TJV preview - monohulls

We look at the form of the Open 60s taking part in the Transat Jacques Vabre

The Open 60 and 50 monohull fleets set sail on the first start of the Transat Jacques Vabre this coming Saturday at 1500GMT local time, nicely coinciding with the first in-port racing of the Volvo Ocean Race.

This year the Open 60 fleet is smaller - 12 boats, compared to 17 two years ago - but is just that little bit more competitive than two years ago. All of the top boats competing, raced in the Vendee Globe earlier this year and are now reliable and highly developed racing machines. Also all have been de-Vendeeised, having spares removed, back-up generators taken off and generally shedding a considerable weight in unnecessary Vendee Globe gear.

Below is our Open 60 form guide:

Odds	Open 60s	Crew	Nat	Designer	Launched	ex-
3:1	Virbac-Paprec	Jean-Pierre Dick & Loïck Peyron	FRA/FRA	Farr Yacht Design	2003
3:1	Bonduelle	Jean Le Cam & Kito de Pavant	FR/FR	Lombard	2004
4:1	Ecover	Mike Golding & Dominique Wavre	US/SW	Owen-Clarke	2003
4:1	Sill et Véolia	Roland Jourdain & Ellen MacArthur	FRA/UK	Lombard	2004
10:1	Skandia	Brian Thompson & Will Oxley	UK/AUS	Owen-Clarke-Humphreys	2000	Kingfisher
12:1	Roxy	Anne Liardet & Miranda Merron	FRA/UK	Groupe Finot/Lombard	1999	PRB
14:1	Cheminées Poujoulat	Bernard Stamm & Yann Eliès	SWI/FR	Rolland	2000	Bobst Group/Armor Lux
18:1	Pro-Form	Marc Thiercelin & Eric Drouglazet	FRA/FRA	Lombard	1998	Whirlpool/Tiscali
25:1	Mare Verticale	Joé Seeten & Cécilia Carreri	FRA/ITA	Groupe Finot	1998	Somewhere/Activewear/Sollac Atlantique/Arcelor Dunkerque
40:1	UUDS	Hervé Laurent & Laurent Massot	FRA/FRA	Groupe Finot	1993	Sceta Calberson/Geodis/Voila
50:1	Galileo	Walter Antunes & Raphaël Coldefy	BRA/FRA	Lavranos	2005
100:1	Artech 60	Jean-Baptiste Dejeanty & Alexandre Toulorge	FR/FR	Artech Design Team	2002	Furtif

Two years ago was the first time we had seen Jean-Pierre Dick's new Virbac, Farr Yacht Design's first open class boat. At the time we thought the boat looked large, clunky and heavy, like an Open 60 from the 1980s and we reflected this in our form guide to that race marking her down to come home in sixth place. Aside from her appearing heavy, this on the basis of her newness and the lack of shorthanded experience of her skipper (see our 2003 form guide here).

As it turns out of course we were completely wrong and Dick and his new Open 60 romped home to take line honours ahead of Sill and Mike Golding's new Ecover. Virbac maybe the 'largest' Open 60 in terms of her hull volume, rig size, etc but contrary to her looks, she is not the heaviest of the new generation boats.

Dick finished sixth in the Vendee Globe after a long catalogue of breakage and says that since that race he has been attempting to make his boat more reliable. "We have tried to make it more reliable, so we can exploit all the potential of the boat. That was the main work we did, and it was not small."

Dick gives a few examples of ensuring that the boats daggerboards go up and down smoothly and the water ballast actually stayed in the tanks without leaking or releasing itself. Aside from the systems Dick says they have been working on the sails. Virbac-Paprec now has a new mainsail with a flat top, following the trend borrowed originally from the 60ft trimarans that has since permeated through to the America's Cup (to see our feature on America's Cup flat top mains - click here).

While all the new Open 60 mainsails built for this race now have flat tops to some degree, as the images here show those on Virbac and Jean le Cam's Bonduelle are the most extreme examples.



One of the reasons why Virbac may be good on the Transat Jacques Vabre course, Dick says, is that she is 'quite physical' to sail in terms of her size and thus responds well to having the extra crew on board. The extra crew on this occasion is the immensely talented Loick Peyron, one of the top three 60ft trimaran skippers of all time.

Beyond the TJV, Dick is having one of three new Open 60s shortly to be built to lines from Farr Yacht Design (alongside the new boats for Vincent Riou and Michel Desjoyeaux). Dick says his new boat will start building in April with a view to launching in January 2007. Who is building the boat has not been made public yet, but Dick says it will probably not be in France.



