Conrad goes catamaran sailing

We speak to Vendee Globe skipper Conrad Humphreys about his new Volvo Extreme 40 campaign

Conrad Humphreys, BT Global Challenge winner and Vendee Globe skipper, has finally come clean about his plans to campaign one of the new Volvo Extreme 40 catamarans, only the second team so far to announce.

While we can think of numerous people we have spoken to who would dearly love to campaign one of these brand new multihulls, simply because they are state of the art autoclaved carbon fibre, high powered, easy to sail, very very fast and just downright fun, Humphreys' reasons for getting involved in the circuit are far more sensible.

Far from his involvement with the VX40 taking over from his Open 60 sailing, Humphreys - a self-confessed catamaran sailing newbie - views it entirely the opposite way, as a means to an end: first the Velux 5 Oceans and then a new boat for the Vendee Globe 2008/9.

"Our goal is about building a program that is going to be successful for the next Vendee," he says. "To be successful with a Vendee project you have to have two things: you need to be successful on the water, but you also need to be successful finding the funding. And that is never easy."

Humphreys says he looked at the campaigns of Michel Desjoyeaux, Jean le Cam and Ellen and came to the conclusion that sailing hundreds of thousands of more miles on an Open 60 was by no means a certain way to help secure him future sponsorship, nor would it help his personal development. "The Global Challenge doesn’t really teach you a huge amount and the Vendee teaches you a huge amount about your personal ability, but it doesn’t develop your cutting edge sailing ability. And since my dinghy days in world championships and so on, I feel that is a side which needs improving."

So his new approach is to sail more diverse boats, crewed by people who are better than he is, from whom he can learn. He'll still enter the major Open 60 events - although the Transat Jacques Vabre conflicts with the first Volvo Extreme 40 racing to be held during the build-up week prior to the start of the Volvo Ocean Race - but will fit the rest of his sailing in around these.



Volvo Extreme 40s are crewed by four and in the Motorola crew will be Hamish Oliphant (above), the man who bought the former Tyco VO60 and who was navigator on BG Group in the last Global Challenge, and the duo who will make the boat sing - Tornado gurus Leigh McMillian and Will Howden (below). McMillian was one half of Team GBR's Tornado team in Athens, while Howden was Mitch Booth and Herbert Dercksen's coach in Athens, is a vastly experienced dinghy cat sailor who has also raced on larger multihulls such as PlayStation. Howden has been up at Marstrom in Sweden overseeing the build of their new 40.



While a round the cans 40ft catamaran is a very different proposition to an Open 60 built for singlehanding around the world racing, they are in some ways not so far apart. The Open 60 is lightweight for its size, planing and gybing downwind and is best decribed as holding the middle ground between a conventionally ballasted displacement monohull and a multihull.

Getting good at sailing the catamaran, Humphreys feels, will also improve his Open 60 skills. "I think your reaction times on the 60 must be that much better once you've sailed a multi to the max. So it should be a very good training platform."

As with his Open 60, his VX40 is sponsored by Motorola, who aside from just signing up for another year (their fourth so far with Humphreys), are also a major sponsor of Torben Grael's Brazilian Volvo Ocean Race entry. As yet there hasn't been contact between Humphries and Grael's team, but he hopes there will be co-operation: Grael is pretty handy on most things that float. Aside from the Brazilian team, Motorola is obviously a major customer of Telefonica, sponsors of the Spanish entry, but one wonders what Ericsson make of all this...

Aside from helping his personal development Humphreys feels that the VX40 program, starting initally with the five races in the Volvo Ocean Race stopovers in Vigo, Rio, Baltimore, Portsmouth and Rotterdam, will also be good for his sponsor and will increase the prospects of finding more - a slight case of 'speculate to accumulate'.

"You can go underground and send proposal after proposal and be quite quiet until you get the funding in place, but this approach I think is better," he says. "We are committing a fairly big chunk of our project budget into just pro-actively going out and sailing a really good series with some great guys and that will be our approach to getting the Vendee funded, which to be successful we need to do.

"It provides a brilliant platform, which can get people excited by the sport. I always believe once you have got people excited by it, the chance for them to grow into something else is much more possible. Our focus is to go out and try and win this championship and at the same time, excite some people along the way, to give good value to Motorola and their customers who come on board with us and sow some seeds for the next stage."

With the Open 60 and the catamaran Humphreys feels he has more diversity in what he can offer by way of corporate entertainment and the 40 is a whole lot more flexible than his monohull. "Take the Round the Island race: not mega-exciting in a 60, but to set line honours in a 40ft cat - which potentially the 40 could do - is mega exciting." If, for example, Motorola decided they wanted to do a promotion in Dubai, the cat is fully geared up to be broken down, popped into its container and shipped there relatively cheaply. Taking the 60 there would be much harder and costly.

"The 5 Oceans, we go to Spain for the start, then Fremantle and Florida. Well why couldn’t we take the cat? We’re going to be shipping a container around the world to each of the stopovers anyway. And we could use the cat for hospitality and as a near-shore promotional tool while we are in each of those stopovers. The cost of doing that is tiny compared compared to the cost of the campaign and consequently it means we have got twice the bang for the buck."

The 40, with its relatively large expanse of netting is also simply more practical to take guests out on. "Taking people out on the 60 is not easy and is really quite stressful when it is blowing. And it is not flexible - you can’t get the boat up close to things. The cat is very different - a great platform, very very fast and exciting and it enables us to put our customers, their employees and potential sponsors right into the heart of the action. There are not many classes where you can do that so easily."

Beyond the Volvo Ocean Race, Humphreys says he's going to suck it and see with the catamaran. Ideally he, as well as the others involved with the new VX40 circuit, would like the 40s to be shipped from regatta to regatta around the world, maybe to 20 countries in a year with at least as many competitors.

As Humphreys goes catamaran sailing, so his Open 60 is over in Marc LeFevre's yard in Caen undergoing a refit. Prior to the Velux 5 Oceans next year he expects to change the appendages and possibly go for a slimmer forged keel (his boat currently has a carbon foil and a tungsten bulb). Otherwise, put on a new suit of sails and she's ready to go.

While the catamaran initiative is to help him raise funds to compete in the 5 Oceans, this is merely a stepping stone to getting a new Open 60 built especially for the next Vendee Globe. And beyond that his current catamaran campaign, he theorises, may allow him to make a quicker passage on from the Vendee Globe into either a 60ft trimaran or a large multihull. "I guess there is an aspirational aspect, wanting to start dipping my toe into sailing multihulls, so there is an attraction there to get that experience. But you have to start somewhere. Ellen wasn’t a cat sailor seven years ago. A lot of the guys step from the 60s to the multis and sailing with people like Leigh and Will who are brilliant to sail with - they have natural flair, real instinct - you’ll be sailing with the best possible coaches - a bit like Ellen teaming up with Paul Brotherton for some of her training." (Ellen raced Laser 4000 with Paul Brotherton as part of her training for the 2000-1 Vendee Globe.)

The new Motorola catamaran ships to Spain on 12 October and will be put together rapidly to allow Humphreys and his team around 10 days training before the Extreme 40 racing starts.

See our recent feature on the Volvo Extreme 40 and our video of this wild new cat.