Tales from the Mini Transat

Sleep deprivation, fights with giant sea birds, narrow misses with ships - it's all here....

The Mini Transat sailors are currently enjoying some rest and relaxation in the sedate environment of Puerto Calero marina in Lanzarote. Skippers are fixing their boats, beginning to get interested in the next leg to Brazil which starts on Satuday, hitting the local bars, swopping tall stories from the high seas with their fellow solo sailors.

To many people's relief the first leg from La Rochelle to the Canaries was mercifully light. Unlike previous years there was little in the way of damage to boats and there were no losses. There was a time when statistically about one sailor was lost per Mini Transat, but this has improved over the last decade, despite the tragic loss of Roberto Varinelli two years ago.

Aside from race leader Sam Manuard, the happiest man in Puerto Calero in terms of his result in the first leg is Irishman Cian McCarthy ( click here to read more about Cian). After telling The Daily Sail prior to the start that he would be happy to finish in the top half of the fleet, McCarthy was ultimately fifth boat across the finish line, having pipped Swede, Pia d'Obry, the top female finisher, at the post.

"I was more than happy with the result as you’d imagine," McCarthy told The Daily Sail dryly.

The first night out was about the only occasion during the race the fleet as a whole experienced reasonable breeze. "At the start I really tried to stay out of trouble, because there was 30 knots of wind. By the time we left La Rochelle the tide was ebbing hard and there was a strong westerly coming in and there was a horrible sea the first night," said McCarthy. "I was certain there were going to be problems and there was. So I made a point of being a bit nice to the boat on the first night and put a reef in and took it easy."

The next morning it had all disappeared and some of the boats were even becalmed as they made their way across the Biscay.

In the westerly conditions the only option was starboard tacking to the left of the rhumb line down to the Spanish coast. The forecast had the wind veering to the north, which it duly did enabling the boats to be lifted as they made their way along the north coast of Spain.

On McCarthy's boat, The Tom Crean, he had ended up closer to the Spanish coast than he anticipated. "Then we had to work our way around all the headlands getting down towards Finistere. I had a hairy moment when I came around one headland in a major acceleration zone and ended up sitting on 17-18 knots for 20 minutes, which I couldn’t do anything about. I didn’t want to be going that fast and if I put pilot on I’d be in a mess. It was mostly pretty light but when you went around some of the headlands it blew up. I had the fractional kite up and a reef in the main at the time."

At this point of the race there were still several boats within sight. He rounded Cape Finisterre, the most northwesterly point of Spain with top French competitors Fred Duthil, David Raison and Pierre Rolland alongside him.

"Then the wind started to go right, so I gybed on that and headed offshore. It got very light that night and I think that was where the real gains were by going right rather than left down the Portugese coast. No one who went into the coast made any gains. Then I think for a couple of days after Finistere we had reasonable breeze and that was when the boat was at its best." At this point McCarthy was up to fourth place. "There was a time when we had nice 15 knots sort of stuff, 20 was the most. And there were lots of light bits in between."

For the rest of the way south to Lanzarote McCarthy was in close contact with Duthil and Pia d'Obry, sticking to the rhumb line, but gybing on every 10degree shift. "At that stage it was myself, Fred and Pia together and we were gybing 50 or 60 times a day. And that went on for days," says McCarthy.

Meanwhile ahead of this pack Sam Manuard and American Jonathan McKee had made a break. McCarthy believes it is combination of both their boats and the skippers that is putting this duo at the head of the fleet.

"I had a bit of a strategy that I wanted to approach the Canaries from the right rather than the left, but that didn’t work out. It was the right thing to do, but I ended up to the left of the other guys because with my boat I have got to sail it hotter just to keep it moving. But it didn’t matter anyway."

Prior to the start McCarthy had been complaining that his keel bulb was too light. In the event this perhaps was an advantage there being little in the way of conditions in this leg that required the boat to have much stability. Aside from this he also didn't break anything. "That is probably why I did well. If you kept your boat together after the first night there were no excuses after that."

