Introducing the Route du Rhum

James Boyd gives the insiders guide to this top ocean racing event

59 boats will be taking the start line here in St Malo this weekend as part of the seventh Route du Rhum, singlehanded transatlantic race to Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. The 60ft trimarans are scheduled to set off on Sunday at 1345 local time with the rest of the fleet on staggered starts from 1335 on Saturday (tomorrow).

Here in France the Route du Rhum, the original French ocean race, may have been eclipsed in the public popularity stakes by the more ambitious Vendee Globe, but it is still a massive crowd puller and for a class which has yet to feature a round the world race, it is the pinnacle of the 60ft trimaran circuit's four yearly calendar.

At present the scene here in grey, overcast St Malo is awe-inspiring. The old town of St Malo with its high city walls, reminiscent of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, lies to seaward of the Vauban and Duguay Trouin Basins. These are neatly divided in two by the main road leading into the old town and has the class two multihulls and the large monohull fleet in the inner basin and the unprecedented line-up of 60ft trimarans in the outer one.

Along the harbour wall and the makeshift marina, there are barriers up from behind which the public can survey the scene and on the rare occasions when one of the better known skippers sticks his or her head above the parapet there are cheers and a clamouring for autographs. Ellen MacArthur carries a marker pen in her back pocket for just such occasions while the UUDS team are buying permawear Oakley sunglasses and Timberland boots for shore crew Alex Sizer so that she can do personal appearances in lieu of skipper Miranda Merron.

In fact since we have been here the public crush hasn't been excessive - partly due to the appalling weather - although it apparently was heaving last weekend and is expected to be so again this weekend. Aside from the racing, the Route du Rhum start is famous for the large number of people that descend upon St Malo to watch it - even back in the 1980s there were believable estimations of as many one million people descending upon this historic port in northern France during the start period.

With such a large fleet including 18 full-on 60ft trimaran campaigns and 17 Open 60s along with an assortment of other multihulls and monohulls, is a unique spectacle for the followers of this race - of which there are many in France - it is nothing remarkable.

Perhaps one of the most impressive line-ups we saw before the start of this race was in 1986 when there was an 85ft size limit in the big multihull class. These 85ft giants were the predecessors of Bruno Peyron's modern day G-class catamarans and there was no shortage of them. Many of these featured towering wingmast rigs and if it is hard to imagine how a 60ft trimaran is handled singlehanded, spare a thought for the skippers of those boats handling bigger sails at a time before lightweight 3DL and Cuben fibre.

Mike Birch, the Canadian former cowboy, won the first Route du Rhum in 1978 in a story that has gone down in the history books. Sailing the tiny trimaran Olympus Photo - using the race as a delvery trip to the States! - Birch pipped Michel Malinovsky's giant monohull Kriter V at the post, finishing ahead by just 1 min and 35 seconds.

Birch has sailed in all the Route du Rhums since - not because he has any sense of history or is in any way vain, but because he simply likes the race. He is back again, aged 72 but as fit as ever, this time sailing Philippe Monnet's former UUNet Open 60. In the 1986 race he was skipper of the 80ft maxi cat TAG Heuer (subsequently ENZA New Zealand, Royal & SunAlliance and most recently Team Legato).

"I guess it was the hardest race I did, but I knew the boat pretty well," says Birch of that race. "We did have a few small problems on the way. I remember I went to sleep and stayed on starboard tack too long or something like that. But when things were good they were really good.

"Putting the mainsail up and down was a job and we had wire halyards and I remember having to rig up a thing to be able to use the coffee grinder. We had some kind of system for gripping the wire so that you didn't have to tail, because that was at a time when you had to use wire for everything. I think it is easier to take the mainsail up and down on a 60 footer than it was on TAG, but the mast height couldn't be that much different, because TAG was pretty underpowered at the start."

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Mike Birch on board Tir Groupe-Montres Yema



The skippers line up