How to sail a 60ft trimaran

Sergio Tacchini's Damian Foxall provides insight into this unique world of boats capable of sailing offshore at 37 knots.

It is hard not to be gob-smacked by the French fleet of 60ft trimarans, 14 of which have been racing in the two handed Transat Jacques Vabre. Yesterday saw the first arrivals in Salvador de Bahia, race winner Franck Cammas' Groupama taking just 11 days to sail 4,340 miles with almost all the boats racking up 500+ mile daily runs (and some 600+ miles) at some point during their swift voyages - not a bad show for boats sailed by just two people.

Aside from being profoundly quick the 60ft trimarans are also multihulls and a development class, hence not only is their technology unique, so is the way they are sailed. To get some insight into this mostly French world we spoke to Irishman Damian Foxall who arrived in third place yesterday with Karen Fauconnier on board Sergio Tacchini.

Launched in August 2001 Sergio Tacchini was the second of three Nigel Irens-designed sisterships to be built, the others being Fred le Peutrec's Bayer CropScience and Loick Peyron's Fujifilm which was destroyed in last year's Route du Rhum. Sergio Tacchini nearly suffered the same fate, her starboard float also catastrophically failing in that race ( read Karine Fauconnier's account of what happened here), but - unlike Fuji - her shore team were able to salvage the boat and spent the whole of last winter rebuilding her.

The failure of her float was a disaster for the Sergio Tacchini team, especially so as the whole concept of their boat had been to err on the conservative. "From the very outset the concept of this project was to be reliable, not to push the development envelope at all," says Foxall, "first of all because of limited means, but most importantly they wanted to have a boat that was reliable."

Following the Route du Rhum when only three 60ft trimarans of 17 starters made it to the finish in Guadeloupe - and only one without stopping - there was a move in the ORMA 60ft trimaran class last winter to put their house in order. Since then the class has come under attack in the French press for not legislating enough, for not reducing mast heights for example, but most of the skippers and designers thedailysail have spoken to seem pretty confident that the modifications are adequate - it is just that they are not very obvious, involving the beefing up of the structure and the use of less brittle and rigid materials (more on this tomorrow).

Obviously in the Transat Jacques Vabre the trimarans weren't subject to hurricane force winds as they were in the Route du Rhum, but the results should apease the critics: of the 14 starters only one boat, Giovanni Soldini's TIM, failed to finish. However there was still considerable breakage. Aside from sail damage or breakage this was limited to the foils and caused by collisions with submerged objects - Sodebo broke her starboard foil and damaged her rudder, Banque Populaire broke half a rudder, Bonduelle broke the fitting of her central rudder and then one of the rudders in her floats, Geant also broke a rudder, etc. This not only indicates that there is a lot of flotsam out there in the ocean, but is an added risk because these boats are so fast and have a lot of appendages - most have six - three rudders, a daggerboard and two lifting foils in the floats.

A possible cure for this is fitting kick-up rudders, as many of the boats have, although this results in its own set of problems. When Foncia collided with an underwater object in the Challenge Mondial Assistance race this summer her rudder kicked up as it was designed to but subsequently the boat spun out of control and capsized...

Foxall maintains that because the ORMA fleet is a development class at the limit of technology, it is inevitable that there will be some breakages. "I don't think you can get around it in this class. It is the most extreme sailing class there is in the world at the moment. Even if you take into account the big maxi cats which are awesome boats but they are a little bit like the difference between a maxi and a Volvo 60 - they are awesome boats to sail but they don’t have the performance-type feel that a 60ft trimaran has and more importantly they are raced fully crewed. This is an extreme class there is always likely to be technical difficulties - plus there’s a very large fleet now."



Foxall on the pumps with Karine Fauconnier


While the 60ft trimaran class has a very open rule and there are a few fundamental differencies - perhaps the most notable is the variation in overall beam (we will look closer at this tomorrow) - Foxall believes that for shorthanded races such as the TJV the boat speed differences between the tris are not nearly as significant as the ability and experience of the crew and the degree to which the boats are 'sorted'. "The differences are outweighed by the fact you have two people on a trimaran trying to drive it as fast as they can for two weeks. The human aspect plays a huge amount in these races and the technical aspect and performance - all the boats go fast, but it is a case of keeping them together and going fast in the right direction - but not too fast."

Foxall gives a run down of the type of speeds they are now hitting on Sergio Tacchini. "When you are into 30s you are going fast. When you are going at 34-36 you are starting to hit the top of the range. You can get into the 30s quite easily when you are reaching in anything over 20 knots of wind." Upwind the numbers are equally impressive. "Generally up until 14 knots we're sailing at 2 knots over the wind speed, so in 14 knots we are doing 16. Then it drops down to about 14 knots in 14 knots and over 16 knots your boat speed is around 1-3 knots below TWS, so in 20 knots you're doing about 18 knots. We don't get much over 18 knots upwind."

