The North pays

Skippers take the long view in the Transat, while Golding reveals keel ram issues

One of the key arts of singlehanded ocean racing is being able to drive your boat to the max without it breaking. All the skippers at the front of the monohull and multihull fleets in The Transat are currently walking this delicate tightrope.

To date only Mike Golding has shown his hand and revealed this afternoon that he spent most of last night battling with a broken hydraulic pump for his canting keel mechanism.
“I first noticed that something was wrong with the keel around Eddystone,” said Golding the Open 60 pre-race favourite. “I couldn’t get the motor to work, and I changed the fuses but then it failed again. I’ve been in discussion with the shore team, but it appears something has gone wrong with the electric motor that drives the pump.”

As a result Golding has to manually tack the swinging keel each time he tacks the boat. To hand-pump the keel across would take even a very fit former fireman around 30 minutes of hard graft. “I’m going to have arms like Popeye at the end of this race,” he commented. But he has minimised the effort on biceps and forearms by opting for an easier, if somewhat unsettling, alternative of laying Ecover over hard to leeward side before each tack, and letting gravity do most of the work. The result is that at its worst the Open 60 is lying at 80 degrees over to leeward, the mast and sails not far short of touching the water. “It must look quite dangerous from outside the boat, but so far it seems surprisingly safe,” Golding explains adding that he completed five tacks overnight using this extreme method. Golding also found the time to have 3 batches of 20 minutes sleep and is sounding remarkably buoyant today.

In the present conditions Golding is satisfied that his unorthodox method of tacking, while far from ideal, will suffice, but he is less sure about trying it in very strong breezes and strangely it is the lightest winds where he fears the greatest problems arising from the motor failure. In the lighter winds, Golding constantly retrims the keel angle to optimise the yacht’s performance, sometimes swinging the bulb to leeward in very light airs to help heel the yacht and keep the sails filling, but then bringing the keel back to windward when a gust accelerates the boat. “I’m not very manoeuvrable with the keel like it is, so light airs could be a problem. Also, I’m not keen on spending too much time close to shore like this.” Hard times lie ahead, as his keel handicap is likely to make the latter stages of the race very taxing on Golding’s strength and sanity, when he negotiates the tricky final approach to the finish in Boston a fortnight from now. In true form though, when the going gets tough, Golding gets tougher.

Long term planning

Meanwhile knowing that the next 24 hours will see them slowed by light airs prior to getting pummelled by an intense depression the competitors in the Transat are currently gambling on their respective futures.

All the frontrunners are currently forging due west blown along by increasingly light northwesterly breeze. The ORMA 60ft multihulls are lying southwest of Ireland some 90 miles ahead of the first IMOCA Open 60 monohulls, but it is the present north-south positioning of the boats that could prove significant in the long term game.

Among the monohulls Pindar AlphaGraphics of Mike Sanderson has sacrificed distance to finish line to get north but as a result has dropped back to fourth, 16 miles astern of the leader. To the south lies Jean-Pierre Dick's Virbac, currently in first place while this morning's leader Mike Golding on Ecover has dropped to second taking the middle ground.

At present no course of action across the race course is paying among the 60ft multihulls where at present a match race for the lead is taking place between Thomas Coville's Sodebo and Geant of Vendée Globe winner Michel Desjoyeaux, the two boats still within sight of one another just a mile apart. Race favourite Groupama lies to the south holding third while Giovanni Soldini's TIM is holding the northerly position a mere 6 miles astern of the front runners.

For the multihulls the next hours will see the boats tackling a high pressure ridge. The boats to the south can expect to see the wind drop off and continue veering to the north, before it drops off although and fills in from the south. Those who have taken the trouble to get north should benefit from the wind not dropping out altogether. If this proves to be true Soldini and Sanderson will be in a strong position.

Aside from the short term tactics, competitors are also looking further down the race track at how they will handle the next weather system - an intense depression the leading multihulls will encounter on Thursday. Making the best of these two significant weather systems while holding their boats together will be the deciding factor in who wins The Transat.