Mike Golding's third Open 60

The singlehanded round the world veteran gives us the guided tour to his new Ecover

We think we are right in saying that with his new Ecover, Mike Golding is the first case of an individual skipper ever getting themselves a third Open 60. Golding has now been campaigning in the IMOCA class for a decade, initially with his Finot-Conq designed Team Group 4, which dismasted so disastrously within hours of the start of the 2000-1 Vendee Globe and then with his Owen-Clarke designed Ecover with which he scored an admirable third place in the 2004-5 Vendee Globe, despite crossing the finish line sans keel.

With a wealth of both new and old talent entering next year's Vendee Globe and 17 new Open 60s, the competition will be by far the hardest the event has ever been. So will it be third time lucky for Golding? With the new Ecover has he finally got the weapon that will get him the top spot on the solo non-stop round the world race podium?

After seeing Dominique Wavre's rather brutal looking Temenos at the start of the Route du Rhum last year, we had our concerns, but the new blue and green emblazoned Ecover, unveiled in the UK recently at Southampton Boat Show, looks to be a weapon.
Design

Like the previous boat, the new Ecover is a design by Owen Clarke. Merf Owen has been involved with all of Golding's Open 60s, project managing the build of the first boat and designing the second. This time however they made even greater use of Emirates Team New Zealand's American designer Clay Oliver to work on the hull form development and VPPs. Owen confirms that substantially more budget was invested in R&D this time around. In addition to the data from the last two campaigns, Owen co-owned some of the R&D work that went into Temenos, but with the new Ecover Oliver spent substantially more time on the CFD as well as running seventh scale models up and down the tank at the Woofson Unit, before finally running some one third scale models at the special commercial tank facility in Copenhagen, used by several of the Cup teams.


Yacht designers (not undertakers) Clay Oliver (left) and Merfyn Owen

For Oliver, working on the Open 60 design must have been a breath of fresh air after the minutae of a Cup program. As he puts it: "With a normal class with a rule you are always making a trade off with sail area versus something under water, so that always creates a crossover, whatever the class. If you have an Open class, it is a case of 'I want a boat like this - a beamier more powerful boat' But 'it is going to be sticky in light airs'. 'Well, let’s add more sail area...' With more sail area you can add more stability - so that is the loop you go through in the open class. The limit is what people can handle in the end."

Oliver reckons that the new generation of boats will certainly be harder to sail. "You have to rely on making good decisions so experience is an important part of that. If you don’t make good decisions you could say the penalty is probably greater with this new generation of boat. A more demanding boat also puts more attention on reliability because loads are higher, so you have to pay attention to all the little things and make sure the boat hangs together with all the higher loads."

As with all the new generation Open 60s we have seen, the end result is a boat that is in terms of sail area to displacement is a way more powerful beast. As Owen puts it: "All the sails are bigger, the gear box, the transition between the sails are the same - because that was a proven place to start from - the balance of the boat was the same. But in essence: taller rig, heavier bulb, similar overall displacement, more righting moment, lower drag rig and hull, lower drag foil sections, so a higher power to weight ratio.

"We were trying to come up with a boat that was more powerful compared to a set figure compared to Ecover 2 and then build the boat down to the same weight as the old boat - having that power level and then streamlining the boat to reduce drag, so that the engine isn’t driving a Land Rover chassis. I’m sure everyone is trying to do that. We were trying not just to stick a bigger engine in."

Compared to the old boat, while the displacement remains around the 8.5 tonne mark, her bulb is heavier while the rig is another 2m taller than the old Ecover's, but even so hers won't be among the tallest spar we'll see in Les Sables d'Olonne next year.

The hull shape has more beam and a double set of chines, similar to the 2004 generation Lombard boats Sill and Bonduelle, only more pronounced. As was the case with the Volvo 70s, the lower set of chines effectively fool the water into thinking the boat is beamier than it actually is, while according to Kiwi boat builder Paul Hakes, who's company Hakes Marine built the new Ecover in Wellington, NZ, the top set of chines is a weight saving measure - a flat surface is lighter than a radiused one and involved no fairing.

