Putting it about

We speak to trimaran guru Loick Peyron about his diverse sailing schedule and his new 38m maxi-foiler

Having been abruptly removed from the 60ft trimaran circuit when his boat broke up in the 2002 Route du Rhum and then been unsuccessful in his partnership with Bertrand Pace attempting to raise funds for an America's Cup campaign, Loick Peyron today is one of the busiest men on the yachting circuit.

Last month for example he was back in 60ft trimarans racing with in the Nokia Oops Cup. He was also with Nicolas Grange on the winning Decision 35 Okalys in the annual Bol d'Or Rolex, sailed around the Isle of Wight with us on Mari Cha IV, set a new Open 60 SNSM record around the coast of Brittany and then carried out a Transat Jacques Vabre qualifier on an Open 60, followed by a few legs of the Tour de France a la Voile.



While Peyron at present is spending a lot of time sailing with other people, he recently revealed to us his next project - a 38m (125ft) long foiler trimaran. In this he hopes to follow a similar path to his elder brother Bruno by winning the Jules Verne Trophy and under taking a program of records.

While Franck Cammas' new Groupama III maxi-trimaran, currently in build at Multiplast in France, and Olivier de Kersauson's Geronimo are more or less enlarged versions of the ORMA 60s, albeit with less extreme beam and sail area, Peyron's new boat - which he has designed himself - is very different.

"The problem is very simple," says Peyron. "If you want to stay on one hull - which is the goal of any multihull sailor - you may do that on small boats or on the 60s or or on big cats just for the pictures, but on a round the world trip you spend maybe 5% of the time on one hull. That means you are not in good conditions 95% of the time and on a tri or a cat it is very hard to regulate that. The only way to stay on one hull is to stay on the main one."

Peyron has experience of foiler trimarans and fond memories of the time he campaigned the Marc Lombard-designed Lada Poch III, a 75ft foiler trimaran in which he scored his first major race win in the 1987 La Baule-Dakar race. With the advent of the ORMA 60 circuit pure foilers disappeared from the French scene although the modern generation of trimarans rely heavily on the retractible curved foils in their floats.

Prior to Lada Poch III there had been a spate of foiler trimarans in France due to the high profile of Eric Tabarly's Paul Ricard. The boats that followed Paul Ricard had mixed success. Some were fitted with inverted T-shaped Bruce foils, but most simply had two fixed foils on the floats angled inwards towards the centre hull.

Foilers began to get a bad name. One of the most high profile white elephants from the period of 85 and 75ft maxi-multihulls during the 1980s was Alain Gabbay's 85ft long and 85ft wide foiler trimaran Charles Heidsieck, but this less due to the foils than inherent structural problems the boat suffered that once solved made the boat too heavy.

Today in France the foiling tradition has been ardently continued by Alain Thebault's L'Hydroptere which for the last decade has gone through an endless cycle of showing dramatic speed before breaking. However while L'Hydroptere is a full foiler - ie the main hull lifts clear of the water - Peyron's new weapon is designed to have its main hull in the water.

Like Paul Ricard and his Lada Poch III, his new maxi-foiler has a single beam, but with a semi-circular main sheet track slung off the back of it, along similar lines to the ORMA 60s. The rig is the multihull standard rotating wingmast mast while the cockpit is also an enlarged version of what features on an ORMA 60.

What is not clear at the moment is exactly what type of foils the boat will have. The perennial problem with having fixed foils in the floats is that they work really well within a small performance envelope and represent considerable drag in light conditions. Therefore it is necessary to have some way of retracting them. Lada Poch III was fitted with what were essentially a retractible inclined daggerboard in each of her small floats. This system was later copied on the 60ft trimarans in the early 1990s before the full-blown retractible curved foils were introduced on the Lombard-designed Banque Populaire in 1996. It seems most likely that Peyron will attempt to include some form of retractible curved foil arrangement where the amount of lift the foil generates can be dictated by how far the foil is lowered.

Hopefully now that more is understood about the engineering of maxi-multihulls and carbon/Nomex construction is greatly improved, Peyron's new boat will not suffer from the same structural issues as Charles Heidsieck.

A significant problem remains - Peyron needs to find money for the project.

And the rest...

While his maxi-foiler project bubbles along, Peyron's principle sailing over the last 12 months has been in Switzerland on the Decision 35s where his 25 years of experience at the sharp end of maxi multihull racing where during the 1990s he was as dominant as Franck Cammas is today have been put to good use.

"The first race I sailed was Geneve Rolle," he says harking back to the first ever regatta for the all-carbon fibre one design catamarans last year when he was sailing with the Red team. "We won that after testing the boat one hour before the start. We were leading all the season but we finished second. We lost the last regatta, the Beau Rivage Palace in Lausanne."

