Steep learning curve

Sam Davies recounts to The Daily Sail her experience in the doublehanded Tour de Bretagne

The double handed Tour de Bretagne race for the Figaro class concluded today with two windward-leewards off the entrance to Lorient harbour on France's Biscay coast.

For Sam Davies this is the first step in her bid to take part in the singlehanded Solitaire du Figaro later this year and one gets the impression this event has been something of a wake-up call for her.

Today Sam and Emma Westmacott scored a 19th and 11th, out of 26 boats in the process bumping themselves up to 18th place overall in their first Figaro event. "We managed to get in tune with the wind again," Sam told The Daily Sail. "We managed to get some good wind shifts and be on the right side of them most of the time, and good starts."

With just a matter of days between her getting her new 32ft Beneteau Figaro and the start of the Tour de Bretagne, the race has been all about learning.

"I learned a lot about how to sail the boat, but also just getting back into making calls and wind shifts and weather and tactics and boat-on-boat stuff, how the boat works, how to do manoeuvres and how not to do manoeuvres! We’ve improved right the way through the regatta..."

A huge amount can be learned from simply watching the old Figaro hands - the names who featured in the top 10 - however the class is still open enough that techniques are shared.

"It is everything. The boat handling, the sail trimming, etc. Basically the more you have a handle on your boat then the more you can keep your head out of the boat and start looking around. When there’s only two people on there’s so much to do, you get to the leeward mark and you do a drop and then you have to change your gear around to the other side, so you are trying to do that going up the beat but also you’ve got to be looking for the windshifts to work out if you’re on a lift or a knock and where everyone else is in relation and all of that sort of stuff as well as trimming the boat. The conditions have been changing so much that you have to change gears every 10 minutes. From light air sailing to heavy air sailing, ballast in, ballast out, car in and car down. Backstay on. It is just never ending..."

While sailing doublehanded can be approached from the perspective of it being two people sailing singlehanded, most of the French competitors have formed effectively two man teams and train at double handed racing from the famous Figaro training camp in Port la Foret.

The wake-up call for Sam has been level of competition in the class. This has proved to be a quantum leap up from the Mini class (which she competed in two years ago) - hardly surprising as this is in one designs against some of the very best in the business who have been refining their skills in this discipline of the sport for a number of years.

"This is like Olympic sailing, but it is just incredible," says Sam. "We did the offshore race. We set off in the dark off Perros. We went out against the tide, and round the rocks there upwind in 22 knots of wind with Solent and full main, pitch black with big waves and we were short tacking up the rocks so close that you could touch the rocks. You were in the breakers as you tacked and if you don’t go in that far then you would lose one or two places to someone else who did. And you do like 20 tacks...

"Coming out of Brest was the same under the cliffs but it wasn’t dark which made it easier because you could see where you were. I looked back on the MaxSea at our track and I counted we did 32 tacks up the first shore before we raced across the Iroise to the other and did a load more tacks up the other shore. And it’s just two people... Fortunately I was steering on that one and Emma had to do all the tacks!

"The one in the dark was just crazy. We are on a lee shore. There’s no lights or navigation marks because no one ever goes there in a normal boat. And so you are going round all these rocks in the dark that you can’t even see and you are going inside them and the only way you can tell you’re going inside them is because you can see them on the computer screen. You don’t have a chance to put it on a paper chart or do anything like that because it is so fast. It is just unreal.

"And you are absolutely knackered because you raced the day before so you are fighting to try and stay alert as well. It reminded me of doing the Admiral’s Cup on a Sydney 40, close racing offshore but that was fully crewed and if someone could get tired they could take a break and someone could take over while they slept on the rail. In this you just can’t. It is more than you could ever imagine in its intensity and how tough it is. And looking at the fleet and who’s here I can’t imagine it isn't going to get much easier when everyone goes on their own as well..."

Aside from coming to terms with the stress of this type of racing Skandia's first outing was hampered by some technical failures. "I think Beneteau concentrated so hard on keeping the boats even performance-wise as in weight and keel shape, they left out a little bit on the general finish of the boat in terms of build quality and how it looks inside. Like they have mounted the ballast pump wrong, so it is going through valves really quickly, so that needs to be fixed. But they know it and they have had a big team following the race, with a huge van and they have been working every night all night to make sure it is not detrimental to anyone’s performance on the race course."

Skandia also experienced some sail problems and Sam is considering taking the boat down to Crouesty where the North France loft is and getting some of their experts to come out sailing with her.

"I think my sails are really good, but they had a bit of build production quality lacking. That’s why we ended up last on the really windy race, because we had problems - they’d put the wrong size bolt rope on the Solent jib. But they’ve fixed that now.

"North is only doing five boats and they are certainly not slow. We have certainly not lacked boat speed at any point. When we have been dropping down the fleet it has been through us than through the sails, apart from the time when the sail blew out of the Tuffluff twice. It is good, but it is so hard. You just make a tiny mistake and you lose so many places. It is so close. Everyone is just overlapped the whole time."

While it was thought that the introduction of a new boat would create more of a level playing field in the class, in fact it is the old Figaro veterans who have come out on top again. "Although it is a new boat, it is set-up by the guys who had the old boats. So it is set up to be sailed in the same way as the old boats, although it is just a bit more powerful and there’s two rudders so it is better on the pilot, but it is still that Figaro way of sailing - a regular pole and symmetric spinnaker and water ballast, the same as how they had it before so they’ve still got their techniques from the last boat."

The new Figaro has an electric water ballast pump (on the old boat one pumped it by hand). It takes eight minutes to fill the tanks from empty, another part of the Figaro racing experience that requires forward planning. "When you are going down a two mile run and it’s blowing 20 knots and you’ve emptied the ballast you kind of regret it when you get to the bottom and you’ve forgotten to put it back in again..."

Generally she is very pleased with her new boat. "I think everyone is pleased with it in terms of handling and its performance. It is very nice to sail as in it is not like a Yngling where the sailing was so boring. This is an enjoyable thing and I would be pleased to go out in her tomorrow if it was nice weather, even though I am completely knackered and my hands are killing me - I would love to go out for a sail, because the boat is nice and rewarding to sail."

However she comes back to the intensity of the racing. "You expect it to be close, but you don’t actually imagine being in there and doing all that while it is that close racing. When I think about close racing I associate it with sailing with 10 other people on the boat. So when I thought it would be close racing I though it would be close racing, but I didn’t think that there’d be only two of you on the boat and you have to do the jobs of 10 people. That’s five people each...."

From here the next event in the programme in the Generali Méditerranée. This starts on 13 June in the Med and will be Sam's first solo race in the class. She is contemplating getting Damian Foxall, who campaigned a Figaro for three seasons and is now part of Karine Fauconnier's Sergio Tacchini trimaran team to give her some coaching.

"I’ve got so much to learn," Sam concludes. "I can’t leave this for long otherwise other people will get ahead."