. Advances in video camera technology linked with big-sponsor budgets have meant that ocean racing is more intimately covered each year.

More recently there have been big efforts to make round-the-cans racing an exciting spectator sport, even for those who know next to nothing about it. Courses were made shorter and kept close to the shore so that live audiences could watch. As TV audiences grew, the sponsors began to spend more on broadening the viewers’ experience and explaining what was going on.

The America’s Cup circus, determined to turn a moribund event into a serious challenger for mainstream audience figures (and hence bigger exposure for potential sponsors) has moved the game up several notches, and they’re gaining experience with each event.

It looks as if the America’s Cup has finally made it through the lawyer-dominated transition phase, and has become a new type of sailing event that will attract even those who know as little about the sport as the average F1 viewer does about motor racing. The AC72s should be interesting when they arrive.

The Mini 6.50 races are the testing ground for both sailors and designers whose goal is the professional ocean races like the Vendée Globe and the Volvo. It provided the initial testing for many innovations, among them the canting keel, double rudders and carbon fibre masts. There are two groups in the race – series production boats (at least 10 must have been built) and prototypes. Clearly, a high-tech 21 foot ocean racer is not going to be cheap, but $50,000-odd is something an amateur with the skill to attract sponsorship can afford, unlike the going rate of around a million for a new Ocean 60.

Women such as Ellen MacArthur and Sam Davies cut their teeth on the Mini Transat, and 6 out of this year’s 84 starters are women.

Dee Caffari was a teacher until the ocean sailing bug bit her and she became a professional yacht skipper. Here’s a French girl who also flipped while pursuing a mundane career on land.

Growing up in Les Sables d’Olonne, willowy blonde Fabienne Robin can’t have missed the excitement generated by the Figaro and the Vendée Globe, but sailing wasn’t a big thing for her. In 2004 she was happily following her career as an accountant when a member of the local yacht club advertised for people to form part of a racing crew. She applied without any real idea of what it would entail.

She was accepted, and that was her epiphany. She gave up her job, and by 2007 had obtained her professional skipper’s ticket. A year later, she’d bought a Pogo 1 and raced in a number of Mini 6.50 events.

She seems given to snap decisions – which she says have always worked out well. In 2008, she saw the moulds for Pierre Roland’s D2 before any had been built. She decided that was the boat for her, and ordered one. Hers was the second, after Rolland’s own boat which he raced in the Charente Maritime Bahia Transat 6.50. Once it was built, she did two or three Mini 6.50 events per year, so she’s now one of the class’s experienced skippers.

The boat has no main sponsor, so it carries the name she gave it – Plume d’Ange. This haunting song (monologue, really) was recorded by Claude Nougaro in 1977, the year before she was born. I’d love to know why she named her boat after it.

PLUME D’ANGE claude Nougaro par zembla38

Here are the lyrics.

If you are rich and love the ocean, you can change the name of Fabienne’s boat. But for only 50 euros you can have your name displayed less prominently – as long as you do it before 25 September. Why not? It would make a change from spending the evening in the pub, and give you something to talk about. It could also give your business a bit of useful publicity. Here is a list of current sponsors.

To tell Fabienne the name or phrase you want her to display on the boat, click here. You can also pay by cheque if you insist.

When something nasty happens to someone on the open ocean, I usually take a quick look at Sailing Anarchy. Forum regulars pull no punches, and delight in flaming one another and any newbie who enters their patch, but they include many of the world’s most experienced ocean sailors and they can be very supportive of any victim who has their sympathy. I took it as a tribute to Joyon when one of the earliest contributors said:

“That man is an animal. Hope the boat’s OK…”

In fact, Joyon had quite a scare. When the gust hit IDEC and started to turn her over, he beat the automatic system to the task of  freeing the mainsheet, and ended up having to dump the traveller, too. However, he ended up under the net of his upside-down tri, not having had time to take a deep breath, and not knowing which was the shortest way out. He says it took him about 40 seconds, and he ended up at the forward cross beam.

He was unharmed, and remained with IDEC, waiting for the tug arranged by his support team, which took them to Montauk and a crane capable of righting her.

The damage could have been worse, but it will still necessitate shipping IDEC back home to Brittany before the next attempt. Her mast is broken in two places but reckoned to be repairable, but the hulls seem sound. Joyon says he has managed to save the electronics, which form a very significant part of any modern high-performance craft.

If you can’t see the photo of IDEC being tipped upright again which is imbedded in the Anarchy post, here’s a link to the original in Yachting Monthly.

Chapeau bas, Francis!