Build

The build of the Open 60 caused Paul Hakes to go back to have to rethink several of the ways he normally works, due to the hull shape. Construction of the boat involved using some new core materials - Kevlar Nomex - and thanks to the chine it was realistic to build the boat by directly fabricating female moulds for the hull and deck. Putting the boat together also required a re-think.

"Because the Open 60 deck is a very light weight structure, a 60ft long flat panel, I really didn’t want to do the traditional thing of putting the deck on the hull because the deck would conform to any shape you gave it," says Hakes. "So instead once we’d put the structure inside the boat I turned it upside down and put the deck underneath it, still in the mould, so it was held true to its shape. I then lowered the hull and structure on top of it. That worked out perfectly."

Foils

Below the water the boat is a similar configuration to before - canting keel, twin asymmetric daggerboards and twin rudders. The Owen Clarke boats differ from most of the other new Open 60s in that they don't have kick-up rudders. This was down to skipper preference says Owen and is the same on Temenos and will also be the same on Dee Caffari's Ecover sistership Aviva that is still under construction at Hakes. Rudders that kick up obviously have safety benefits and can reduce drag when the weather one is hoisted, but they have downsides too as Owen puts it: "if they kick up at the wrong time you can be in big trouble…"

The canting keel mechanism is similar to before except this time instead of designing the rams in house, they worked with Italian manufacturer Cariboni. As Golding puts it: "they are the only people not to have problems in the Volvo and they have done a very nice job." As usual two rams are fitted, one on either side of the keel and potentially a little excess with this boat is that the rams are built entirely in titanium. The centre of gravity of the boat is still around 1.5m below the bottom of the boat, so the substantial rams are still some way above this, says Golding by way of justifying this.

Significantly compared to the old boat the keel has moved aft in the boat and the twin daggerboards have also moved aft relative to the keel (although not alongside the keel as they are on the Farr boats). The boards themselves are longer, slenderer, more high aspect ratio affairs than those fitted to the old Ecover.



Obviously an aspect of the keel that Golding was particularly keen to focus on was the foil. The one that broke on the previous Ecover was built in fabricated steel and was one of two foils of this type to fail in the Vendee (the other being that of Nick Moloney's Skandia) while the carbon fibre keel on Roland Jourdain's Sill & Veolia also had issues serious enough for him to retire from the race.

Exactly why the previous foil failed remains a subject of slight conjecture. Golding has his theories: "We had voltage leakage on the boat and I feel that we had some problem because of a design or construction issue - there a problem, the keel was breached, water got inside and the breach got bigger because of the turbulence but it was much much worse because there was voltage running through the system."

Golding confirms that did find several areas of voltage leakage on the old boat ("a lot more than we thought") but now they have established a procedure to ensure this isn't repeated. For example today on board all key pieces of electronics are mounted on wood as an insulator. And to solve any manufacturing issues with the foil the QA (Quality Assurance) testing of the new keel has been increased from 30% to 100%.

They have since tried a forged steel foil on the previous boat and although it offered a narrower profile and less drag, Golding feels its extra weight took the edge off the performance.

Water tankage

One area where the new Ecover has more refinement than the other Open 60s we have seen is in her water ballast arrangement. While most of the other new boats typically have three tanks - forward, mid and aft - each side, on Ecover there are five each side, the two additional tanks each side being aft.

"On the old boat one of the mods we made was that we had a large aft tank and we split it and we found that was useful, it gave us more gears and basically this is doing the same thing," explains Golding. "They are not small tanks so we can put a lot of water in the boat. If we fill up the whole of one side of the boat it adds about half the weight of the boat again." ie: around 4.25 tonnes of water each side - a similar amount to the purely water ballasted pre-canting keel boats used to carry in the 1990s...

Golding says that even in the hairest beam reaching conditions it is unlikely all the water ballast would be deployed on one side. "In my experience you’d never do that, because in reality you get so powered up that it becomes impossible to sail the boat. The chances of breaking something goes through the roof. But the nice thing about the five gears is that there are lots of option to find the sweet spot."