Level pegging with Virbac Paprec for the top spot in our form guide is Jean le Cam's yellow-hulled Marc Lombard design Bonduelle. This Transat Jacques Vabre would appear to be the swansong for Bonduelle, le Cam's sponsor who produces tinned vegetables and who have backed him through both a 60ft trimaran and an Open 60 campaign. Bonduelle's contract with Le Cam expires at the end of this race. The talented Le Cam, who is one of only two people to have won the Solitaire du Figaro three times and finished second in this year's Vendee Globe, is currently looking for a new sponsor for his next six year plan aboard the Open 60.

During the Calais Round Britain Race this year, Bonduelle dismasted but is now up and running with a new mast and a suit of new sails. This being the end of Bonduelle's sponsorship le Cam is keen to go out with a bang. As a result Bonduelle new suit of sails are lighter weight than normal and the sail plan enlarged with the forestay now almost reaching the masthead. If the TJV turns out to be light wind affair then Bonduelle will definitely be the form boat. Le Cam is sailing with another former Solitaire du Figaro winner Kito de Pavant.

Bonduelle's sistership Sill et Veolia meanwhile has continued with her original fractional rig. The most significant change to her has been the fitting of a new keel. Sill, readers will recall, was fitted with a carbon fibre keel foil when she was launched early last summer. Soon after launch her keel showed signs of suffering from 'flutter', a phenomenon when a harmonic resonance builds up in foils, ultimately causing structural damage. Despite being repaired prior to the Vendee Globe, clearly the damage to Sill's keel was more deep-rooted and she ended up pulling out of the singlehanded non-stop around the world race.

Following some legal wrangling over the keel issue - if a keel suffers from 'flutter' is it the designer, engineer or builder who are responsible? - the boat has now been fitted with a steel fabricated keel, retaining her original bulb. Aside from that skipper Roland Jourdain (aka Bilou) says the boat is much the same. "We have a new mainsail, and we took a lot of weight out of the boat." The Sill square top is more modest than Bonduelle's while Bilou reckons they have saved 100kg weight in gear. They may make more changes to Sill over the winter depending upon their TJV result.

Jourdain has sailing with him the young English starlette MacArthur. More on this in due course.





Prior to the last Vendee Globe we - and to be fair most other Open 60 pundits - were putting Mike Golding and his Owen-Clarke designed Ecover down as the boat to beat. Ultimately Golding ended up third, and in an episode which will go down in sailing folklore, crossed the Les Sables d'Olonne finish line without a keel.

While Ecover proved surprisingly stable, and even extremely fast without her keel, Golding has since reverted to the more traditional with-keel configuration, having managed to obtain the forged steel foil for the brand new Owen-Clarke designed Open 60 currently in build for former Canadian mountie and Around Alone competitor Derek Hatfield.

Aside from the keel Golding says that he and his team have done a great deal of post-Vendee maintenance but nothing of great consequence. "We’ve just been concentrating on the boat set-up," says Golding. "We lost some of our set-up in terms of rig and weight distribution around the time of the Calais Round Britain, but we have got it back now."

This includes what her skipper terms her 'superheight mode' that is a combination of factors such as board, sail and rig set-up. "When we sailed on the qualification I thought we had it back. But you can never really tell until you are with other boats. On the prologue there are great photos of the boats going off the start line and us just climbing through Virbac. So superheight is back."

Part of the issue is weight distribution and trim. "I feel that maybe for a while when we are fully crewed we are over the performance hump in terms of weight," says Golding. "We have a few gauges on the boat like the distance of the transom off the water, etc. That seems to be very critical and if you are the wrong side of it the boat suddenly doesn’t go any more. Moving a tool box from the front of the boat to the back can make a lot of difference."

Golding also says the new keel has taken some getting used to. "I lost a bit of confidence in it - not in its security, I just thought it was on the heavy side. But now I am starting to see that it is not necessarily hurting our performance."

Since fitting the stronger forged keel (to read in depth about the relative merits of forged v. fabricated keels - click here) Golding says Ecover has gained power. The new foil is around 250kg (under 10%) heavier than Ecover's previous fabricated version while the weight of the bulb is much the same as before.

For the TJV Ecover has new fore and aft sails, the headsails made specifically for this race, the mainsail designed to last Golding China Cup race next year. The square top in Golding's view has kept Ecover's performance up with that of his rivals. "It works particularly well for us because we have a rotating rig and particularly upwind."

Aside from her mainsail develop Ecover also now has a new larger masthead kite. "It is a step towards the larger kites Sill and Bonduelle have got, but it is not the whole way," says Golding. "It seems to work but we need breeze - it is not a light airs sail. Even though it is our largest kite, it is still quite a heavy kite."

