Vendée Globe - bits & pieces from the doldrums
While the front-runners are creaming south, convinced that they’re going to come to a dead halt at the next high pressure zone while boats several hundred miles behind catch up, let me pick a few comments out of the messages from the later bunch.
First, while many skippers coasted through the doldrums with nothing more than loss of speed (at 10 knots, these boats feel as if they’re coasting gently along), others did get examples of what they were all fearing - hours with no wind at all, short, violent squalls going round in circles, torrential rain…
However, it wasn’t the doldrums that shattered Jérémie Beyou’s rigging and forced Delta Dore to retire once he had reached the lee of an island off Brazil and had a chance to examine the damage in detail. In practice, his spreader failures, and the damage done to the rest of the rig by the bits swinging around, were casualties of the stormy ride through the Bay of Biscay.
We’ve come a long way since Gypsy Moth IV demonstrated that stainless steel - used on all modern yachts at the time - didn’t take kindly to being flapped around incessantly for months on end. Metal fatigue became as much a problem for ocean-going yachts as it had long been for jet aircraft.
Today’s materials are a world apart from Chichester’s stainless steel plate shroud tangs, but so are the forces they must endure. I’ve mentioned it before, and Mike Golding commented on it in a pre-race interview - the rig is the weakest physical link in modern high-performance boats. Making it as tough as necessary without sacrificing weight, and hence stability and sail-carrying power, is one of the toughest challenges for the designers.
For my money, one of the worst experiences over the past few days was that of Jony Malbon, who lost communication with the source of his weather information, and all but the most basic contact with the outside world. During that period, he must have felt more like the early round-the-world racers - and look how many of them went a bit funny in the head in the process… He’s passed a serious test, and the fates seem to be smiling on him now as he turns from hunted to hunter. Go man, go!
