Disaster for Groupama 3

As Franck Cammas' maxi-tri suffers a structure failure in her windward float

At 1216 GMT today, Franck Cammas, skipper of Groupama 3 called his shore team to inform them that an aft beam bulkhead had broken, leading to serious damage to the float. With strong winds from a cold front chasing them, Groupama 3 is slowly making headway towards Cape Town some 1,700 miles away and is forced to abandon her attempt on the Jules Verne Trophy…

At around midday today the Groupama 3 crew heard a big cracking sound as a bulkhead attached to the aft beam broke in the harsh conditions as the giant trimaran was reaching in a powerful NNEly windand rough seas. The crew knew they had to sail fast to stay to the east of the front chasing them in order to drop south into the Southern Ocean with the depression The crack n the bulkhead then caused the windward float to follow suit and with the damage clearly worsening, the crew immediately stopped the boat and concluded that it would be necessary to abandon this round the world attempt.

Skipper Franck Cammas reported: “We’d spent the night sailing fast to stay ahead of the front and this morning Thomas Coville and Bruno Jeanjean were on deck when they heard a big ‘crack’: there was a small rack between the aft beam and the port float. Conditions were really bouncy: we came to a standstill with the wind right on our stern so we could open the hatch and get down inside the float. Part of the section between the beam and the float, level with the bulkhead, had become detached. As such the structural integrity was reduced by at least half. It is impossible to image effecting repairs at sea due to the conditions. At the moment we’re still being shaken about: there was 35 knots of wind on the beam at the time of the incident and just now, we’ve been caught up by the front so we’ve got 40 knots of breeze...

"We’ve dropped the mainsail and Groupama 3 is running before the wind to avoid any harsh motion. We’re going to draw up a route to avoid having too much wind and excessively large waves. We’re heading south to let the second low pass by us tonight and then we’ll head off towards Cape Town tomorrow morning, Tuesday. We’re continuing with the same watch system and I’m working with Stan [Honey] to see what we can do next. The idea then is to get back to France as quickly as possible: the crew’s up for that and if we can set off again before the end of January then it’s still feasible to make a new attempt!”

Director of External Communication at Groupama, Frédérique Granado, commented: "The most important thing is that the crew are safe and sound. Our priority is that they make Cape Town under the safest possible conditions. We know we can count on their experience and their determination to preserve Groupama 3. Hearing them allude to a new departure this winter is the best proof of this.”

Cape Town is around 1,700 miles away where the team will make the quickest pitstop. However the crew estimate it will still take a week of sailing for Groupama 3 to reach there before making a repair prior to heading north again bound for France.

Clearly Cammas and his crew are very disappointed after this ten and a half day voyage. The trimaran had confirmed her fantastic performance by at one point pulling out a 700 mile lead over Orange 2's reference pace on her way down the North Atlantic.