Stitched up in the Doldrums

Mike Golding recounts to thedailysail about Ecover III's mixed fortunes in the Transat Jacques Vabre.

Mike Golding has just completed his umpeenth transatlantic race, finishing the Transat Jacques Vabre in fifth place. While on the one hand this is a good result in a fleet of 17, considering that his Ecover III is a brand new Open 60 and the TJV her first competitive outing. However Golding and his co-skipper and sailmaker Bruno Dubois led the fleet for the latter stages going down the north Atlantic but lost their grip on the lead as they passed through the Doldrums.

"I am obviously a bit gutted about what happened in the Doldrums, but there you go." Golding told thedailysail from the comfort of his hotel room in Salvador. " Karine Fauconnier [who sailed on the 50ft tri Crepes Whaou] said she was trying to call us because she was stuck exactly where we were aiming! It was a matter of 40 miles further west and you were flying..."

Golding is slightly flummoxed by how much they lost in the Doldrums. "It was strange - we didn’t stop very much, we just weren’t going fast enough. We were being told that there wasn’t much lateral difference in the breeze right to left, but that didn’t turn out to be correct. It was clear from the files we were cutting it fine.

"We had a bit of a problem - we out tacticed ourselves, because when we all headed west with Gitana 30-40 miles behind us on DTF, we were on an unfavoured gybe going west. We did that for six hours - which is quite a long time to 'eat black bread', as Bruno puts it, and what we thought we’d do is stitch Gitana up and do a short gybe to the south, so that they see our course kink to the south. So we did that and it really worked well: Gitana gybed and started heading south when we carried on west. But then you get a bit nerve wracked by it - because Gitana has cut 80 miles inside of you and is making ground on you towards the mark. So in the end we bottled out and said 'that’s enough'. We had 80 miles of separation with Gitana and had VM, which were a long shot at that point, on the outside [to the west] and those were the two boats we were looking at. When you have a guy like Loick Peyron, who is presumably getting all the weather routing from the Gitana team, you think 'there must be a way through here'. So we suckered ourselves into turning left too early by 40 miles.

"Having said all that, the reality is if we’d set ourselves up 40 miles further west, the guys behind would have gone even further west. It is like if you have five cards, the first person to put the cards down doesn’t have any choice and gets a 1 in 5 chance while the last person gets to see all the cards. Whatever we’d done boats would have always set up on the right hand side of us. Then the questionmark was how far is far enough? We did try and put another hitch in back to the west, we did a similar track to Foncia, but ours is 40 miles further east. In hindsight there were plenty more opportunities to get west if we’d been prepared to lose position and it is always tempting not to lose position..."



From the Doldrums on the boats broke out into southeasteries and it was a straightline reach to the finish. It was not only a procession, but a case of the rich getting richer, says Golding. "On the big reach in here I was in a panic, thinking this is not looking good because Safran is streamrollering everyone, but I have come to the conclusion that that was just weather related. Safran was going so quick in those reaching conditions."

This surprised Golding because earlier in the race, in similar conditions, Ecover III had had an edge over Marc Guillemot and Charles Caudrelier's VPLP/Verdier design. "So individual boats ahead were always gaining, boats behind were always losing and the only exception was Safran," Golding continues. " Safran is clearly quick in those conditions and we struggled a bit in an area where we shouldn’t have been struggling. And what is it? Part of it is we had a problem with ballast - we’ve got two tanks that are leaking badly into each other and we have an inability to load and unload water - one of the scoops was broken - the one scoop we needed. So it was like we had all these gears but no clutch."

The scoops are used to bring water ballast into the boat and Ecover III, like most of the Open 60s has two of them - one on each side, for each tack. The broken scoop was the leeward one to starboard. Golding confirms that the issue was simply a mechanical issue rather than it having been thwacked by some flotsam. "It jammed up and I was having to turn it with a spanner and lift it with a strap over my back and jump on it to get it down - in the end it gave up the ghost. Then we weren’t able to scoop water from that side of the boat, so we had to load water through the windward scoop and sail the boat flat and go low."

