Fastest man on the planet

James Boyd spoke to Orange skipper Bruno Peyron about his latest triumph

Bruno Peyron, ocean multihull skipper, the creator of The Race and the present generation of big multihulls, is a man who could stride mountains at the moment. Sunday saw another historic moment in his already impressive career when the 46 year old from La Baule succeeded in reducing the time it takes to circumnavigate the world by yacht from 71 days to 64 days.

In the nine years since Peyron became the first man to sail around the world in less than 80 days, a feat which won him the Jules Verne Trophy. Since then Peyron says the record has changed. "Last time was like a world premier. We accomplished something which everybody said was impossible. It was a very special feeling - like The Race. This time was different. Everyone knows it is maybe possible if you do everything right, but it is still difficult. So the feeling is a bit different - a lot of happiness and some pride as well to have done the job the well and some satisfaction for me in succeeding to get back at the highest level so fast when I decided to try - in just such a short period of time, just eight months after the arrival of The Race."

One of the features of his round the world trip which is known to have frustrated some of the younger speed-hungry crew on board was Peyron's conservative approach, only pushing when conditions allowed and generally tackling the record in a manner which could be best described as seamanlike first and competitive second. Peyron makes no apologies for this - after all he has raced big cats for more than two decades and has now logged around 280,000 miles on them. Indeed he claims to have only ever pulled out of one race in his whole career - an impressive record.

"Well to win anything you have to finish, which is obviously not a scoop," he explains. "But saying that we obviously didn't sail slowly. When you saw how we sailed in the Pacific or the two parts of the Atlantic, everywhere except the Indian Ocean - we pushed hard. If you say "first we'll push and then, maybe, we'll finish" this is stupid.

"I told everybody before the start 'don't bother me with the way I sail, I know how I want to sail'," he continues. "And I wanted to be sure all the crew felt the same way and that's how we put the crew together - our all agreeing that we were going to sail this way. I am not sure of many things, of course and it is very good to doubt, but I have enough experience on big multis to know how to sail these machines".

Ocean going multihulls are very different beasts to their singlehulled equivalents and this is something which monohull sailors often do not apreciate. With monohulls you can push them to their limit in the knowledge you can generally recover if you wipe out. With multihulls this limit is far less clearly defined and although potentially much much higher than that of an equivalent monohull it is much more dependent upon conditions, in particular sea state. While boats in say the Volvo Ocean Race are constantly driven at 100%, with racing multihulls the analogy of a racing car with no breaks, but an accelerator upon which the skipper's foot rest is more apt.

"They [monohull sailors] are very much convinced they are right, because they have a lot of experience," says Peyron. "On the one hand I want to welcome to these people to this new world. Grant [Dalton] was clever enough to put a team together where they learned very fast, and of course I have no doubt that the others coming in the future will do it the same way, but there is still a possibility that some of them will be convinced that they have to push hard all the time and they will be wrong".

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