Exhausted and ecstatic

Sam Davies recounts her last leg in the Figaro - how she stayed awake and finished seventh

It's lunchtime in France and Sam Davies has just woken up having gone to bed at 9am following her triumphant seventh place arrival on the final leg of the Solitaire du Figaro. In the normal scheme of things, seventh place doesn't sound great, but in the Figaro for a first timer it is a huge achievement. Sam was just 10 minutes behind first placed Lionel Pean and ahead of several titans of the singlehanded offshore racing world, such as Loick Peyron, Alain Gautier, 2002 winner Kito de Pavant and even God himself - Michel Desjoyeaux. Overall in her first Solitaire du Figaro she finished 19th out of 42.

"I’m absolutely knackered," Sam yawns, something of a feature of our conversation. "It's pretty much end of Mini Transat tiredness. But the real tiredness won’t hit me for a couple of days yet, because I’m still on race energy. I hope the adrenaline will get me through the prizegiving..."

And it's not all over yet. Tomorrow (Saturday) there is an epilogue race to the series, thankfully fully crewed, which most will use as a thank you to shore crews and sponsors. On board for this will be Skandia's Chief Marketing Officer André Oszmann no doubt as well as faithful shore crew Nick Black.

The leg from Dingle in southwest Ireland threw up another mixed bag of conditions. After sailing a round the cans course in the bay off Dingle, the boats fetched out to the Fastnet Rock. "In the fetch we ended up with 33 knots of wind at one point in a big rain squall," Sam says promising not to yawn again. "Then it was spinnakers up and running all the way, which I was quite nervous about because I’d found my upwind speed, but I hadn’t quite got my downwind speed sorted. Then it was gybed downwind all the way to get to the Scillies and there were shifts in pressure."

On the first two nights at sea, sleep got the better of her. "I don’t think I’d managed myself well enough to do four legs. I think I was fine on three. And the tiredness just hit me. So the first night I slept a lot. I was lucky that the true wind on the pilot worked well with the spinnaker and luckily I woke up whenever the wind shifted to gybe and every time I woke up I had gained some places! So I slept and ended up 10 places further up the fleet in the morning! Not that I am planning on repeating that, but it was lucky."

En route to the Scillies the gradient wind dropped out and the boats had to negotiate what Sam describes as almost Doldrums-like rain clouds with no wind underneath them. "Going through that was quite tricky and I didn’t do that too well. That split the fleet a bit." Those conditions weren't forecast - the forecast proved quite unreliable for this leg.

"At Wolf Rock, I was still in an okay place and in the bizuths I was behind Yves le Blevec by quite a way because he got through the first light patch quite well. But I was with Eric Drouglazet and Ronan Attansio, Charles Caudrelier and Erwan Tabarly were behind me still, so I was in good company and I had people I could sail to.

"In this fleet I need people there to sail against so that I can match my speed, but also just to see where people are going, because generally the really experienced guys like Eric Drouglazet they seem to go in the right direction for some reason. So I use people - I don’t completely follow them, but my race tactics involve looking at where the other people go because I know I’m not as good as them.

"So like going across the Channel, I had absolutely no idea where to go. Meeno my weather guy said 'get south as quickly as possible' but he also said there was more wind to the east. So I just took the rhumb line. The other thing was that the wind was supposedly going to shift to the north so you could have taken one side or the other because of the shift as well. But I had two contradicting forecasts about which way the wind was going to shift, so I just hit the middle and Eric Drouglazet and Ronan Antanasio were two fast people who had also decided to go that way. So I always had some fast people to go with."

The tides on this leg had little adverse affect on Skandia's progress. If anything they helped as the frontrunners found themselves rounding the outside of Ouessant against a foul tide causing the fleet to close up from astern.