In addition from the effect of sinking the boat during measurement, generally the trim ballast is there to maximise waterline length upwind and to keep the bow out when broad reaching. This has been the case for some time, but now they are refining the process further. "Now it is better understood and we’ve found we can do more of it," says Golding. "There is a lot of talk about rocker and transom immersion. Most boats - the Farrs and Finots will be transom down and their boats have very flat exits at the back, but if you have that you are a bit sticker in the light and we saw that with Ecover 2 she was very fast in the light. This boat has got less rocker than the previous boat so it is more transom immersed." So somewhere in between the new Farrs and Finots and their previous position.

The tanks in the central compartment in particular have been enlarged as Golding says that this was a gear they lacked on the old boat. "Reaching I don’t think we could load up like the other boats could. We were always splitting between forward and aft ballast and I think we ended up with too much water. It was always a bit of a compromise."

Compared to the Farr boats the tanks seem to be higher and this creates a distinct headroom issue in the main saloon area where the only place one can stand up fully is in a small square at the foot of the companionway.

A problem with fitting so many tanks was of course the plumbing, particularly as Golding (a former fireman) was keen that all the tanks could be charged from a single 'main' running down the middle of the boat and fed by one scoop on each side of the boat.

Aloft

On the last Ecover, a new style of rig was fitted that was effectively a rotating wingmast with two sets of diamonds but with fixed shrouds and spreaders (hinged at the mast). The new rig is a development of this, still a rotating wingmast but without the top diamond. "We wanted to get rid of the top diamonds on the old boat but we could never bring ourselves to do it, because the boat was reliable. So it wasn’t completely new for this boat," admits Merf Owen. "It is the same concept as before, but the whole thing has been re-engineered again, with new FE [Finite Element Analysis]."

While Southern Spars used the same tooling as Virbac's mast, work on the rig was carried out in partnership between Southern Spars and North Sails Spain's Juan Meseguer and the result is a spar with a similar cord but which is a bit fatter. The overall weight has been reduced and there are custom-designed spreaders to reduce drag. "We haven’t gone mad about it because it is still the Vendee Globe and we are using 200 Series track for the Ronstan cars which is a size up from the last boat and that is a reflection of the power of the new boat compared to the old boat," says Owen.

At this early stage the rig has proved to be worked well only that due to the extra compression on the D2s, thanks to there being no upper diamand, the rig doesn't rotate as easily, says Golding.

The standing rigging is all Future Fibres PBO, but this time they have reverted to turnbuckles instead of lashings. The turnbuckles however are of course made in titanium...

As is the case with all of the new Open 60s the Solent stay is the only one fixed, the rest are on halyard locks. Ecover is a fitted with a mix of Southern Spar locks and Karver, the latter on the two spinnakers and genniker. "The redundancy is terrific," says Golding. "Normally you have a 2:1 with the dead end secured up top. This way there is no dead end because everything comes down to the deck. I can run halyards out and our Karver system is custom in that the holes in it are bigger than normal, because normally you can’t run the splice through so you can’t mouse them out. With ours you can, so that you don’t have to go up the mast!" Something to be avoided at all costs when racing singlehanded... For the new boat Golding opted to change from Facnor to Karver furling gear too.

While locks are used on all sails except the main, Golding hasn't been tempted to use hydraulics anywhere except the keel. The downhaul at the tack on the headsails is ground on via a cascade block system, that is much lighter and more reliable and repairable than a hydraulic set-up.

The headsail tracks run laterally with an adjustable ring system as is the latest trend. All lines run aft from the mast through twin channels in the cabin top, rather than the single tunnel fitted on the Farr boats. The latter arrangement creates one 'pit' area but Golding prefers the lines being divided up as you get into less of a tangle in the cockpit. He has even got solid rope boxes rather than bags now for this same reason.

While several of the new generation 60s have opted for more conventional vang arrangements or the 'Mich Des' C-shaped track for the mainsheet as well, Golding has opted for the typical French 'soft' vang arrangement with a line running along the boom that is barber hauled to wherever it is needed.

