Third time lucky?

Mike Golding discusses his latest Vendee Globe campaign

Britain’s most capped solo offshore sailor, Mike Golding, is currently lining up for his third Vendee Globe aboard his third new Open 60. But in a 30 strong line-up including 20 new boats launched over the course of the last four year cycle, the ante has been upped incredibly since the last race in 2004-5, when he finished third.

All the new boats are beamier, more powerful with more water ballast, with taller, larger sail plans and Golding’s new Owen Clarke design, Ecover 3, is no different. “It would be reasonable to say it is 10-15% faster than the old boat, pretty much everywhere, maybe with the exception of the very light,” says Golding, comparing his new steed with his previous Owen Clarke-designed, Ecover 2. “Basically as soon as the boat is moving it is quicker. Then even in the very light conditions you have more sail area so you’ll probably be quicker anyway - it just makes more fuss about it because it has that very hard chine which digs in and makes a mess of the water.

“Is it better all round? It is different all round. Alex [Thomson] said it best: ‘The boat is a bit of a truck.’ I think that that applies to all the modern generation of boats – you get on them and you don’t think you are going fast but you are and it is a heavier, more laboured process.”

According to Golding this seems to be largely an issue of power rather than weight as at just under 8.5 tonnes Ecover 3’s weight in ‘IMOCA trim’ is just under 8.5 tonnes; only a fraction more than his last boat. She is at the lower end of the weight spectrum where it is believed Marc Guillemot’s Safran is the featherweight of the fleet at just under 8 tonnes.

While traditionally designers have made IMOCA 60s as light as possible, this resulting in boats requiring smaller sail plans, more easily manageable by the solo skipper, etc this time Brian Thompson’s Pindar represents a departure from this, designer Juan Kouyoumdjian going down the maximum power route (maximum beam, bigger sail plan and heaviest bulb etc) believing this to produce a faster boat, as he proved with ABN AMRO One in the last Volvo Ocean Race.



“ Pindar proves there is another way to crack the nut,” says Golding. “I have fallen into believing that the boat is quicker than anyone else. But in the Vendee context, I’m not sure that it will work because as you increase the power to make the boat deliver the performance potential, you have to drive it at or very near its potential. If you are a boat like Safran you can afford to cruise with a sail way below its wind range and the boat will continue to trundle along because it is easily driven. Whereas on Pindar, you will have to make the change or fall behind. I think Juan’s concept is correct, but in the solo environment it might struggle. In theory if Juan’s theory is correct, with such a powerful boat you do less sail changes, whereas a lighter boat has to do more. There is nothing wrong with Juan’s thought process - if you reduce the number of sail changes you will go faster, but in practice I can’t believe that will be the case.”

While Pindar’s mast is something in the order of 30m off the deck, Ecover’s rig is a more modest 28m, still around 1.5m taller than the spar on Golding’s previous boat. Golding says he is happy with this - despite being taller the new Southern Spars-built rig weighs much the same as Ecover 2’s. “I never thought that mast height was where it is at. Historically the Vendee has never been won by the boat with the tallest mast, although that is meaningless. In reality I think there is an optimum mast height, but the whole thing is integrated with your stability. On Ecover, we still present a lot of sail area. The boat is masthead rig - we have gone away from fractional - and we pack a lot of area. Downwind in moderate conditions we have a 400sqm spinnaker and a big mainsail compared to something like Artemis, so we have a lot of sail area we can present. And most of the time on these boats you are trying to back off the power.”

This time Golding has benefited from Dee Caffari getting an exact sistership to Ecover 3, both boats built down at Hakes Marine in New Zealand. In August the two boats undertook some basic two boat testing down in Plymouth.

So what did they learn from this? “We did some testing on the Code 3 and Code 5, but the main thing was sail crossovers and the big things like the interceptors, ballast configurations, etc.” The testing was set up by electronics guru and navigator Nat Ives and Golding says that for the most part it confirmed a lot of what they previously only suspected about the handling of their boats. “We have moved some things on our crossovers. It is not a whole new ballpark, but we have more confidence in what we’re doing.”

They are running Optima software that displays wind speed and angle, as well as other factors such as daggerboard and ballast configuration, even the interceptor, and plots these relative to the resultant boat speed on a graph. While they didn’t have telemetry set up, they were able to use Automatic Identification System (as all IMOCA Open 60s are now obliged to carry) to monitor each other’s boat speed and course.

Golding says that in addition to making their polars more accurate, one of the most important things they learned (and perhaps unique for solo sailing) is how low in the range they can go with sails before they really must change. In other words it answers a vital question for the exhausted solo sailor: ‘do I need to change sail?’

An interesting aspect thrown up by the two boating was just how critical heel angle is. With a canting keel the range of heel angles is great and for the skipper also controllable thanks to the cant angle. “For a boat like ours which is very flat and wedge shaped, we have to heel a lot. The first thing I was thinking was that I need more cant in my bunk! Heel angle is critical: sometimes in our testing it was hard to differentiate the gains made by whatever was be tested compared to the gains made by different heel angles.”

