Thursday departure imminent

Bruno Peyron speaks to James Boyd about his forthcoming Jules Verne attempt

Peyron does admit that these boats are capable of smashing the existing record. "We have to be honest enough to understand that The Race generation of boats will one day be able to pass the wall of 60 days. But is it going to be this year, next year or later? I don't know. There is no reason for us to take risks because this target is there."

The added speed potential will means they won't have to push as hard as they did on their hair raising voyage on board Commodore Explorer in 1993. "It changes many things," says Peyron. "When we went there for the first time in 1993 we were like pioneers. It was a complete jump into the known world, so we were not racing all the time, we were just trying to learn. Since then a lot of time and miles have passed under the bows. We've learned a lot of things."

The Race also provided great insight into how to sail the new generation of big cats. "The goals are different now and we will be racing and pushing harder. The difference in speed allows us to be more confident in our tactical choice and with the weather, because most of the time we can be in the best position with our best range of sails. If we decide to try to find 28-32 knots of wind from the right angle, we have a good chance of finding them." Being able to maintain average daily speeds of 20-25 knots gives navigators the flexibility to position themselves in the quadrant of a weather system they want to be in and optimum cat sailing conditions - most of the time.

As is being proven in the Volvo Ocean Race at the moment, having good weather knowledge is crucial. However for Jules Verne attempts shore side routing is allowed (it is banned from the VOR), but even so Peyron has the valuable figure of Gilles Chiorri in the crew. Aside from being a talented sailor, Chiorri is also a professional meteorologist with the company Meteo Consult. "Meteo Consult is doing our weather," says Peyron. "It is very good because Gilles Chiorri is used to working with them and he was in charge of the weather for The Race and now he's boat captain, so it's a perfect team. I'm very happy with that. So it will be Gilles and I doing the navigation."

When The Race finished the three Ollier catamaran all experienced varying degrees of structural damage. Many believed that they had been too lightly built. Because so much of this record attempt rides on the reliability of the boat, Peyron is taking no chances and while Orange (the former Innovation Explorer, sailed by his younger brother Loick in The Race) was being refitted in La Ciotat in the south of France last autumn, she was beefed up.

"The main job has been focusing on the reliability and this is for one reason: because I think that the potential for these boats has not yet been used to the maximum and one way to use it to the maximum is to upgrade the level of reliability," he explains. "The boats came back from The Race without too much damage and it was impressive that they were very reliable. But we decided to reinforce the fairing of the two main cross arms, changing the Nomex to a hard core foam." This was a problems which put Cam Lewis' Team Adventure out of the running when they had to put into Cape Town to make repairs and later also proved a problem on Club Medas they returned up the Atlantic.

"The second change was to modify the join between the cross arm and hull exactly where Club Med had the problem," Peyron continues on the subject of the more serious damage that Club Med suffered that had Dalts' "three man army" of Neal McDonald, Ed Danby and Jan Dekker scrabbling for the carbon and epoxy. "After examining the problem it was not as bad as they thought, but of course they were right to try to do something. Nothing like that happened to Innovation but we decided anyway to change this and make the join more progressive."

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