Rounding Ouessant Skandia was in the mid-20s. But sailing down the Brittany coast over the course of Thursday her position leapt to fifth. "I just made it around the Chaussee de Sein just as the tide was turning and I thought the guys behind me wouldn’t get around. And the guys who'd gone round earlier than us had been forced offshore for the breeze. When I got there it was morning and the gradient was the perfect direction for sea breeze, so it was ‘yes, let’s hit the shore’ or at least closer to the shore for the sea breeze. I think the others would have done it, but when they got there was so little wind I think they were tempted offshore."

Sam could only see a couple of boats ahead of her and she knew she was in good shape. She says that despite making some bad decisions earlier in the race, she knew that there might be the opportunity to make a gain on the leaders sailing down the French coast if she sailed smart. "The wind had shifted which put me in a good position, because they [the offshore group] all had to gybe back down to get to where I was because I was on a nice angle with the spinnaker."

Being near the front of the fleet brought it's own anxiety. "I thought 'I’ve still got nearly 100 miles to go and there’s a lot of guys behind me who are a lot more experienced and better than me, so I’ve got to work really hard to stay in this place'. I knew they’d comeback, because they are good and they weren’t far behind.

"At one point I could see the leader and there was no one between me and him. There were just a couple of people alongside. That’s not so good for my race tactics, my following people and deciding based upon where others go in front of me!

"I’m going to have to change these tactics for next year because that was definitely using the fleet for advice. It’s completely different tactics when you’re in the lead. You have to start making decisions for yourself and taking risks. This year was definitely my no risk year..."

Unexpectedly the wind had built to 22-23 knot and at the time Sam says hotshots like Erwan Tabarly and former winner Eric Drouglazet were sailing in her group and she fully expected them to pass her. However her North France spinnaker proved something of a weapon and she held her own.

Eventually Tabarly did pass her, but he was on the only one showing more speed in the conditions. "Then we converged and we had a 240deg true wind angle reach in 18 knots, so it was quite fast and we had four boats in parallel in a row, all surfing on the waves and trying to get past each other and two boats really close behind."

Sam's quintessential Figaro moment came as they were approaching a turning mark 25 miles from the finish line on the final night at sea. "There were six of us flying down this reach. Then we heard on the radio “ok, the next buoy is in it place - but it is not lit'. So you think ‘great’. We are flying down the reach at 12 knots, heading for a mark which doesn’t have a light on it and there are people calling water on each other...

"So you’re hooning along and you are just about to go on a spinnaker reach and you are filling ballast, you’ve got to make sure all the stuff is stacked on the right side, you’ve got to make sure your pole is the right height when you go round the mark otherwise people will sail above you and roll you, and you have to do that at the same time as looking on the screen and steering and trimming to find where this unlit mark is. So luckily I wasn’t in the lead and there were people to follow, but it was still pretty hard. You can vaguely see where the mark is because you can see when the nav lights start going up."

At the mark Sam made another smart move. "We were coming in with Gildas Morvan and Eric Drouglazet underneath me fighting it out and then I had AIC to windward of me and so we went around the mark and then we were on to a tight tight spinnaker reach in 20 knots. I thought I have no chance of fighting with the others because I knew that everyone would be luffing each other. So I went low and sailed on my own. And that was good because a couple of guys lost quite a lot. In a luffing fight with a spinnaker in the dark against Eric Drouglazet I knew who was going to win and it was wasn’t going to be me! So I stayed clear of the rabble and took a bit of a risk and came out a couple of places higher than I probably would have done."

Sam crossed the line in seventh place at 03.00 local time this morning, just ten minutes astern of the leader, just 45 seconds behind Figaro veteran Gildas Morvan. Despite the hour a crowd of locals had turned out and Sam's sponsor was there with her parents and her sister.

There followed a tense wait for those astern to arrive before the overall winner could be announced. With a 19 minute lead Alain Gautier looked to be in a strong position, but he was beaten by Armel LeCleac'h by the ridiculously small margin of 13 seconds.

For 26 year old Armel LeCleac'h this will be the ticket on to greater things. "In France you’ve made it when you’ve won the Figaro," says Sam. "It’s like you go down in history. You join that elite bunch of hero people. In France everyone knows the credibility of winning the Figaro and so in terms of wanting to secure a sponsor in the future it is a big big help." Traditionally a win in the Solitaire du Figaro is a stepping stone into an Open 60 or 60ft trimaran campaign.