Regardless of these technical problems, plus problems with the engine and hence the charging, Golding still feels that the main deciding factor in this year's Transat Jacques Vabre for Ecover III was poor tactics in the Doldrums.

"It was very light, the whole race was slow," Golding continues. "The revelation to us was that we are quite quick downwind in these light conditions, because we are not supposed to be. And all that crap about spinnakers [that the Groupe Bel crew cited as being the source of Ecover's speed advantage prior to the Doldrums] - that was bollocks. We were basically playing the shifts - every time we played a shift we made a gain – it was that simple. And we were watching Bel who was right with us, miss the shifts and then wondering why they were five miles further back..."

Golding says they learned valuable lessons about the new boat in the race but they still have more potential to eek out of the her. They might have achieved more in this respect in the TJV had they not spent so long fixing problems. "The true of these boats as they get more complicated, is that if things go well then you’re fine, but if things go badly then your eye comes off the ball really quickly. You have to prioritise what you need. At the end of the day we need power to make the boat work...

"I have to say that from the deck upwards the boat is perfect. The rig was a great area. No one looks hard at our rig, because it looks just like a classic rig, but it so isn’t a classic rig." On Ecover the Southern Spars tube has a single diamond (supporting the bottom half of the tube) and rotates within a single set of hinged spreaders. "It is such a cool rig and it has just gone in the boat and worked from the get go. We are very pleased with it. Virbac gave us the heebeegeebees when they had all the problems with their rig, but we have had no similar problems. We are getting better rotation than we did with the old rig.

"We can get 40degrees rotation instead of 30 deg. The rig is not the ultimate rotating rig, it doesn't have deck spreaders, it is a compromise. Coming in on that reach [to the finish] it was definitely doing the job, it was over rotated, exactly where it should be for that particular point of sail. So that’s been good and we’ve had no major halyard problems, the locks are all working. The sails have been fantastic we have one which is a bit of a lemon, but we can sort that."



Golding's co-skipper for the TJV was his longterm sailmaker, North Sails France's Bruno Dubois, himself an ocean racing veteran. "We had to convince him that you have to make Code 5s flatter and after 4,300 miles he agrees!

"The sail crossovers are interesting," continues Golding. "We were going downwind with the kite up and full main - I got on the helm and was thinking ‘22 knots with full kite and full main - not a problem’. That would have been no problem on the old boat. I would have taken the kite to 25 or even more. But I got on the helm and the boat felt really fruity and a bit border line and I was worried we had control issues. Then Bruno pointed out to me that we have almost a third more sail rea. A bigger mainsail, another 100sqft in the kite and I thought ‘fair enough, the boat is different’. Because the boat looks and feels so much like Ecover II in many respects it catches you out."

Golding admits that the boat is more of a handful with the added horsepower, however the sail plan is easier to handle due to their sizeable winch package. "A lot of people were saying to me before that we have overcooked it, because we have two 880s for mainsheet and traveller and even Bruno now thinks it was a good call, because it is just so nice to be able to wind stuff in and have proper control over it. Because we have winched the boat correctly and we have the two grinders, etc just the whole handling system is really good, so in many respects it feels better than the old boat, even though the sail plan is bigger and the sails are heavier, etc. All the gennikers and kites are 1:1 now because we have no 2:1 halyards, and that was hard work, but in fact in the end not too bad."

On the new boat they are using a combination of Southern Spars and Karver halyard locks, at this stage for Golding to access which he prefers. Southern Spars are the benchmark, however he likes the fact that the Karver locks are external to the mast and in theory one could chimmy up the mast to replace one if it failed. "That it is a zero chafe option - if it is all operating correctly. As a solution I like it, but it is not a very positive action. You are always sure it is on, but you are never sure if it is off. That has caused some concern! I think it may be a problem of lubrication and maintenance. In the end the locks worked all the time and did the business and we had kites up for days and days and got zero chafe." Something that was not the case on Ecover II...