During this leg he reckons he got around five hours of sleep per day on average and there was one occasion when he accidentally slept for 2-3 hours in one go. "I don’t push myself over the limit," McCarthy admits. "I don’t do any good sitting on deck falling asleep I just go to bed for 20 minutes. So I don’t over do it that way. It is better not to miss the gybe than to be sitting there bleary eyed and I don’t steer properly when I’m that tired. So I don’t push myself over the line that way. Your body tells you it’s had enough and it's time to go to bed."

American double Olympic medallist and race favourite Jonathan McKee finished second on the first leg, two hours behind Manuard.

Despite the conditions at the start he had pushed hard and this effort had got him into the lead early on in the leg. Unfortunately on the third morning at sea, while off the north coast of Spain around 120-140 miles from Cape Finisterre, McKee says the wind dropped causing him to lose his advantage as the race effectively restarted.

"Eventually some sea breeze came in and I made my way to the shore. I couldn’t really tell how I was doing. There were about five boats I was pretty close with in light-medium air running downwind and I didn’t know if there were others that were ahead or not."

He headed inshore where there was better breeze and later went offshore to get past Cape Finisterre. "You had to get offshore because there was a lee behind the mountains there," said McKee. "I did that as well as most of the guys, but not as well as some of the guys."

One of the principle frustrations for McKee during the race was over the radioing of positions. "There was a VHF call-in twice a day, but some guys including most of the top guys weren’t giving their positions like they were supposed to. I was giving mine because that is what the rules say you have to do. So it was kind of funny that everyone kind of knew where I was, but I didn’t know where they were. But it is just one of those things. I didn’t feel I could take a chance on not doing what the rule said. So it is a little bit of a double standard I think." McKee must be carrying one of the world's most powerful VHF sets because the transmissions of his positions were heard almost 100 miles away by James Bird.

"The organisers have the positions [each boat is fitted with Inmarsat D+ hooked up to a GPS], but you still have the call-in twice a day for no real reason," says McKee. "Then once a day they broadcast the distance to finish of all the boats, but not the position. So that is the one piece of info you have, you don’t know if people are east or west or whatever." McKee also points out that a number of skippers were failing to turn their nav lights on at night.

Like McCarthy, McKee also effectively gybed down the rhumb line. "There are opportunities for separation and you don’t ever really know what is paying. At that point the weather information isn’t that good and the information you can pick up isn’t specific enough to help you very much.

"I would gybe as much as 10 times a day depending upon the situation. I was pretty aggressive with playing the shifts and staying on the rhumb line. And every so often I would just try the other gybe to see how it would feel, because you don’t have instruments sometimes it is hard to tell what you angle is going to be on the other gybe."

To some extent the last phase of the leg was a lottery as the boats sailed in and out of light patches or were completely becalmed. This was the reason, he believes, why he and Sam Manuard were swopping places over the last few days of the leg.

"It was all a bit random," admits McKee. "The wind was really flukey. The wind would be one place and not another place. if you fell into a hole, you couldn't really do anything about it - you don’t know whether to go left or right to get out of it. You are operating on instinct at that point."

Aside from not knowing Manuard's position other than that the Frenchman had slightly less miles to sail to the finish line than he did and realising that the entire fleet knew his exact position while he didn't know theirs, these calm patches were the greatest source of frustration for McKee. "The wind totally died for me on the last night, 24 hours before I finished. When the wind dies you assume everyone else has wind. So I’m sitting there slowly going nowhere, so I fully expected to be in big trouble. So to finish where I did after all that - I was really happy."

Like McCarthy his Team McLube didn't suffer any gear breakage. McKee reckons he got around four or so hours sleep each day on average, a pattern he is now used to and thinks he will be able to sustain over the next and substantially longer leg to Brazil. On board he says he steers for around half the time.

