Sailing Club Med

Mark Chisnell blagged his way aboard Grant Dalton’s maxi-cat, and this is what happened

Club Med announced their arrival in UK waters by storming up the Solent last Sunday, 1st October. Picking their way through the crowd on a glorious sunny afternoon - one hull in the air and over 30 knots on the dial. Not a bad way to arrive home for Brit, Neal McDonald, and UK-resident Kiwi, Ed Danby.

After relaunching Club Med a couple of days earlier, they barely had time to get into their stride on the 350 mile trip across from Vannes, France, covering the last 130 miles in about five hours - as skipper Grant Dalton put it, ‘She’s quite a toy.’

But this is nothing less than we’ve come to expect from this latest generation of offshore maxi-cats. Both the 24-hour distance run record and the east-to-west trans-Atlantic record fell to Club Med on her first major offshore trip. That was before three feet of bow - the sacrificial crash box - fell off on the way back to Europe from New York.

After six weeks in the yard, during which time they have undergone a complete refit as well as had the bow redesigned and rebuilt, these boys are back in business. And you could be forgiven for expecting this account of a day sail in the Solent - in 20 knots of breeze - to be a white knuckled, raw nerved tale of adrenaline rush. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. I wouldn’t say steering a 110 foot catamaran at 30 knots plus was exactly dull, but ....

Sailing Club Med in these conditions of beam reaching in flat water is a serene experience. There’s a gale of apparent wind - when is there not at 30 knots - but there’s no spray and very little noise. The motion is easy, the fine bows slicing through any resistance. And when she slows the sensation is more like you’ve run aground into very soft mud - or sailed over a spinnaker - than someone slamming the brakes on.
But we did get a few clues on our short sail about the power and speed that are involved with this machine. The first was when the traveller was eased with one-too-few turns on the winch. The roped leaped free with a huge bang, before proceeding to strip off skin and deal a case of second degree burns - one man retired to the hospital (he’s all right, just needed a dressing).

The second clue is passing any fixed object - and that means pretty much everything else on the water. Boats and buoys rush up on you like speed cameras on the guilty. But the steering is really easy and responsive - put the bow down in a puff and watch the speed climb. Club Med has been built to chew through a circumnavigation with the minimum of fuss, and the Solent shrinks to the size of a boating lake.



Neal McDonald reckoned that most of the sailing they’ve done so far has been this easy - pull the sails up and sheet on. They steer to an apparent wind angle rather than trim around a course, and under normal circumstances four men on deck is plenty. But when they do have to do a sail change, it’s a big job. And you definitely don’t want to get caught with too much sail up. McDonald reckoned there was enough power in the headsail and full main to capsize her in 20 knots. But navigator Mike Quilter said that during their record breaking 24 hour run, the only sail change they made was to pull a reef out. They managed to go a week on the trans-Atlantic without doing a single sail change - ‘easy miles’ as Quilter commented.

Mike Quilter also talked about the tactical and strategic problems that the boat presents. There is a very narrow range of wind angles in which they can sail efficiently. Both the tacking and gybing angles are huge, and Club Med goes quicker down the track with ten knots on the beam than 20 knots up the bum. As a consequence, the wind direction is more important to them than the wind speed - which puts a different slant on dealing with things like high pressure areas.

When it comes to tackling such thorny problems on his navigation computers, Quilter certainly can’t complain about the work environment - the nav station is positively palatial. There’s a big bench seat, acres of space and with a parallel ‘office’ in the other hull that contains a media suite and email facilities, he doesn’t get harassed by crewmen trying to say hello to Mum. And - say it quietly - there’s even a window, what a Whitbread 60 navigator would give for a room with a view.

The rest of the accommodation is straight-forward. Hard bunks run down both hulls from the ‘offices’ at the stern, ending forward with the companionway and then a galley in the starboard hull, and a wet locker in the port. The layout on deck is simple and clean, the trampoline more fun than any bouncy castle I’ve ever been on.

Short of the QE2, it would be hard to imagine a more comfortable way to travel afloat - until it cuts up rough. The real Club Med experience will be deep in the North Atlantic or the Southern Ocean, doing 30 knots in the dark, with big seas and a faint whiff of iceberg in the air. Fortunately, I won’t be the one writing about that day out ...