Fastest man on the planet

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

In these storm force conditions Peyron set Orange hove-to, a choice that was good from a seamanship point of view, but slightly at odds with a record attempt.
"Firstly we were pushing hard, a bit too hard - under big genniker, then mid-genniker then reef, etc etc etc and the liferaft blew off from the aft beam and there were big bumps and full ballast, so we tried to slow down and it was impossible to slow down, and the big waves were growing and it was tough. Then some squalls came with about 60 knots and we had three reefs and no jib and we were doing 25 knots and I saw this and thought 'this feels bad - time to park'.

Prior to this Peyron had been on the helm and he gave some interesting insight on how one steers in the ultimate Southern Ocean conditions. "Sometimes you have waves and you mustn't take them. You have to refuse them. You see monster waves and a big hole in front of you and you have just 1 or 1.5 seconds to decide whether you are going to go down them or surf down their side. For three or four hours that afternoon it was impossible to go down them. Downstairs was bad."

During his trip on board Commodore Explorer in 1993 Peyron had made a similar decision to go hove to when a massive storm, which he says was bigger than the one they experienced this time, had nearly driven them into the coast of South America as they approached Cape Horn.

"I prefered to let the system go and restart in good condition and check the boat. If we'd continued then something wrong would have happened. The series of big waves gave me a very bad feeling. At the end of that I said okay - we're parking."

To 'park', Peyron says, was reasonably easy. At the time they were doing 20 knots downwind in 60 knots of wind with 40 apparent. They were bear headed and had three reefs in the mainsail. There was no chance of taking the main down, so Peyron says they chose a good moment in the waves, dumped the mainsail right off and used their speed to go head to wind. They then dropped the main and went hove to with the mast one way and the helm on the opposite lock. The daggerboards were half way up. "We just had to park and wait for it to calm down. We continued to sail with the mast, but very slowly."

Although stopping in any sort of record attempt would seem strange, it cannot be denied that Peyron's approach to record breaking has been a successful one and it will be interesting to see in the future if those with a different background and a different approach can do better. Certainly the view is that the present generation of boats are more than capable of taking the record below 60 days and possibly, given the right conditions, less.

Tomorrow in part two of this article Bruno Peyron reveals his plans for the future...