The ideal point of sail for Team McLube is upwind, but any advantage he may have seen from this at the outset of the leg, he says, didn't come to anything. "In medium air running, I don’t think my boat is anything special. It is fine, but there was one day when Sam [Manuard] was about a mile behind me and he gradually passed me. I think that was a boat speed issue. In those conditions he was a little bit faster."

Of the 36 finishers in the Proto fleet, Britain's James Bird, who aged 20 is the youngest in the fleet, finished 29th some two days after the leaders aboard Atomic, one of the oldest boats in her class.

Aside from the first night Bird also experienced some big conditions rounding Cape Finisterre. "We had 40 knots downwind and some pretty big waves. That was the only really major - the rest was really pleasant trade winds-type sailing, downwind, spinnaker up, pretty much going the way you wanted to go."

Unlike McCarthy and McKee, Bird did have a few incidents. "I broke a jib halyard on the first day in the heavy upwind stuff, so I had to climb up the mast, and lash a block on and rerun it externally. And I hit something - I’ve got a bit of chunk missing out of the front of my keel - just after Finisterre.

"One morning I was going along and I was asleep and the boat stops and I came flying out of the hatch and as I came flying out this bird came flying in."

Bird was not the only person to encounter bird life with attitude. Off the Portugese coast Isabelle Magois on Eden Park was in the cockpit when a massive sea bird circled her boat twice and then landed in her cockpit, rapidly making a nest for itself on top of her spinnaker bag beneath her boat's main hatch. Magois does not know what type of bird it was - it had a wingspan of 2m and its body was around 60cm long. All would have been fine had Magois not wanted to try and get below to get her camera. As she tried to get down below so the bird, clearly tired and not wanting to be disturbed, began aggressively attacking her with its beak.

Magois retired to the helm again and there was a stand off for at least an hour as she eyed the bird which the bird countered with aggressive 'don't mess with me' movements of its head. At one point the bird began to spread its wings and made to take off - but this proved to be a false alarm as it slumped back into its nylon nest, continuing to glower. Kept prisoner in her own cockpit by the marauding sea bird like some out-take from the famous Hitchcock film, Magois resolved the situation by belting the bird over its head with a winch handle and then throwing it overboard, something which she later said had upset her greatly.



Home sweet home. Not much room to move inside a swing keel Mini

James Bird (above) also had a very near miss with a 100 ton fishing boat. "We were running parallel and then he altered course and he cut across in front of me. But I didn’t see him alter course until I saw his bow when the jib backed. I bore away and went down the side of him but we were doing a massive surf at about 14 knots and he realised we were going to hit a bit of trouble so he put the hammers down." Bird managed to dive beneath the fishing boat's stern missing it by around 5-10 metres. "We came off a surf straight into his breaking stern wave and the whole boat was just underwater. I thought the whole rig was going to pop out."

Others were not so lucky. One Pogo in Puerto Calero has red paint down the side of his boat where he ran down the side of a cargo ship. Chris Sayer, racing alongside the Mini Transat fleet, also slide down the side of an oil tanker, but mercifully his boat, now named Wildcard, was not seriously damaged. Another Mini was hit full on by the bow bulb of another cargo vessel and was fortunate to survive to tell the tale.

Several skippers talked about spending many hours gybing down the separation zone between the two shipping lanes off Finisterre. While it is hoped that competitors crossed the shipping lanes at right angles, it also seems irresponsible that the race's organisers haven't come up with some way - through the use of waypoints for example - to keep the Minis either inshore or offshore of the shipping lanes.

The 24 hours also resulted in one dismasting, while Francois-Jacques Jauffrineau nursed his boat into Puerto Calero his rig hanging ludicrously askew. "His mast looks like someone took a can opener to it at the bottom," commented one observer.

The second leg of the Mini Transat set off on Saturday. James Bird thinks that the scene will be set in the first 24 hours. "There are massive wind differences either side of Fuerteventura. There is a catamaran here which goes out every day so I might try and pick the skipper’s brains about that. The first 24 hours are key because you can get a pretty big jump. From then on it is guesswork."

