Keeping the wheels on pt2

We continue the crew recollections from Cheyenne's incredible round the world voyage

This article continues from part one published yesterday

Another reason Cheyenne can be pushed harder is simply because her construction is more robust than the Ollier catamarans. "Gilles [Ollier] had his experience with Jet Services V and all those boats and they thought they were designing a boat that was tough enough," says Gino Morrelli. "We came at it from a blank piece of paper and our engineering told us that we couldn’t get away with a Nomex core in the boat, so we had to have aluminium [honeycomb] and our skins were almost double that of the Ollier’s. If they were about 2mm skins, we were about 4mm. So we were a whole magnitude more conservative."

Her performance also shows marked differencies to the Ollier cats. Maiden has on occasion been known to sail in excess of 40 knots, while during their whole round the world attempt Daivd Scully says Cheyenne didn't see more than 35 knots. In light conditions the Ollier cats are quicker, but where Cheyenne excels is in being able to churn out outstanding 24 hour runs day after day. "The top end is probably sail plan limiting," says Gino Morrelli. "They are cleaner aerodynamically with their rigs in certain conditions. We have a permanent babystay and staysail stay, then there's the diamonds, masthead shrouds, aft lowers - so we have a few more wires. Some of it might be aerodynamic limitations."

The layout of the sail plan is also significantly different. Gino Morrell says this was a result of trying to create a stiff platform by separating the main and aft beams. With the rig on the main beam the centre of effort of the sailplan is further forward than it should be - hence why Cheyenne has a dramatic 9 degrees of rake in her mast. "I like the theory that when as the boat is pitching upwind the first arc of the centre of gravity of the rig and the sail plan is horizontal or up slightly. Whereas if you have a plumb rig and it pitches it drives the noses under harder. There is also a little bit of an aerodynamic advantage to having sloped leading edges on foils."

Cheyenne's boom is just a monster and as a result the sail plan is much more mainsail-biased than the Ollier cats. She also has a forestay and babystay on which the Solent and staysail are usually on furlers (or were...) "This changes your way of sailing because you keep the full main or the one reef a lot more and you change the headsails," says Fraser Brown.

During the record Cheyenne's 13 crew were split into three watch with Adrienne Cahalan out of the watch system. On Dave Scully's watch was Guillermo Altadill, Mark Featherstone and Paul van Dyke (Whirley), while on Brian Thompson's watch was Damian Foxall, Steve Fossett, and Nick Leggatt and Jacques Vincent's watch comprised Frazer Brown, Mike Beasley and Justin Slattery.

Slattery and Foxall's role was as the boat's bowmen, while van Dyke was the on board sailmaker. Rigging was handled by Foxall, Slattery and Jacques Vincent. Leggatt, Scully and Cahalan looked after the computers and electronics, while Mark Featherstone handled the mechanics, ensure that the gensets and watermakers (the engines were removed prior to the trip) kept working. Guillermo Altadill was in charge of the food.

Generally as she sailed through the Southern Ocean there was a policy of trying to avoid winds exceeding 35 knots, however as with all big multihulls their speed was dictated much more by the sea state.

Unfortunately the next drama happened some 1,000 miles short of the Horn on day 35, 13 March. "We were sailing normally but a low pressure system began to form in front of us and created some incredibly confused seas," recounts Justin Slattery. "One of the biggest problems with these boats is to slow them down to save the boat when the seaway is bad otherwise the boat just breaks up. And if you don’t do it fast enough it creates horrendous loads, for example, in the mast track. And that coupled with the fact that it is probably the largest roached mainsail in the world, puts extreme forces on the headboard car, especially when it is flogging."

To the crew's dismay the loads became too much for the mast track at the first reef and they watched it peel off the mast. "The headboard broke out and we went head to wind and smoked the main down as quickly as possible," continues Slattery. "If we didn’t do that the next weak link would be the batten car and it might just 'ping ping ping' all the way down the mast and you would be screwed, there would be no way to recover from it." Incredibly the main and headboard car had caused six M12 and ten 10M bolts to shear and had mangled the track.

Getting underway again under second reef, initial plans were to repair the track in the lee of the Falklands once they had rounded Cape Horn. However Justin Slattery and Damian Foxall, 'the two angry Irishmen' as Adrienne Cahalan describes them, motivated the crew to make the repair there and then despite the awful seaway. Two pairs of crew Slattery and David Scully, and Damian Foxall and Mike Beasley, took four or five hour shifts up the rig trying to prise the sheared bolts out of the mast using an Easy Out bit. "Your legs go to sleep after a while and you're flapping around like a rag doll - boom, boom, boom - being beaten to death," described Scully. Once the track had been removed it was taken down to the deck, the usable parts were salvaged and taken back up and fitted along with some spare track they were carrying.