This year the game has been raised in the Decision 35 class with new faces coming into the scene from fellow former 60ft trimaran skipper Alain Gautier to America's Cup legend and Swiss resident Russell Coutts. With the exception of Gautier's catamaran the Decision 35s are all owned by amateur sailors "some of whom need stickers on the hull or the sail and some who don't" as Peyron puts it. For this season when he joined Okalys, which as Bedat & Co finished sixth of the eight boats, owner Nicolas Grange had generally put better crew on the boat.

"The two last boats last year are the two winning ones this year," points out Peyron. "They didn’t change anything on the boat - that is just the crew. Bedat, the old Okalys was not leading last year and Gonet, the boat which Russell is sailing on was completely at the back and in the first Grand Prix they came second behind us. But the level is higher and higher as with every one design class. And it is at a good level now." He expects this raising of the game in the crew to continue, as is typical of any one design class.

Aside from his 60ft trimaran and maxi-multihull experience Peyron also skippered a Formula 40 in the late 1980s and has some interesting comparisons to make with the hi-tech last weight ultra-powerful Decisions. Built entirely in carbon fibre by Decision Yachts, who build Alinghi's America's Cup yachts, the construction of the Decision 35s is about as good as one can get and they also have the flying central fore and aft hull/beam allowing good fore and aft stiffness in the sail plan. As a result Peyron says they go upwind, tack and manoeuvre much better. The only significant teething problem last year was the Decision 35s masts which were too light and have since been reinforced throughout the fleet.

"It is almost perfect," Peyron maintains of the Decision 35. "But we don’t need perfection when all the boats are identical. They are quite extreme, but because they are very narrow at the front the maximum speed is not very high. We have only done 23 knots which is really the maximum." You would think a boat with such humungous sail area would easily be capable of 30+ knots.

"It is not possible to go faster than that because the mast is so tall, but then you need that because 99% of the weather [on the Swiss lakes] needs a lot of sail area. So the problem is not strong wind - strong wind starts at 15 knots. You are hitting maximum righting moment at 6 knots maybe. You need to lift the hull all the time even downwind and that is very interesting."

Due to the lightweight of the boats, positioning of the crew is vital and in the light (even by Swiss lake standards) Bol d'Or Rolex last month the crew spent most of the time piled up on the leeward bow to entice the weather hull and both transoms to lift.

"The weight of the crew and the placing of it is very important," says Peyron. "In some conditions you need to heel but we have different techniques and right now it is not so bad. We bring the crew up to weather very quickly in 6-7 knots because we definitely need it because the mast is tall and the sail area is quite big and then by the time you begin to heel you need power."

Sailing on the Swiss lakes Peyron says is a different proposition from racing on the open ocean. "It is very interesting not to have salt in the eyes at high speed. I like that. You are not like a mixamatosis rabbit! That is quite interesting. You need to be a bit more able to do anything at any time and you have to look everywhere all the time, to the sails, to the smoke. You need to have a very wide angle of view and that is very interesting. Anything can happen. Every time the wind changes 5 degrees that is another name, another story. They talk with their crazy accent about a 100 different winds, each from a different direction. That is funny," he says jovially of his fellow Swiss crew.

Peyron cites the example of the 2004 Bol d'Or when he was sailing with the bulk of the Decision 35 fleet towards the turning mark at the opposite end of the lake from Geneva, while two other boats seemed far behind and chose the "big tour" via the north shore of the lake but ultimately reached the turning mark first. They won the race.

"That is a big lesson for me," he admits. "We knew we had to do that but most of the fleet was with us. So you have to trust in the statistics not in the tactics, unless you are all together. If some of them are missing you really have to be careful."

Aside from the boats Peyron says he likes racing on the Swiss lakes because the scenery is stunning and the class offers a mixture of Grand Prix combined with longer events like the Bol d'Or Rolex.

Peyron's sailing this year has also taken him back to 60ft trimaran class and the Nokia Oops Cup in Sweden, which he has been dipping in and out of. This was an interesting episode for him as instead of sailing on his old Fujicolor, now Knut Frostad's Academy, he was sailing on the former Groupama I, which in the hands of Franck Cammas had been his main competition in the late 1990s. The boat is now Klabbe Nylof's HiQ. He also sailed the Gotland Rund with Magnus Olsson on Nokia, the former Biscuits la Trinitaine.

The Nokia Oops Cup also provided him with the first opportunity in 13 years to race against his elder brother Bruno. While sailing with Nylof, they beat Bruno in the Union Offshore race between Gothenberg and Oslo. However Bruno, sailing with Steve Ravussin and Roger Nilson on Stena Sovcomflot, would ultimately go on to win the Nokia Oops Cup in its entirety.

Over the latter part of this season Peyron will spend increasing amounts of time racing with Jean-Pierre Dick on board the Open 60 Virbac. The duo are racing together in the two-handed Transat Jacques Vabre in November and Peyron is part of the design team, including Farr Yacht Design, who are building Dick's next Virbac in which this time he hopes to win the 2008-9 Vendee Globe.

In the meantime there is the no small matter of finding funds for a radical 38m foiling trimaran to deal with.

More images of the new foiler trimaran on page 2...