Foxall sailed in the last Volvo Ocean Race aboard Kevin Shoebridge's Tyco and in comparison racing a 60ft trimaran is a profoundly different experience. While on VO60s it is about keeping the pedal firmly pressed to the floor, winning races in a 60ft trimaran requires a much more subtle approach. "I don't think it is in pushing the boat to 99.5% that you are going to win races," says Foxall of trimaran racing. "The harder you push the boat the faster it goes, but there is a point when you are pushing hard for not a lot of gain and sometimes you go as fast with less sail up - that is especially true of these boats. So sometimes it is a case of trying to make the boat go slower or at least making it go easier anyway.

"In terms of the strategic look at it and the way you sail the boat as well - you are not looking for the strongest winds, you are not looking for the low pressures," Foxall adds, comparing it to Volvo racing. "It is the opposite - you are looking for flat water and high pressure and you are not looking to put up as much sail area as you can, although on the Volvo certainly in the top end of the range sometimes the fractional sails are faster than the masthead sails - it is just more accentuated in these boats. But likewise when conditions are there you really have to go fast. When you have flat water and you are in a high pressure and the air is stable you have got to get both hulls up and go fast and that’s when it is really enjoyable..."

This year Foxall has embarked on a Tornado Olympic campaign, not for Athens, but for China in 2008... He, like a number of crew racing in the trimaran class, can't emphasis enough the merits of sailing dinghies and small keelboats while being involved with big boat campaigns. "You go back into dinghy sailing and you have that immediate helm sensation that can get a little bit blunt in big boats, where you sail more on instrumentation and the effect body movement on the trim of the boat isn't as immediate and crucial. In fact having good trim or good feel on the helm does translate immediately into speed in a big boat, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a better sailor very quickly in a big boat because your mistakes aren’t punished as quickly as they are in dinghies. So dinghies still remain the basis of competitive sailing, which is why you see the likes of Dickson and Cayard who fundamentally base their sailing in the small boat and one design classes. I made a conscious move last year to do that and it is great. I see it as an investment in my skill."

So what has he brought back to Sergio Tacchini from racing the Tornado? "One of the fundamental feedbacks from multihull sailing as opposed to monohull sailing is still the heel of the boat and that angle is quite critical in a multihull. You get a lot of feedback with regards to the noise of the boat through the water. Apparent wind angle is very critical in multihulls, because it is always ahead of the beam. It is very easy to find yourself close reaching when you are supposed to be upwind or broad reaching when you are supposed to be downwind, and it is a very very fine line.

"I think apparent wind speed as opposed to angle is even more important. But it is a much larger picture than that. The return of the helm back into your hand or how much pressure is on the helm, or on our boat the weather rudder sends back quite a hum when the tip of it is in the water and downwind you can steer just to that noise - when it comes out of the water you know you are a bit high and when it gets in the water and starts humming you know you are a little bit low. It is a lot of those little feedbacks that you look for."

In the Transat Jacques Vabre they raced double handed and Foxall says this is another unique way of sailing compared to singlehanded or fully crewed. "Rather than saying it is singlehanded with the second person, it is more like crewed racing with two people. Rather than having half the work to do or two people to do the same it is more like having two people doing the fully crewed job. We were very aware of that in our preparations in terms of having support ashore."

Like Emma Richards and Mike Sanderson's approach on Pindar, Foxall says that because they are allowed shore-based routing on the Transat Jacques Vabre, they more or less delegate that responsibility off the boat. During the TJV they used meteorologist Pierre Lasnier and Armel le C'leach, winner of this year's Solitaire du Figaro. "He is not a router, but he is our onshore navigator and tactician," says Foxall of le C'leach's role. "He can do work we wouldn’t have time to do because we need to be driving the boat 24 hours a day."

During the race he or Fauconnier would be helming for a majority of the time. However there were some conditions when the autopilot was faster. "When you are tired a lot of the time the autopilot is faster or when you are reaching in flat water. It is only when you are doing VMG sailing or trying to sail some sort of targets that hand steering is a lot quicker and of course in waves when you have to anticipate and follow the wave train it is quite easy for the autopilot to get quite slow."

The conventional wisdom for racing trimarans, or indeed Open 60s, shorthanded is that you set up the trim of the sails and then steer to that. Foxall says this is not always the case. "That is an interesting part of shorthanded sailing. It certainly depends on the conditions. Generally speaking it is better to trim your sails for a fast mode and then drive, but not to try and make it too critical because you can fall out of the groove and then spend too much time trying to get back into it, just because you don’t have someone there to ease up the leech, or whatever, when you get slow.

"But sometimes it is faster especially when you are using the autopilot and you can trim the sails to your course - especially if you are close to your autopilot controls and you can drop it up or down five degrees. In high pressure you get that quite a bit - you get oscillating winds but when you are trying to steer a VMC course, you might just pick a compass heading and trim to the sails, and then with each shift as it comes through on a reasonably regular basis, go up 5, down 5, etc. But it depends how big the oscillations are whether you just drive it or trim as well."

Tommorrow Foxall and French naval engineer Antoine Mermod, who runs the technical side of the Sergio Tacchini explains some of the new technology being used in the 60ft trimaran fleet - particularly their extraordinary foils.

For more images of Sergio Tacchini see the following pages