So having raced intensely many of the other top Open 60s from all the other design houses - Farr, VPLP/Verdier and Finot - what's Golding's assessment of the competition?

"Initially I was pretty worried about Foncia, inevitably she was ' Foncia' [by this Golding means a Michel Desjoyeaux boat] - very quick everywhere. We did actually smoke him downwind, right next door to him. He has to got to be worried about that. But we all had our moments.

"If there is one boat out there in the fleet that I liked more than the others, it is the VPLP/Verdier boats. I think they are really quite interseting, they are nice looking, quite technical. I am very interested in the curved daggerboards [on Safran] , we spent a lot of time with Groupe Bel in a lot of different configurations and we are a very similar speed to her. It will be interesting to see how the curved daggerboards fare in the upwind stretch coming back on the B to B [the singlehanded non-stop return race from the TJV finish]. They can’t be as efficient as a straight board and in the end in the Vendee you do need that upwind element once you are round the Horn. I not saying she won’t go upwind, I’m just saying I’m not sure she will - so much more is going into lift as opposed to lateral resistance, so there must be a cut-off. Mind you Mich could have had another Finot and it would have been fast."

One of the surprises of the new generation boat is just how slow the Finot-Conq boats have been, and by this we mean BritAir and Generali rather than Alex Thomson's Hugo Boss. "It is a worry when Generali is struggling against the old PRB," confirms Golding. Yann Elies' boat has spent much of the latter stages of the race up against Sam Davies and Jeanne Gregoire's Roxy. "They have to be worried. The other place where you might find those boats come into their own - and that is very Finot - is that when they’re in the South they may be blisteringly fast. You just don’t know. Some of these newer boats, like the VPLP/Verdier boats and ours might be more of a handful in the south. It is hard to imagine how Finot-Conq could have made a slower boat. The boats do look big though.

And then there's the new Juan K-designed Pindar, a boat with more beam and more sailpower than anything else in the fleet - that Brian Thompson and Will Oxley were to have raced before her mast broke. For the second time. "It would have been interesting to have seen how Pindar got on in this race. I think she would have been smoked on bits of it and on others she would have been on fire. The question is would it have made a difference on the race?"

Golding's sponsor Ecover are backing the singlehanded B2B (Brazil to Brittany rather than 'business to business) race returning from the TJV finish, however at present the start date is still to be finalised and will be decided once more Open 60s have reached Salvador. Golding says the rumour is 28 November.

"It will be very interesting to see how the boats get on in a solo format, because some of these boats might not go so well solo. So we’ll see."

To summarise, Golding is pleased that Ecover III hasn't proved to be a "lemon". "Clearly we have a boat that can compete and that has to be the upside of this Jacques Vabre even if we didn’t get the result we wanted. When we set out we were managing our expectations and obviously our expectations changed about half way through the race when we thought we had the potential to win it! But we just didn’t crack it."

Part of the issue is that the IMOCA Open 60 class is now incredibly competitive with old hands from the 60ft trimarans (such as Loick Peyron and Marc Guillemot) coming through and many other highly talented sailors such as Yann Elies and Armel leCleac'h graduating up from the Figaro.

"That is the whole nub of it," says Golding. "There are a lot better boats, good teams and it will be hard to do well. It is just rather annoying that it was Mich that did it! (ie the race favourite) I was very pleased to see Bernard [Stamm] up there. Merf [Merfyn Owen] is viewed as a more conservative designer but clearly the boats he is producing are quick. We had a good boat, it is good foundation but we still have some work to do this winter to get the boat Vendee ready. No matter how early you build you’ve always got shed loads of work to do! I think we have a potential race winner in our hands and in the Vendee I feel pretty happy that we have not shot our boat before we started and I’m not sure I’d feel that way if I was on a Finot right now!"