The repair to the mast section took the best part of two days as Cheyenne continued on towards Cape Horn. They then were able to hoist the mainsail fully once again. Only 24 hours later the same problem occurred to the track at the masthead... One can only imagine what it was like working almost 150ft above the water in the middle of the Southern Ocean. "I spent about 40 hours at the top of the rig between the two repairs - 20 hours each time," Slattery estimates. For the second repair the crew were hunting around the boat for suitable bolts which ended up being borrowed from winches and even the engine bay.

"A lot of it is just chasing the weak link around," said Gino Morrelli of Cheyenne's mast track problems. "For the first couple of years we kept breaking mains, mains were too stretchy, sail shape looked terrible, we kept breaking battens. Finally Halsey Lidgard threw enough carbon into the main to stop that breaking but it has transferred the weak link to the headboard car, to the reef tracks, to the fittings and we just chased the weak link out of the sail into the rig. That’s probably why the headstay came loose. Most of the shock loading is occurring because the mainsail is so much stiffer."

Cheyenne has some impressive loads in her rig such as mast compression of 100,000lb (around 50 tonnes), headstay tension 65,000lb (32 tonnes). "We had load cells on board for the first three years," says Morrelli. "The scariest numbers we saw was the headstay’s ability to go from 65,000 to zero and back within one second as you pounded upwind. The shroud shock loads were never as near as extreme. You could never unload a weather shroud but upwind the headstay would go slack..."

Despite their troubles they finally rounded Cape Horn on 17 March in record time, 39 days 16 hours after leaving Ushant and still roughly 2.5 days ahead of Orange's record.

Taking a similar track as Francis Joyon had earlier in the year, Cheyenne closed on the South American coast, making good progress in following winds, until their corridor of wind came to a dead end off Rio. "Coming up the South Atlantic it felt like we were having a bad time there, getting stuck in the sub-tropics, but by the time we got to the Equator we’d got the record from the Horn to the Equator. We couldn’t believe it," says Fraser Brown.

Into the North Atlantic they slowed a little coming through the Doldrums and managed to pick up the north easterly trades considerably further south than normal. Unfortunately sailing upwind in these they experienced near disaster once again when the giant pin holding the forward beam to the starboard hull broke on 29 March (day 51).
"The forward beam was a worry," says Steve Fossett. "The solution was easy, but what was scary was that the pin came so close to working all its way out. If we’d sailed another hour or two hours without recognising it, the pin would have come out and the mast gone over and perhaps the boat break apart."

Concern over this crucial join in the boat's structure had been in the back of their minds since strange noises started emanating from it in the Indian Ocean, but at that time it was showing no cracks or movement. The pin became an issue when it was noticed that the aft end of it had backed out by 35mm. "We had 70mm to spare, so it had backed out by about half," describes Gino Morrelli, who back at his base in California was trying to work out a solution. "We thought there was 25-30mm inside before the whole thing would have gone into orbit..." They solved the problem by drilling through the bearing and putting another pin through it to block it, a repair which thankfully held until they finished.

Below: not a pretty sight...the join of the forward crossbeam to the starboard hull, blackened by oil where the crew were lubricating the bearing and showing the bolt they put through the main bearing pin to stop it easing its way out



After an incredible passage back up the North Atlantic where they were able to lay the finish line rather than having to sail around the Azores high, Cheyenne finally crossed the finish line yesterday afternoon to complete their circumnavigation in a time of 58 days 9 hours, 32 minutes and 45 seconds, taking almost six days off Orange's record.
While subject to ratification by the World Sailing Speed Record Council remains a formality, some political dealings are outstanding over whether or not Cheyenne gets the Jules Verne Trophy. Prior to Cheyenne's departure Steve Fossett hadnt reach agreement with the Jules Verne Trophy Association over the entry fee and it seems unlikely she will be eligible. At present Geronimo is about to enter the Atlantic a 300 miles ahead of Orange's 2002 record and could well break her time and thus claim the Jules Verne Trophy even if her circumnavigation is in a slower time than Cheyenne's record.

With his ultimate sailing ambition ticked off Steve Fossett's next project is no less ambitious - to take a glider into the stratosphere. He says that this isn't the end of his sailing career, although one can imagine it is just hard to known what to do when you hold both the transatlantic and the non-stop around the world records. The only major record he doesn't hold at present is the 24 hour and presumably being the first person to sail more than 700 miles in a day would be an attraction. If they were to attempt this David Scully thinks that New York to Cape Race would be a suitable piece of race track. It is equally possible that the boat will be sold or the present team find a sponsor to take part in the Oryx Cup.

In the short term it seems unlikely that Cheyenne will be moving far from her berth in Plymouth Yacht Haven.