Vendee Globe carnage

In this two part article we look at the devastion of the IMOCA fleet that resulted in only one third of the fleet finishing

While the start of the Vendee Globe last autumn was allegedly attended by more people than the start of the Tour de France cycling, the present race has seen a high price paid by the IMOCA Open 60 fleet, with the highest attrition ever witnessed in the non-stop singlehanded round the world race. At present – and bare in mind there are still three boats in the Atlantic yet to finish – of the 30 starters there have been 18 retirements and one boat, PRB, in a strange limbo-land: dismasted, but awarded third place due to this damage occurring as a result of going to the result of capsized Jean le Cam off Cape Horn.

On the plus side there have been eight actual finishers so far, but the majority of these could be accurately described as the ‘walking wounded’, whether it was racing with a thread bare mainsail ( Aviva), or with a keel that had broken off completely ( Safran) or where both rams had stopped working ( Bahrain Team Pindar).

Historically the Vendee Globe has a 50% attrition rate, although in the 2000-1 and 2004-5 races it was substantially less - around 30-40%. In the latest Vendee Globe the attrition stands at around 66%, comparable to the devastating 1996 Vendee Globe, when three boats were lost in storm-force conditions off Australia (Tony Bullimore and Thierry Dubois rescued by the valiant efforts of the Royal Australian navy and Raphael Dinelli famously plucked from his sinking ship by Pete Goss) and then the tragic disappearance of Franco-Canadian skipper Jerry Roufs mid-Pacific.

The difference this time is that not only is the attrition rate up, it represents a higher percentage of a substantially bigger fleet - while 30 boats started this Vendee Globe, there were only 16 in the 1996-7 race.

So is this a big disaster? Several key players think not, or at least are not surprised by it. As Alain Gautier, safety consultant on this race and winner of the second Vendee Globe puts it: “It is a mechanical sport like racing cars and if you compare it with something like the Le Mans 24 hours or Paris-Dakar if you look at the last 10 years, the percentage is approaching the Vendee Globe - 62% don’t finish. That is a lot. Why we talk more about sailing boats, is that it is more impressive when you see a boat dismasted or capsized. But when you see a car stopped, the media don’t talk about it, but a few cars in the Le Mans 24 hours break their engine after two hours. We have to accept that and maybe to take some lessons for the future. It will always be a mechanical sport.”

BT skipper Seb Josse agrees: “It is not a catastrophe. Two boats are lost. One - Generali is not a problem of the boat. The second one was in a bad spot and – I think for the safety it is good now.

“Before the start I knew that just half of the fleet would finish. For sure we had really bad weather from the start, the second night was really hard. We saw a lot of boats dismast and after the weather was just shit all the time. In the Indian Ocean it was hard and St Helena it was really hard too, really bad waves.

“We see the Volvo - they are really strong boats but all the boats break their booms and stop when there is 50 knots of wind. At some stage the waves are too hard and we are playing with carbon boats. They are not aluminium. It is not the BT Global Challenge.”

So why has there been so much carnage?

Among this year’s record number of starters, an unprecedented 20 had been built over the four years since the previous Vendee Globe. Over this period, IMOCA, the Open 60 class association, attempted to rearrange its calendar so that there are more races with the inclusion for example of the doublehanded non-stop Barcelona World Race. In theory this should have resulted in a better prepared Vendee Globe fleet. But as Ecover 3 skipper Mike Golding, himself a victim of a broken mast in this race, puts it: “A lot of those boats are new and even though most were built in plenty of time for the Vendee and did other events, there were some boats there which hadn’t finished any of them, and the fact is they kept a 100% record on that…”

What is certainly true is that the latest generation IMOCA Open 60s have become more powerful, with beamier chined hull shapes, substantially taller rigs with larger sail plans and vast amounts of internal water ballast, enabling them to increase their overall displacement by as much as 50%. At the same time they have also become more complex with all manner of rotating wingmasts, deck spreaders, kick-up rudders, interceptors, planing boards/trim tabs, halyard locks, hydraulics, sailing handling systems, etc. Despite it being unanimously agreed that most of the top campaigns were better prepared than ever before, each having a small army of shore crew, the power and complexity of the new boats are certainly the principle reasons why 75% of them failed to make it around the planet, while only 40% of the older boats dropped out.

With this number of new boats, the event was also potentially the most competitive to date with old hands such as Michel Desjoyeaux, Brian Thompson, Loick Peyron and Marc Guillemot moving across or back from large multihulls, along with a fresh influx of Figaro sailors such as Sam Davies, Armel le Cleac’h, Yann Elies and Jeremie Beyou graduating up.

Mike Golding is of the opinion that once they had suffered a few pastings in the Indian Ocean, the leaders developed a rhythm a few notches back from flat-out, that they all more or less abided by. That was until Michel Desjoyeaux flew up through the fleet and entered the mix. Was it the added pressure of Foncia’s arrival in the leading pack that caused Golding and Peyron to put pedal back to the metal, ultimately resulting their boats’ dismasting?