Sam says she has learned loads this year which will help her in her long term assault on the Figaro class. "Until you’ve done it you don’t really know how to prepare yourself mentally and physically for the endurance side, which is why there is this ‘bizuth’ division."

But is it something you can mentally prepare for? "If you know what you’re in for. Before the first race I wasn’t nervous, but then I got more and more nervous as the race went on. The stopover in La Rochelle was a nightmare because we didn’t start until 5pm. I was so nervous and if I’m nervous I normally can’t eat too well. I could barely eat dinner the night before and then all the next day in La Rochelle waiting, I couldn’t eat. Then I get on the water and all that goes. It’s like the tiredness - I didn’t feel tired in Dingle until I got on the water and could relax a bit. So in La Rochelle I ate about two packets of biscuits before the start…

"So if you know what you’re in for you can pace yourself a bit better. I don’t think it is something you can learn from other people telling you about it. I think it is something you have to do to learn it. Now I know what I need to ask from people about how I should go about it. People can’t tell you what to do until you can explain to them what it is like when you are out there."

One of the advantages of sleeping a lot early on in the race is that Sam feels it left her in better shape for the conclusion of the leg. "I was really so tired on the first and second night and the third morning after we rounded Wolf Race. I was contemplating having to throw up, because I had such a headache. It wasn’t sea sickness, it was a flat calm, it was tiredness and I had a headache. It was like when you wake up after a really long sleep and you feel worse. Right now I feel the same.

"Gradually as that day went through I slept a bit more and I felt a bit better and I thought 'I can do this', because I can sleep and if I can just take a little advantage of a tiny windshift further up the course it might make a big difference."

Simply watching how others go about their Figaro racing has also helped greatly. "I can watch how they trim their sail, how they do things, how much they steer and use the pilot and I’ve just done a lot of watching and copying and learning from copying what they do on to my boat. It's been small things like spinnaker trim. I’ve been sailing with my pole too low and I’ve watched people sail past me with their pole higher up. So quite basic stuff.

"Then things about when people steer. People say “I was at the helm all the time,” but in fact you don’t because you’re so tired that sometimes the pilot works better. So you can have the pilot on and you can sit there and trim and you can move your body weight to the right place on the boat. So when it is really light you can sit further forward."

On the weather side Sam says she was happy, except that conditions proved so unpredictable. "I had my weatherfaxes coming through and I could see a little bit of what was happening. Every time there was weather that was predictable, then I sailed the right way. Meeno [her weather router - who she used in stopovers] had told me the right stuff and I travelled the right direction." The only downside was there was very little wind throughout the race. "One guy had bought a new Solent for the race. He hasn’t got it out of the packet yet..."

With the Solitaire du Figaro out of the way, the Figaro season is far from over. The Route du Ponant, another singlehanded race, starts in a little over a week's time, including three days of windward-leewards off St Gilles, a long race with a night's stopover in Guernsey and then on to Perros Guerrec for some more windward-leewards. There's certainly no shortage of training in this class...

Then immediately after this there is the long distance race between St Nazaire in Brittany and Dakar in Senegal, West Africa. Sam is taking part in the Route du Ponant, but not the long distance race - for which THE BOAT IS FOR CHARTER ( click here to find out more).

Sam says that a lot of people in the fleet are not relishing the Route du Ponant. "It is 10 days of racing. It is like the first one we did in the Med [the Generali Mediterranee]. But it’s cold and we’re tired from the Solitaire du Figaro and it’s probably going to be blowing a gale, because we haven’t used much wind so we’ve probably been saving it up for this next race. But it's the final race in the Championat de France [the Figaro championship series], not that I have a ranking because I haven’t joined the FFV."

Skandia at some point will come back to the UK where Sam may keep her over the winter prior to returning to France for training in the spring. So how about a singlehanded division in the Winter Series???

More photos on the following pages