Another keel on its way out

Brian Thompson's Bahrain Team Pindar finished but with her keel detached from its rams...

Brian Thompson and his Bahrain Team Pindar crossed the Vendée Globe finish line off Les Sables d'Olonne this morning at 08:31:55 GMT to secure fifth place in the solo non stop around the world race. Finishing in a time of 98 days 20 hours 29 min 55 sec, Thompson managed to stave off the ongoing attacks of Dee Caffari, while coming home just 7hours10min after Marc Guillemot’s keel-less Safran.

Incredibly on his last night at sea Bahrain Team Pindar suffered a broken keel pin (holding the giant hydraulic rams to the canting keel) and finished with the keel flayling freely, but at least still attached (which was not the case for third placed Marc Guillemot's Safran). According to Thompson the pin broke a couple of days ago but with Dee Caffari chasing him down, didn’t make it public. It disintegrated finally last night. Thankfully at the time he was sailing in flat water so the keel wasn’t likely to damage the boat.

The keel rams had been given Thompson problems ever since the Equator. “The seals were just perishing. You pump up the ram, first with the engine and then when I lost power with the hand pump and within two hours the keel was back into the centre and all the oil has transferred from one side of the ram to the other side. I was down to one ram quite early, because the sensor was leaking on the starboard side. So then I used the port ram and that sensor started leaking which was the outboard side of the ram. Then I used both rams on the inboard side - so push and pull - and both of them were pulling in turn. So I was getting low on [hydraulic’ oil because every time it leaks you lose a little, but I just had enough oil. I did have some engine oil that I would have put in next.”

The keel has been the latest in a long series of technical issues that Thompson had to deal with during the race aboard his extreme Juan Kouyoumdjian designed IMOCA Open 60, mostly thanks to the unpleasant scenario of the Vendee Globe being the boat’s first significant race.

“This is the first offshore race we’ve started and we’ve come fifth in the Vendee Globe!” said Thompson. “It is really not bad. Obviously it would be nice to be a bit closer to Armel [le Cleac’h], and it feels like we could be.”

While his competitors were racing in anger, Thompson was having to spend his time fire-fighting as he nursed his powerful boat around the race course. “Most days I wasn’t sure I’d make it around, but I was still determined,” Thompson told thedailysail. “The number one focus was to finish, it was ‘I’ve got to fix it’ because I’ve got to finish. I could have thrown the toys out of the pram – ‘oh, not another thing broken…’ So it was harder than I thought it would be. The boat was great overall. It was just teething problems that become quite an issue when you are trying to do a round the world race by yourself and no outside assistant is allowed.” He says the worst thing was getting stuck up the mast on Christmas day. “That was very rough, bumpy and not Christmasy at all!”

While there were a number of issues of varying degrees of seriousness, the most threatening to his race was when to the southwest of Australia Bahrain Team Pindar suffered some broken structure in her bow compartment.

“Apart from the keel pin breaking yesterday, that was the biggest thing,” recounted Thompson. “When I saw it – it was ‘I’m probably not going to be able to carry on with this’. And talking to the designers they said ‘no, you can do without those’ but then funnily enough when the bulkhead in front broke [later in the race], they said ‘that’s not important, the other one was really important!’”

“It could have been more enjoyable if I’d got more into the routine of sailing, sail changing and sailing to a higher level with weather, etc,” says Thompson, who whom the experience must have been fairly ghastly. “I didn’t have the luxury of indulging in pursuits like steering. The sailing bit was always fairly non-daunting [having previously sailed on maxi-multihulls]. It was just dealing with all the repairs and to be confident in all your own decisions. And just to have done a race like this, when you see how tough it is that it is quite an exclusive club of people who’ve done it. Even though we did well partly by attrition, we still did well.”

His race tactically was also hampered by a lack of communications. His Fleet 77 satcoms gave up the ghost early on in the race while the Iridium Open Port broke at the last ice gate. From there the only weather information he was able to receive were MaxSea Chopper GRIB files. Then over the last few days he lost power completely. “I had two alternators and they both had the same manufacturing fault. Half way through the race they realised they had some part on their ‘field coil’ that they’d bought in, a plastic part that failed and they’ve had hundreds or 1000s of failures and we just had two in a bad batch.”

So is Bahrain Team Pindar, the beamest, most powerful boat in this year’s Vendee Globe and believed by many to be the shape of things to come, indeed the best bit of kit for the solo non-stop round the world race? “I don’t think it is the ultimate downwind boat,” concedes Thompson. “It is heavier than the others which makes it better for reaching, but downwind you are pushing an extra 2.5 tonnes through the water, so you are always trying to overcome that.”

However Thompson is more optimistic for most other courses. “For the Transat definitely and the Route du Rhum or the new Route du Cafe. Round Britain or Round Europe would be fantastic – lots of mixed conditions, but if it a race with a lot of downwind, which a lot of races like the Route du Rhum or the TJV tend to be, then you would be okay for the first week or so and then you’d just have to hang in there. Reaching and upwind – and downwind in light air it would be good - it has a tall rig. It is just when you are trying to push it along and you are trying to get 25 knots out of it, you have to have a bit more sail than everyone else to do that.”

So do you have to sail her in a special way because she is so beamy? “She feels very stable. In a storm you feel very very safe to keep on going fast. A totally minor issue is that the lower shrouds aren’t covered in Dyneema, so I couldn’t let the main out very far. They look a long way out there, but in fact it is not. It is trimmed for 90 degrees and slightly eased for hitting the lower shrouds and the batten has eaten into the lower shroud on the starboard side. So if that had been covered I could have eased the main out more. So I had to reef early to stop the main rounding the boat up. The main was always over trimmed, so you might as well have a small sail over-trimmed than a big one, because it weather cocks you. So it made it hard for the pilots.”

According to Thompson the sails are now full of little tears while there is still a nice luff to leech tear in the A3 which he managed early on in the race. “There is plenty of sail damage, but I am still using them, although I wouldn’t use them again!”

At present plans for the boat now are vague. She is returning to the UK and Hamble Yacht Services where she will go through a refit before being shipped out to Bahrain to be parked in front of the King’s box during the F1 Grand Prix. Thompson hopes she is going to do the IMOCA circuit. Meanwhile there are all sorts of plans afoot to try and take Bahraini sailors out on board her. He says he would like

Arriving in Les Sables d’Olonne Thompson was reunited with his young family, wife Natalie and his young daughter Genevive, 3½ and Tristan 1½.

See the official video of Brian's finish here .

See thedailysail's less glamorous video of Brian's arrival at the dock and of his broken keel pin here