Lost keels	Safran, Veolia, VM Materiaux
Problems with keel head	Temenos
Dismasted due to breakage	Ecover, Gitana Eighty,  Aquarelle, DCNS, Groupe Bel
Other dismasting	PRB
Sail damage	Artemis
Spreader damage	Spirit of Canada, Delta Dore
Rudder	Paprec Virbac, BT, Cheminees Poujoulat, Pakea Bizkaia
Skipper injury	Generali
Assorted damage	Maisonneuve
Structural problems	Hugo Boss

The detail

Looking at the actual cases, the most common ailments in this Vendee Globe have been dismastings, rudder issues and the high profile keel breakages/bulb loses.

In the mid to late 1990s when wide flat decked, light bulbed Open 60s were all showing a tendency to capsize and remain inverted and hence stability rules were introduced to prevent this reoccuring, unfortunately there is little pattern to the present carnage. All the dismastings happened in the first half of the race - the terrible conditions straight after the start that claimed three and the equally nasty wave patterns in the Indian Ocean which put front rankers like Ecover 3 and Gitana Eighty out of action – while the keel issues were in the second half of the race, just like the previous Vendee Globe, when Ecover 2’s keel dropped off just before finishing, while Skandia’s was claimed by Davy Jones off the Brazilian coast en route home. In this race in pretty much every example of a specific breakage there are exceptions, boats that did make it around without that particular gear failing.

Matters are made all the harder in terms of being able to analyse this (not to mention teams wishing to make insurance claims), as it is thought that some of the rig and keel breakages may have been delayed reactions, skippers reporting that they were unaware of having hit that errant submerged container or growler the moment disaster occurred. A clonk with something substantial a few days or even weeks before and a few thousand cycles later the result could be no bulb or a broken keel or mast - something worth bearing in mind for any yacht owner.

There are a couple of obvious weak points in the gear the boats are using. Transom-hung kick-up rudders are one, particularly when they kick up (or are hauled out of the water deliberately) by 90degrees and get slammed by waves. Equally there are problems with carbon fibre keel foils breaking (as opposed to the fabricated steel foils that broke in the last race).

While it is tempting to draw conclusions on designer-specific issues, again this is nowhere near clear cut. For example it is tempting to look at how the keels both dropped off the 2004-5 generation Lombard-designs, but on Jean le Cam’s VM Materiaux the bulb parted company from the foil while on Roland Jourdain’s Veolia Environnement the foil snapped off at the hull exit. In any case, since the previous Vendee, aside from the basic shell of the boat, Veolia Environnement was almost completely rebuilt to design work carried out by Juan Kouyoumdjian’s team and this specifically included the keel where the structural work was carried out by Herve Devaux Systems, which sadly had also failed for Jourdain during the 2004-5 Vendee Globe, when he had been forced to retire half way through.



After Véolia Environnement suffered her keel breakage this time – Marc Lombard’s office was quick to issue this release explaining the situation:

“Following the capsize of VM Matériaux , the rescue of Jean le Cam and the loss of bulb of Véolia, it seems important to relate how racing teams are actually working, to describe how our (but also other) boats are built, modified and constantly improved.

“From Jean le Cam's report, the collision with an ‘Undefined Floating Object’ would be the reason of the loss of its bulbous ballast, which is in other words unpredictable damage. Although the consequences are disastrous, this kind of collision cannot be calculated or taken in account in any load model or building method. Beside the use of a sonar, we do not see any solution to this kind of problems.

“ Véolia is fitted with a keel and a bulb, which are not issued from our design office, but have been engineered and designed by concurrent design and engineering offices, without our consent in any way. It is a great pity that in those ‘so structurally important evolutions’ our office has not even been asked for a quotation....

“In any case, it is important to say that competition in the IMOCA class is becoming more and more technical, the racing teams are totally independent from their sub-contractors and they are totally free to use any design office to make any modification that they want and overall to use or not use the help of sub-contractors in their technical modifications.

“In those teams, the culture of secrecy is high, especially towards the competing racing teams, but also to the designers of their own boat (that are independent and can possibly work for other teams).

“Yacht racing is, on this aspect, very close to Formula One racing where ‘racing teams’ are doing most of the technical work and evolutions on their own, accepting in fact the responsibility with this way of working.

“It is highly unfortunate that every time a technical problem occurs, the media behave just as if those boats were similar to production boats, and built by irresponsible people.
“That is definitely not the case... The teams are totally responsible of the management of the technical decisions. The ‘new ideas and new technology laboratory’ that are racing yachts comes with a built-in technical risk that is as high as the level of competition itself. In most cases the racing teams are very aware of that, and in most cases they fully accept those risks.

