Tales from the Transat Jacques Vabre

We speak to Mike Golding and Alex Thomson about their voyages

Remarkably for someone who was out into the small hours and beyond sampling the delights of Salvador the previous night, Alex Thomson is in remarkably good form when we speak to him. He and his boat's previous owner Roland Jourdain were second monohull to finish in the Transat Jacques Vabre, narrowly ahead of Mike Golding and Brian Thompson on Ecover.

"Sill put on this big dinner for 60 people last night with Brazilian karate dancers," he recounts. "Half way through they stopped the dancing and made the presentation of this big wooden key of Sill to me, so Bilou [Roland Jourdain] and I had to get up on stage and do a little karate dance. It was really nice - the Sill lot are top guys and apparently I am the English family. They will be there to greet us in La Rochelle [at the end of the Defi Atlantique]. They have been brilliant."

Thomson has previously raced the TJV with Josh Hall on an Open 60 and subsequently the OSTAR singlehanded on an Open 50. With next year's Vendee Globe on the agenda Thomson was using this race as an opportunity to learn from Roland Jourdain, who is one of the most experienced skippers in the class.

"The biggest thing is trying to find the pace for the whole thing," says Thomson of what he has learned. "I tended to be too reactionary to things all the time, do things in a hectic way and learning to understand more the way the pace works and chilling out a bit more.

"We talked a lot about ways to do things and how to get out of trouble. Whenever we did a manoeuvre, I always asked if I was on my own how would I do this? I don’t think there’d be an awful lot of difference. I don’t think we’d have had the kite up for as long as we did singlehanded. You’d be grinding in the headsails and rolling them up but apart from that we wouldn’t do anything different.

Headsail changes were perhaps the biggest eye-opener. "It frustrated me a little bit, but I can understand why - you are going upwind in 18 knots and the breeze picks up to 25 knots and you need to put the trinquette up, you bear away on this boat - you dump the main and headsail, bear away to 140 angle, roll the headsail, unroll the trinquette and off you go again. “But we’re losing miles Bilou! You can’t do this!” And he was like “well let’s do it the other way and rip up the headsails…”

Aside from this there was the sheer power of the boat to come to terms with. "There is the situation with the mastheads and the code sails and the spinnakers - I could see it being extremely scary shall we say, but I think I have a healthy enough respect for that not to put myself into a situation where I get into trouble with that."

Thomson describes how it can get out of hand... "When we went through the first front and we popped the masthead and it fell down and went around the keel, there was only about 18 knots of breeze. And we got the fractional up and Bilou was pulling the sock up and suddenly we had 30-32 knots of breeze, and the fractional spinnaker filled and we’d got full main up and the boat was sitting on 22-23 knots. I was driving the boat thinking, I don’t really need this - the first time I am sailing the boat at full-on pace downwind as deep as this. It felt alright but all I could think of was poor old Bilou on the foredeck, pulling the sock up and trying to tidy up, half under water the whole time, and I was sure he was thinking “I hope that Brit can drive the boat….” When he came back to the cockpit I said that to him - and he agreed!"



On another occasion they were sailing along in 8-9 knots of breeze and Thomson decided to try trimming the kite and letting the pilot steer. "So I trimmed to the pilot and I was down to leeward and the starboard pilot control wasn’t working and we got a gust of 12-13 knots and I couldn’t get across the boat quick enough to take the pilot off to stop the boat from broaching up. It wasn’t a real broach, but it gives you a real appreciation of the amount of power particularly with that spinnaker." As Sam Davies has said in our interviews with her during the course of the race there are tense and safe ways of sailing Open 60s - the former being whenever spinnakers and gennikers are up.

Compared to the previous boats Thomson has sailed a unique feature of Sill is her rig - comprising a rotating wingmast with deck spreaders. "It’s the simplicity of the whole thing," he says of the set-up. "The boat only has one shroud and the rig isn’t jacked up of anything, so it is a low compression rig, and the only other shroud is lashed under hand tension. So the mast has interesting bends in it, especially when you are down to two or three reefs and an ORC jib - it looks like the thing shouldn’t stand up. There is a bit of an issue with the device that calculates the angle of the mast. Ours went down and I can see it being an issue as without that inclinometer working you have got no wind direction. So we had to rotate the mast manually. Whenever we tacked or gybed, we would work out what we thought the amount of mast rotation was and Bilou would go down and set the inclinometer manually."

Generally they did very little navigation and routing themselves, instead deferring to their shore based router Pierre Lasnier and Jourdain's number 2 Gael Le C'leach. "He [Lasnier] made 90% of the decisions and we tweaked them a little or Bilou would say he didn’t agree with the speed we’d been doing. Bilou's view is that if you are going to have a router you have to trust them, but Bilou was using any source of information you could imagine. Biscuits la Trinitaine [Marc Guillemot's 60ft trimaran] went past us, so we had 24 hours of instant observations up the course in front of us..."

Like Golding, Thomson will be racing Sill back to France in the Defi Atlantique. "Yesterday I would have happily cancelled it," says Thomson. "Today I am really looking forward to it. All the boys are on board getting it ready. I’ve done the race from here to the Azores before, and it is a nice easy race touch wood. I will be disappointed if I am not up there with Virbac and PRB and Mike."



While Golding says that he is not going to go flat out Thomson thinks it is unlikely that any of the competitors are going to be able resist their competitive streak. The event is going to be particularly interesting as aside from being a qualifier for next year's Vendee Globe it will also mimick the final stage of next year's singlehanded round the world race which finishes in Les Sables d'Olonne. It is also being raced under Vendee conditions - ie no shoreside routing.

Aside from the technique aspect of solo offshore racing, Thomson says that he has learned that to win the Vendee Globe a large part is about having a reliable boat and spending as much time on the water as humanly possible.

Up against the new generation boats like Virbac and Ecover and Marc Lombard boats - Jourdain's new Sill and Jean le Cam's new Bonduelle, both currently under construction (we will be featuring the new Sill next week on thedailysail.com), the older generation Sill may be slightly short on speed in some areas. "You can’t really tell with the Open boats because you only need a couple of degrees wind direction or speed change and you are into a completely different set of polars. In light conditions Sill is heavy - something like 900kg heavier than Mike’s boat. We know we can ditch 250kg, so in the lighter breeze we are going be a bit slower, but in the heavier breeze you might be a bit quicker."

There are some modifications to the boat afoot that will include enlarging the foils (to improve upwind ability) and some more 'off the wall' changes that he is going to keep under his hat for now. "Another area of development is that Mike has been very clever with his headsails by reducing the gaps in the wardrobe, by increasing the trinquette area and I think Bilou will do the same [with the new Sill]. I think that is something we would like to do." At present specifically there is a hole in the wardrobe in the 18-23 knot range.

Finally there was much publicity emanating from the boat over the course of last weekend's England v France rugby match. There were forfeits for the loser, but Thomson apparently didn't press this. "I had a union jack thong on board [allegedly this was a present from a supporter] and I should have got Bilou to wear it and stand in the cockpit singing the national anthem!"

Had France won Thomson would have to have faced dining on flying fish. "They are rank. They stink - would you eat a dog that flew? Fortunately I knew we were going to win, when the match was on. I was up on deck and this flying fish came flying across the boat into the mainsail, ran down the mainsail, along the boom, bounced off the reefing line and fell into the water. Bilou was going 'there’s no way we are going to win now…'".