Cammas on standby

Groupama III and her 10 crew ready to take on the Jules Verne Trophy

Tomorrow, Thursday December 6, Franck Cammas and his crew will go on stand-by awaiting an appropriate weather window to take their 105ft maxi-trimaran Groupama 3, around the world non-stop on an attempt on the Jules Verne Trophy. The record to beat is of course that of Bruno Peyron and Orange 2, who in March 2005 set the present time of 50 days 16 hours and 20 minutes.

At the Groupama base within the famous submarine silos of Lorient, Cammas' team is nearly complete, with sailors flying in from Brazil, South Africa and France. Most of the crew already known their VPLP-designed trimaran intimately having already broken four records in her over the course of this year. This included the Route of Discovery record between Cadiz and San Salvadore in the Bahamas, Miami to New York and then the two big ones which really established the boat and team's credentials - setting a new outright New York-Lizard record of just 4 days 3 hours 57 minutes and 54 seconds, during which time they also established a new outright 24 hour record covering a crazy 794 miles in a day as an average speed of 33.08 knots. (See our report from this here).

Along with team manager, Stephane Guilbaud and skipper Franck Cammas the crew line-up are watch leaders Franck Proffit and Steve Ravussin, Fred Le Peutrec, Loic le Mignon, Sebastien Audigane, Jacques Caraës, Jan Dekker and maxi-cat round the world veteran Ronan le Goff. Of these only Dekker, who has sailed extensively on Groupama II, is new to the maxi-tri. Sadly Marcel van Triest who was supposed to be on board as navigator had to withdraw for personal reasons. His replacement will be announced early next week. Routing and weather collation ashore will be carried out bySylvain Mondon of Meteo France.

Like most record campaigns of this type the team are running a 'code' system indicating the departure likelihood. Code red obviously equals 'no go' but they also have Code Orange (possible start within 96 hours), code yellow (probably start within 48 hours) and code green (definite start within 24 hours). At present the team are 'code red'.

See our report on Groupama III
Our video of sailing on board with Paul Larsen
Video of skipper Franck Cammas giving his impressions of the boat