While Ecover is supposedly most efficient upwind in practise Golding says on the race course she has proved fast downwind too. "In the Calais Round Britain and the Vendee we were flying downwind. I was quite surprised because I knew we were up on the weight and down on sail area. I have always sailed both the Finot and this boat hot angles and I am a believer in sailing fast. The others are running bigger sails and it forces them down which looks good on the water, but they are not necessary faster in terms of VMG downwind. You would think they could solve it by heating up but they are restricted by the size of their sails."

One of the most interesting observations looking out of the press centre window here in Le Havre is seeing the relative mast heights of the Open 60s. Ecover's wingmast seems to be around 2m shorter than her rivals.

Golding seems quite bullish about his boat's performance and, as ever, his steed is immaculately prepared. If the boat has a weak spot it is in th 10-14 knot range. "It is not the boat is slow, it is just difficult to identify whether you should have [water] ballast in or ballast out, which is annoying as you spend a lot of time in that area."

While the boats in top four spots are reasonably obvious, who will win the fight for fifth is a much harder call. Our favourite is probably Brian Thompson and Australian navigator Will Oxley sailing Skandia, originally Ellen MacArthur's Kingfisher Open 60. Like Ecover, Skandia also lost her keel in the Vendee Globe and this has been replaced with another fabricated steel keel foil that has has a larger cord size over the previous version to improve its strength and longevity.

Skandia has shed a considerable amount of weight from the Vendee, losing her spare generator, watermaker and will be carrying less fuel, food and spares. The Solent is now on hanks rather than being on a furler and they are also carrying a bigger genoa and the boat's biggest ever spinnaker - 390sqm compared to 340sqm used before.

During the prologue Skandia was proving remarkably quick particularly downwind and it will be interesting to see how good a job Thompson will do in keeping up with the newer boats.



Following his disastrous capsize in The Transat last year, Around Alone winner Bernard Stamm is back with a vengeance and feeling more confident than ever. "I am ready," the swash-buckling Swiss skipper told us. "I think it is the first time maybe since Around Alone that we have been ready like this." Stamm is sailing with Yann Eliès, with whom he raced round the world on Bruno Peyron's Orange II. Stamm is known for his unflinching pedal-to-the-metal style and if his boat holds together and the breeze is up he will certainly be a contender.

Stamm acknowledges that his boat Cheminées Poujoulat may not be as quick as the 2003 generation Open 60s, but still feels he is in with a good chance. "It is still possible to make good competition in such a long race and there are enough different options to play. It will be harder than if we had a new boat, but not a problem."

Since the disaster in the Transat Stamm has rebuilt his boat and says that the only change he has made is that her single daggerboard now has smaller cord, is deeper than before and can be 'tacked' within its case - a similar system found to that on the Vincent Riou and Michel Desjoyeaux's double Vendee Globe winner PRB.

The legendary PRB was this summer acquired by the Roxy team and is being campaigned in this Transat Jacques Vabre by Vendee Globe competitor Anne Liardet and Hamble's own Miranda Merron. While Merron and Liardet are both highly experienced Open 60 sailors, this is the first time they have been faced with such a powerful boat. They have been spending the weeks up until now developing their confidence with this legendary craft and trying to understand how to get the most from her and it will be interesting to see how well they can keep up with the boys. Of considerable benefit to them is that Vincent Riou will be acting as their router during the Transat Jacques Vabre.

Something of an unknown is Brazilian Walter Antunes' Lavranos-design Galileo. The boat is brand new and fully carbon fibre in construction with all the right features - canting keel, three sets of water ballast tank. However the boat may be a little too new while Antunes and his crew Raphaël Coldefy are new to singlehanded ocean racing. In their favour is that in ending up in Salvador de Bahia, they are sailing into home waters.


Open 50 line-up

Open 50s	Crew	Nat	Designer	Built	ex
Artforms	Kip Stone & Merfyn Owen	USA/UK	Owen-Clarke	2003
Gryphon Solo	Joe Harris & Josh Hall	USA/UK	Groupe Finot	1997	Magellan Alpha/Tommy Hilfiger
Défi Vendéen	Jean-François Durand & Karen Leibovici	FRA/FRA	Berret/Racoupeau	2002
Vedettes de Bréhat	Servane Escoffier & Bertrand de Broc	FRA/FRA	Groupe Finot	1996	CCP Cray Valley/Ashfield Healthcare/Hellomoto
Adecco - Etoile Horizon	Bob Escoffier & Gérard Faye	FRA/FRA	Balta	2001
Polarity Solo	Paul Metcalf & Ryan Finn	UK/UK	Breneur	1990