An added complication for this next leg is that the boats must leave one of the west lying Cape Verde islands to starboard.

"There is a lot that is going to go on in terms of a number of different stages," says Jonathan McKee of the next leg. "It is more wide open in terms of tactics and a bit more random particularly when you get to the Doldrums. It is also just a lot longer. There is less than 12 hours between the top boats, which for a 20 plus day race is nothing. So basically we are all just starting over."

Aside from the start the main issue will be where to cross the Doldrums. "It’s 10 days after you leave," says McKee, "and the thing shifts so rapidly that the information you have at the start isn’t really going to help you. So you have to go by some statistical averages and make some educated guesses and pick yourself a window to go through and hope that you are right and then try to play it well on the day in the micro-conditions, which can make a huge difference. How you handle each individual cloud can make a giant difference."

Results from leg one

			Proto fleet
Pos	Sail no	Skipper	Boat	Time	Av speed
1	431	Samuel Manuard	TIP TOP TOO - LE GRAU DU ROI PORT CAMARGUE	9 j 05:08:41	5.9
2	247	Jonathan Mc Kee	TEAM MC LUBE	+ 0 j 01:59:41	5.8
3	151	Armel Tripon	MOULIN ROTY	+ 0 j 05:38:22	5.7
4	265	Frédéric Duthil	ALL MER	+ 0 j 07:14:56	5.7
5	393	Cian Mc Carthy	THE TOM CREAN	+ 0 j 08:16:18	5.6
6	316	Pia L'Obry	EXPATRIA.FR	+ 0 j 08:18:10	5.6
7	139	François Cuinet	REGLISSE	+ 0 j 09:43:41	5.6
8	354	Bruno Garcia	SALADINO	+ 0 j 13:01:06	5.5
9	312	Pascal Doin	ASNQ	+ 0 j 13:38:23	5.5
10	240	Alex Pella	AQUATEC - SANTIVERI - TEXKNIT	+ 0 j 13:57:33	5.5
11	347	Pierre Rolland	EXTRADO	+ 0 j 14:14:44	5.5
12	353	Willy Garcia	CEYLAN DIAMANTES	+ 0 j 14:27:01	5.5
13	321	Jean-Baptiste Dejeanty	ARTECH - CAEN LA MER	+ 0 j 15:36:49	5.5
14	303	Enrico Podesta	DIABOLO-SLAM	+ 0 j 15:45:12	5.5
15	227	Donald Wright	RUSSE NOIR	+ 0 j 16:07:21	5.5
16	135	Stéphane Ayrault	WYETH	+ 0 j 17:25:53	5.4
17	346	Sébastien Roubinet	ADRENALINE	+ 0 j 18:08:01	5.4
18	109	Gaspard Franeau	AVOCATS SANS FRONTIERES	+ 0 j 21:51:09	5.3
19	326	Ian Munslow	ISHTAR	+ 0 j 23:41:34	5.3
20	260	Richard Mérigeaux	BON PIED BON OEIL	+ 1 j 01:00:39	5.3
21	36	Peter de Smedt	HUYSMAN	+ 1 j 01:40:19	5.3
22	258	Marc Gascons	TIP-TOP	+ 1 j 02:47:31	5.2
23	352	Luis Irisarri	DEVIAJE.COM	+ 1 j 04:07:39	5.2
24	333	Arsène Ledertheil	LA CIGOGNE DE L'OCEAN	+ 1 j 08:50:39	5.1