"That is why we didn’t break any goosenecks," he says of why he chose this. "Downwind you have some loss of head control, but with these big flat tops and the boat goes over weight, you have to have a phenomenally heavy boom if you are going to vang it conventionally. I couldn’t see justification for doing anything but the lightest route."

Golding says he liked the cockpit layout of the previous Ecover,so it hasn't changed much. Once again there are twin wheels and twin pedestals. Aside from the rope boxes, the size of the gear has gone up - the primary winches for example are now two sizes bigger than they were on the old boat. This is partly to handle the loads developed by the enlarged sail plan and the greater loads running through the boat thanks to the enlarged bulb. But the larger winches also enable faster line speeds.

"The mainsheet is now 4:1, it used to be 2:1," explains Golding, as to why this is useful. "We had to go 4:1 because otherwise we couldn’t run the system any more with a clutch, we would have had to use a jammer at 2:1 and you don’t want that for the main sheet." But with a 4:1 he obviously has to wind in twice the amount of mainsheet now.

Forward in the cockpit is a more enclosed cuddy than the previous boat. Here Golding can sit on bean bag, protected from the elements. The seating area on each side can also be fitted with a protective screen that clips in.

Down below



Down below as we have said there is a distinct lack of headroom compared to the previous boat, but this is similar to most of the new water tank-filled Open 60s. The gallery area on the new boat is on the forward side of the cockpit bulkhead, while the table table has moved further aft (with the keel box) so it is more accessible from the companionway.

The chart table layout appears much the same as before except that there is only one monitor and instead of having fully plumbed in computers, Golding now runs two laptops as he says these draw less power. The twin laptops are neatly enclosed in draws beneath the chart table and with a wireless mouse and keyboard plus a touch screen display, and the possibly of switching computers remotely, they never need see light of day. Both computers are identical, but Golding says that there are occasionally programs which clash (such as MaxSea and Deckman) that are best run separately. He plans to store most of his computing on to a flash drive.

The electronics have been speced and fitted by Diverse and include all the normal gear - B&G performance instruments and autopilot controller, ActivEcho radar transponder, VHF radio, keel controls, water ballast tank monitors (showing which are full or empty), control heads for the Iridium and Fleet 77 satphones, Garmin GPS plotter that doubles as the radar display while the chart plotter side is also loaded with charts in case the computers suffer a meltdown. New this time is that the boat is fitted with AIS vessel tracking. It also has a very impressive control set-up for the Livewire on board video enabling cameras to be panned by remote from the chart table and for individual pans motions to be saved for future use. The set-up includes a masthead camera that can also be helpful for checking out the trim of the sails - if it is panned up enough it could also be used for checking for icebergs and shipping...

Along with the new boat Golding also has a new shore team run by Matt Cowpe, who previously worked on Charles Dunstone's boat. Also back on board has been Martin Carter, who previously worked on Team Group 4 and has since graduated up to Volvo and America's Cup projects.

Generally the boat was smack on during its construction, in particular the thorny area of weights. According to Owen when they put the boat together and went through the IMOCA tests they had 16mm left on the stroke for the ram for example. "It is right down to the last notch. The boat should do what it is supposed to do."

The end result according to the VPPs is a boat that should be capable of a sub-80 day Vendee Globe, but that is assuming the weather stays good. "That is a bit of a worry," says Owen. "The Vendee Globes have been a bit benign in recent years."

The next Ecover has been sailing for the first time this week and will soon be heading towards France for her first race, the Transat Jacques Vabre which Golding is competing in with his sailmaker, Bruno Dubois of North Sails France. In the TJV Golding will get his first opportunity to see how his new steed stacks up against the other new boats such as Farr designs like Foncia and Gitana Eighty, the Finot-Conqs such as Generali and Brit Air, the new Verdier/VPLP boats such as Groupe Bel and Safran, not to mention the new Juan K-designed Pindar hopefully this time with a rig that stays upright.

For there it will be the IMOCA circuit with his sponsorship agreement with Ecover at it is now concluding in the middle of 2009.

More photos on the following pages...