It also validated how they should use their daggerboards. The boards on the new generation Owen Clarke boats are longer with a shorter chord. According to Golding the VPPs were suggesting that the boards should be lifted when the boat is sailing lower than 80deg TWA. “In practice I’ve been using them full down any time the apparent wind is forward of the beam. There is a critical point where you have to start lifting it so that you don’t break it. And that was validated by the two boating. The only thing is that the boards aren’t built to go roaring off downwind at 25 knots. So you have to bring them up before you load them up too much. The boards will take a lot of speed in flat water, but if you start bouncing over waves…”

While Ecover is of more modest proportions than the super powerful Pindar and Artemis Ocean Racing, she does have several unique features. While the majority of boats have three pairs of water ballast tanks on Ecover there are five - forward, mid and three aft tanks. As with all the boats the forward tanks are the biggest and along the centreline and are around 2.2 tonnes a side, while the mid-ballast tanks are L-shaped and around 1.5 each. The three aft tanks (known as 1-2-3, 1 being the further forward) are around 0.75 tonnes each.

Golding explains the roles of each tank when it is filled up: “Forward doesn’t do much for the righting - it is more for inertial ballast. Mid is your biggest righting moment ballast. 1-2-3 are additions to mid. Upwind you’d go 1 and 2 and we would have four tanks loaded at any one time. Conversely downwind you’d load from the back - 3, 2, 1 mid. If you are going dead downwind you’d just load 3-2-1.”

Foil

A significant issue that Golding hopes (touch wood) he has solved now is over the new Ecover’s keel foil, a particularly thorny topic remembering that a foil breakage nearly scuppered his chances in the last Vendee Globe. The new Ecover was originally fitted with a fabricated steel keel, but this once again had problems and over the course of this summer Ecover 3 was fitted with a new carbon foil.

“With the last steel keel there were cracks appearing all over it after just 10,000 miles of usage,” says Golding. The blame for this went from builder to sub-contractor to designer and back again, leaving Golding scratching his head about what he should do. “You could build another steel keel quick - but on what basis would you do that, what parameters would you use? And the only solution in steel being offered to me was a heavier solution - forged or a heavier scantling - and they were both going to make me slower. So the only solution in the mix that was going to offer me a performance gain was carbon.”

Golding had had a good experience with a carbon foil on his first Groupe Finot-designed Ecover. “We wanted a new generation carbon keel, but we didn’t want any risks, so I hope we are not pushing any boundaries, we are just safe.” For this reason they employed high experienced French engineer Herve Devaux of HDS to design the new foil which was subsequently build by JMV in Cherbourg. Typically carbon foils are lighter than their steel equivalents but have to be more bulky and Golding admits that Ecover's new keel is both fatter and with a longer cord, but because it is lighter the bulb can be heavier. Following Ecover’s foil troubles, on Dee Caffari’s sistership Aviva, they have changed not to a carbon solution but to one in fabricated stainless steel.

Aside from the ‘flutter’ issue experienced by Roland Jourdain’s boat prior to the last Vendee Globe, the biggest issue with carbon foils recently has been the attachment of the rams to the top of the foil. According to Golding, for this reason the top of Ecover’s new foil got bigger and bigger to the extent that when they fitted it they weren’t able to get full cant ,because the hull was in the way!

While titanium is now banned from keel rams in the Volvo Ocean Race, this is not the case with the Open 60s and Ecover is one of several boats to have titanium rams. While made by Cariboni, their rams are non-standard having the control block directly mounted on each ram to reduce pipework. The keel rams are the only hydraulics on board, Golding preferring the reliability of cascades and large winches to handle the sail and rig controls.

Power

In order to reduce weight, Golding is not taking a genset this time, and will be using his Lombardini diesel engine for charging. While some of the Volvo boats are using their main engine to drive the hydraulic pump that cants their keel, on Ecover 3 the keel is canted electronically. Aside from a back-up wind generator the main engine is thus a vital piece of equipment and after suffering problems with back pressure in the exhaust during last year’s Transat Jacques Vabre, the engine has been bench tested and given love. Golding says that his main engine set up cost as much as a “very nice family saloon car…”

As Golding has learned the hard way in previous races (dismasting shortly after the start of the 2000-1 race and his keel foil snapping shortly before the finish in 2004-5) reliability is king in this gruelling non-stop round the world race. “We have a lot of redundancy on board,” he confides. “We have invested a huge amount of time in the way we do that to make sure we don’t have halyard problems. We have a 3:1 on the main and everything is on a lock up front, but we have two Southern Spars locks for our primary sails and then we have three Karver locks at the top of the rig, 2 spis and 1 genniker. So there is a lot of interchangeability - if you lose your genniker halyard you can plug it into the spi halyard and there is a little extension strop, and you have two of those, so you’d have to be pretty damned silly to lose all of them. All of things we’re doing here is investing in not having to go up the rig!”

While this time the Vendee Globe playing field has changed slightly: there are more boats all of them 'bigger' and more powerful, more top notch skippers but also more races to have competed in before. As a result Golding still predicts that there will be the normal Vendee Globe attrition rate with something like one half to one third of the boats not making it around, this entirely dependent upon the weather experienced (less than half the fleet finished in 1996-7, the last occasion when it was a ‘bad weather’ Vendee Globe). “Because the boats are so powerful, when you break you break bigger,” says Golding, although admitting that they have a good shake down in several races they have competed in already.

Golding has all the ingredients to win the Vendee Globe, but ultimately his fortunes in the solo non-stop round the world race will be in the hands of Lady Luck.

See some video here of a couple of Ecover's cool features....

Plus some helicopter video images here

Tomorrow we look at Ecover 's interceptor system...

More photos on the following pages....