Keeping the wheels on

Thedailysail was in Plymouth to discuss Cheyenne's incredible round the world voyage with her crew

The 125ft long twin hulled form of Steve Fossett's Cheyenne with her towering heavily raked mast emerged out of the darkness of Plymouth Sound last night and tied up at the dock at Plymouth Yacht Haven an hour before closing time. Her international crew of 13 were ecstatic, over the moon: they had made it around the world, knocking more than six days off Bruno Peyron and Orange's existing 64 day record, another record to add to their equally impressive 4 day 17 hour record for the west to east North Atlantic crossing they set in 2001 and still hold.

Crossing the line between Le Stiff lighthouse on Ushant and the Lizard at 05:10:35 GMT on 7 February, Cheyenne had not set sail in the optimum weather conditions. Yet their time to the Equator was a respectible 8 days 6 hours and 28 minutes, crossing the Doldrums on a 468 miles day. Adrienne Cahalan who took over the navigator's role on board at the last minute when Fossett's regular navigator Stan Honey had to pull out due to other commitments, had conveniently just completed a thesis in Southern Ocean weather and says that leaving their departure any later may have had consequences further round the course, with less predictable track of depressions in the Southern Ocean and returning to the finish line in the North Atlantic. She says the ideal time for starting a round the world record is December - as demonstrated by Francis Joyon.

In round the world racing and record attempts there are a number of meteorological obstacles to pass. After the Doldrums, the most significant is skirting to the west of the St Helena high in the South Atlantic as sailing the direct route from the Equator is upwind. As a matter of policy Cahalan (who is now the fastest Australian around the world - six days faster than Nick Moloney in fact) says they attempted to shave miles off these detours wherever possible and as a result she estimates they cut down the overall distance of their attempt by up to 1,300 miles on the total round the world course.

Although they had suffered problems with their electronics while still in the north Atlantic it was once into the Southern Ocean that the crew experienced their first major gear damage.

An important point worth noting about this record is that although Cheyenne was well routed and lucky with the weather the boat suffered some near catastrophic breakage during her round the world trip and it was entirely down to the ingenuity and determination of her crew that they made it round.

For the round the world voyage Cheyenne crew was much more experienced than usually sails on board and Steve Fossett says that this was a deliberate choice when he selected the crew. "The decision to take a crew that are not only outstanding sailors, but also were capable of repairing equipment was the key decision that I made that made the difference with us being able to make it around. An average crew would not have been able to solve the equipment problems which this crew solved."

Upon their arrival in Plymouth last night one sensed amazement among some of the crew that they had succeeded in getting the giant catamaran around the world without terminally breaking the boat - although they had a good go and came perilously close to succeeding.

A day or so after they had experienced their first taste of the Southern Ocean their forestay broke at the bottom. It is easy to imagine the scenario - 125ft catamaran with a mast rising to 147ft above the water, the entire Southern Ocean ahead of you and one of the more important pieces of wire holding your rig up breaks. No question - you retire. "I think all of us thought we were done on that one," says Fossett, who had Cheyenne pointing gingerly towards Cape Town. Yet, amazingly, the crew found a solution.

Cheyenne has a variety of standing rigging - Kevlar shrouds, rod diamonds while her 38m long forestay is 20mm wire (at the time rod was not available in this length). "The Norseman fitting pulled out," describes watch leader David Scully. "It got floppy and we couldn’t work out what was wrong. You just don’t expect Norseman fittings to fall out. We were hoping it was something else, but then as we were figuring out what was wrong with it the whole sail with the roller furler and the carbon fibre foil fell on the tramp with a big bang and then we were left with the wire which weighs about 5kg per metre flayling around on the deck. It is a serious piece of wire. One wrong move and it would take your hand off, take your arm off or take your head off."

The crew restrained the forestay with ropes while some halyards were swiftly attached to secure the rig. Fortunately they were heading downwind at the time. Then they set about effecting a repair.



Above - Cheyenne 's wire forestay

"We ripped the whole thing apart," described Fraser Brown, seeing $ signs now that his top six battens succeeded in making it around the world. "We managed to put cone in the Norseman fitting back together. You would normally do it in a workshop. We were working on the main beam. We got to work on it, shoved the thimble back in there and pulled the housing over it and wrenched it down and we managed to get it back on...It worked!"

They then had the fabulous job of trying to reattach the forestay. "We just kept sending it downwind," Fraser continues. "We just eased the mainsheet off and wound the genniker halyard on. We had one guy driving at the back and seven people on the bow..."

The carbon fibre furler was left off the forestay and the Solent modified with hoops along the luff. "We were faced with hauling the Solent up and down everytime we wanted to use it which turned out to be not so bad," says David Scully.

The forestay repair to the forestay took about a day and once this was repaired they got up to speed again, passing the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope at 04:39:07GMT on
day 18 (25 February). "After that we figured we could fix pretty much anything," says Scully.

Cheyenne's crossing of the Indian Ocean could not have been better. Old Southern Ocean hands such as Guillermo Altadill and Jacques Vincent said that in all their crossings of the normally ferocious Indian Ocean, they had never experienced such good sea state conditions and Cheyenne was able to rattle off a series of 500+ mile days. By the time they were passing Tasmania they had increased their lead over Orange's 2002 round the world record to 1,700 miles (or 3-4 days).

Many of Cheyenne's crew had also sailed on the first generation Ollier G-class catamarans and they have interesting comparisons to make between them. "This boat is so different," says Fraser Brown, who has been part of the regular crew on Tracy Edwards' Maiden. "Firstly there's the size and the weight. This is a 30 ton boat compared to an 18 ton boat. [In fact Cheyenne's designer Gino Morelli reckons she is presently 26-27 tonnes]. The gear is big and everything has been built big and so the loads are bigger. Driving is a lot heavier. It is not as nimble through the water. You can’t drive it as neatly as Maiden. Downwind driving Maiden is beautiful, downwind in this it is a case of putting it down the wave and send it."

Gino Morrelli says that one of the reasons Cheyenne is harder to steer is that has a lot less rocker than the Ollier cats and the location of the daggerboards - around 20ft further aft - is also significant. "You put a lot more load on the rudder to affect the same turning moment. So the same force on the rudder creates less turning, so that also contributes to that lack of agility. They carry a higher percentage of load on their rudders, whereas we wanted the rudders to be more lightly loaded in a straight line situation and we wanted most of the load on the daggerboards."

A significant different between Cheyenne and the Ollier cats is that she can be pushed much harder, perhaps in a manner more akin to Volvo racing rather than maxi-multihull sailing. "We never held back. We just pushed it all the time and that is a huge difference. We never once hit the front beam and that’s unheard of," enthused Fraser Brown adding that they had thought that waves wacking the underside of the aft beam might present a potential delamination problem but this only occurred perhaps 5% of the trip.

The reason for the forward beam not contacting the water nor the boat going down to the mine was due to Cheyenne's 20ft long bow extensions which were retrofitted just prior to her starting The Race in 2001. This modification saw her forebeam beam raised by around 2ft while her new bows have a freeboard of around 10ft. "It became pretty obvious after the first sea trials and the 24 hour record in New Zealand that the limiting factor wasn’t lack of stability or sail area, it was a lack of bow," explains Gino Morrelli. "The forebeam hitting wavetops was the first thing that would limit how fast we could go. The first transatlantic runs back and forth it became evident that the first way to add about 5 knots of boat speed was to grow the thing. We didn’t want to fool with the forward sail plan so we just raised the bows as far as we could get away with."

More photos on page two

Part two of this article will appear on thedailysail tomorrow