“Anyone who would not accept those risks and would let the responsibility of their own acts to such or such subcontractor is not welcome in the ‘racing yacht business’. This is the reason why Formula one car drivers or racing boat skippers are considered heroes.

“Thanks to Jean and Roland who behave as they should, with respect to their subcontractors.”

While Veolia’s keel snapped off just below the pivot point at the hull exit, just as it did on Marc Guillemot’s VPLP/Verdier-designed Safran a few days later, several other boats fitted with carbon fibre keels suffered breakage at the head of the foil, where the hydraulic rams (or ram) attach. On Dominique Wavre’s Temenos 2, the two carbon fibre verticals to which the rams attach simply sheared off. Mike Golding says that since Ecover 3 has an identical foil he was understandly extremely concerned about his own foil at this time (on Dee Caffari’s Aviva has a fabricated stainless steel foil which went around unscathed). The new Finot-Conq designs also experienced this problem prior to the Vendee Globe, most notably Hugo Boss in the Barcelona World Race, but on these the head of the carbon foil was beefed up by fitted with a steel cap at the top of the foil for the rams to attach to.

Rudder problems were the biggest source of trouble during this race and were so severe in the cases of Seb Josse’s BT and Jean-Pierre Dick’s Paprec Virbac, both race leaders at one time, that they were forced to retire. However rudders problems were not always terminal - Michel Desjoyeaux managed to complete the race after jury rigging a broken pin on Foncia, and they were not limited to the Farr designs. Sam Davies and Arnaud Boissieres also had similar issues with their older generation Finot/Conq designs.



“There is a lot of stuff to hit,” says Farr’s Patrick Shaughnessy. “I think the kick-up rudder arrangements on our boats seemed to suffer a bit after they kicked up, and in a case when they didn’t fully come out of the water, they had some loading in a partially kicked up state that was greater than what we anticipated.” So basically the rudder case must be beefed up to withstand the load inflicted on it if a wave breaks on to the rudder tip when it is flipped up to 90 degrees, or alternatively the rudder should flip up by 180deg to the vertical (as it does on for example Sam Davies’ Roxy), in which case the transom needs to be strengthened.

There is also the issue over whether the rudders are built into movable cases within the transom or are literally transom-hung like a dinghy. On Paprec-Virbac 2 and Gitana Eighty for example they were transom hung because of the trim tabs/planning wedges.

Rig breakages are typically harder to analyse since the evidence tends to get cut away and hurled overboard as rapidly as possible to prevent it damaging the hull. However over the four years of this Vendee cycle more rigs have been claimed than ever before, with five (excluding PRB) in this Vendee Globe, three in the Barcelona World Race, Artemis 1 in the 2007 Transat Jacques Vabre, BritAir and Aviva in the Ecover Transat B2B, etc. Again there seems to be no pattern to this – they have occurred to boats with fixed masts, rotating masts, rigged in difference ways, broken in different ways, with different sail configurations up. For example in the Indian Ocean, both Gitana Eighty and Ecover 3’s lost their rigs during wipe-outs. Gitana Eighty had a fixed rig while Ecover’s was a small section rotating spar with a single lower diamond. This race also saw first – two boats, Spirit of Canada and Delta Dore, pulling out with spreader damage, the latter due to a broken fitting at the mast, the former again through damage caused during a wipe-out.

One of the reasons certainly why there was so much carnage aloft this time is that teams were trying to enlarge their sail plans, in many cases adding several metres to their mast height, while at the same time trying to minimise tube weight. Add this to a more powerful hull shape and the ability to carry huge amounts of water ballast and the loads going through the rig have gone up massively.

The degree of carnage this time was also due to the weather being severe. The last two Vendee Globes were relatively light in round the world race terms and had few casualties whereas the severe conditions of 1996-7, as was the case this time, brought wholescale destruction.

“In the last two Vendees I recall getting on a weather system and riding it for 1000s and 1000s of miles,” says Mike Golding. “In the last Vendee I had four or five weather systems - tops - throughout the whole Southern Ocean. In this Vendee Globe they seemed to be coming in and sliding diagonally across our path, maybe because we were being pinned further to the north, so consequently there were more manoeuvres. And also the gates were coming up very quickly, one after another, so that again led to more manoeuvres.”

Golding doesn’t think this was due to the inclusion into the course this time of more icegates than ever before which kept the boats north (although his personal view is that there were too many). “The thing is it is the weather and it is the planet and it can happen anywhere. You could be north, you could be south and you’d still get whacked.”
An issue with the boats that relates to this is that a lot of the engineering work in the IMOCA class is empirical - ie what broke last time is made stronger so that it won’t break this time, what didn’t break last time is deemed fine for this time. With two light Vendee Globes before this, perhaps the latest generation of Vendee Globe boats were built too lightly to handle this year’s onslaught?

In tomorrow's article we look at what is likely to be done to put this right...