25	138	Eric Defert	AMIRAL DE BRETAGNE	+ 1 j 14:38:47	5
26	444	Isabelle Magois	EDEN PARK	+ 1 j 19:16:21	4.9
27	416	Daniel Schaffer	SENSIL	+ 1 j 19:40:24	4.9
28	335	Barnabé Chivot	FTH THIRARD	+ 1 j 21:27:31	4.9
29	56	James Bird	ATOMIC	+ 2 j 00:42:06	4.8
30	29	Arthur Barret	UBAYE	+ 2 j 10:14:34	4.6
31	34	Gustavo Pacheco	EPSILON	+ 3 j 03:42:43	4.4
32	304	Frédéric Duval	SOJASUN	+ 3 j 13:08:40	4.2
33	185	Thomas Valentin	THOMAS HAWK	+ 4 j 04:33:38	4
34	277	François-Jacques Jauffrineau	VENDEE PRISMA	+ 4 j 06:42:46	4
35	342	Alessandro Zamagna	ARKE	+ 4 j 16:31:29	3.9
36	102	Ghislain Gendron	VILLE DE BANDOL	+ 4 j 19:26:41	3.8
			Series fleet
1	426	Erwan Tymen	POGO 2 NAVY LEST	9 j 21:20:12	5.5
2	428	David Sineau	FRANCE FERMETURES	+ 0 j 00:23:37	5.5
3	440	David Raison	RAYON LIQUIDE	+ 0 j 00:27:57	5.5
4	330	Jean-Pierre Balmes	CECIM	+ 0 j 09:11:48	5.3
5	209	Bertrand Lecharpentier	NEC HONFLEUR	+ 0 j 09:30:57	5.3
6	168	Fabrice Guillerm	RAULT LE SERVICE ALIMENTAIRE	+ 0 j 09:34:28	5.3
7	250	Brieuc Maisoneuve	PAYS GRANVILLAIS	+ 0 j 09:39:26	5.3
8	421	Michel Mirabel	GWALARN IV	+ 0 j 09:47:45	5.2
9	269	Lionel Rubio de Teran	GROUPE CIBF	+ 0 j 10:23:28	5.2
10	371	Juan Carlos Sanchis Mari	SPASMOS	+ 0 j 11:41:36	5.2
11	282	Erwan Abalain	MARION NOEL CONSEILS	+ 0 j 12:30:45	5.2
12	245	Patrick Bot	FINIST'MER ECOLE NAVALE	+ 0 j 12:51:30	5.2
13	318	Yann Riou	THRANE & THRANE	+ 0 j 13:01:10	5.2
14	340	Rémi Beauvais	SPI CALL CENTER	+ 0 j 14:59:55	5.1
15	404	Francis Hueber	SHAITAN ENSIETA ECOLE D'INGENIEURS BRESTOISE	+ 0 j 15:03:48	5.1
16	295	David Sautret	MIKALOU SAILING	+ 0 j 17:00:03	5.1
17	381	Gonzalo Botin	DON VITO	+ 1 j 02:22:38	4.9
18	167	Manuel Castilla	VISION ORIGINALE	+ 1 j 02:28:42	4.9
19	175	Adam Seamans	SPIRIT OF AMERICA	+ 1 j 02:30:48	4.9
20	322	Gilles Guillerm	BLUE BOSSA	+ 1 j 05:15:49	4.9
21	388	Yves Niort	DEMI-CLE SHIPCHANDLER	+ 1 j 06:56:13	4.8
22	345	Cécile Poujol	INFORMATIQUE ET STATISTIQUES	+ 1 j 14:26:09	4.7
23	373	Christophe Dary	SAGA LA QUALITE DU SERVICE	+ 1 j 20:04:09	4.6
24	262	Eric Schmitt	LA LIMULE	+ 2 j 02:23:24	4.5
25	355	Jacques Valente	ACTION INNOCENCE	+ 2 j 10:48:08	4.4
26	89	Rémy Malburet	SOEUR MARIE THERESE DES BATIGNOLLES	+ 2 j 12:37:08	4.4
27	329	Laurent Jaunin	TERRE-ET-FAUNE.ORG	+ 2 j 15:41:43	4.3
28	273	Vincent Volk Leonovitch	GOUDURIX 2	+ 2 j 16:36:46	4.3
29	360	Henri Gourmelon	TOBABOOTS	+ 3 j 20:20:51	3.9
30	47	Bernard Morin	JOGGING INTERNATIONAL	+ 3 j 21:00:53	3.9