Alex Thomson back on form

Following his Transat Jacques Vabre second, the British IMOCA 60 skipper tells us of his race

Could a second place in the Transat Jacques Vabre be the final change in the fortune Alex Thomson has been waiting for?

In recent years Thomson has suffered numerous disasters, from losing the first Hugo Boss during the Velux 5 Oceans, to the collision prior to the 2008 Vendee Globe, to having to pull out of sailing the Barcelona World Race when he suffered a pre-race appendicitis followed by his wife Kate giving birth to their first son Oscar, born with a heart defect.

“You do make your own luck to a degree,” Thomson told us before the start of the TJV. “Some of the things that have happened you can say were bad luck, but you could also say that we could have done things differently. But we have learned from it and we have got stronger. If you take a coin you will have a period when you get 10-15 heads, but at some point it will change. I enjoy what I do and I think we have got a good team and hopefully it will come good.”

And so it did, when on Friday night Thomson and his well-known Spanish co-skipper and round the world veteran, Guillermo Altadill, came home second in the Transat Jacques Vabre, at one point even leading the fleet for a few hours as they passed north of the Azores. This was also the third time that Hugo Boss has finished second to Jean Pierre Dick in a doublehanded race.

The decisive move in the race came when Hugo Boss chose to maintain their northerly position as did Jean-Pierre Dick and Jeremie Beyou on their Barcelona World Race winner, Virbac Paprec 3.

Thomson said that on the last Transat Jacques Vabre he had chosen the northern route from the very outset. “There was only us and BT that went north of the Casquets traffic separation scheme. That was our strategy and on the first night Ross [his 2009 co-skipper] broke his hand and was on painkillers. Then we went through the storm, and it was pretty bad, and we had a knock down and broke a daggerboard, and we carried on sailing and we had got to the point where we were taking reefs out when we noticed that the boat was full of water. At that point we were looking at a good fourth place,” he recalls.

This time they survived the second cold front which took PRB and Cheminees Poujoulat out of the running. “There was massive shift. It went from true southerly to a true westerly in 10 seconds,” says Thomson of this. “If you didn’t get to the helm in time, because most people where on pilot, you would have crash tacked on to the wrong. Fortunately it didn’t happen to us.” However in the process they ended up with broken lazyjacks, one broken batten and a rip in the mainsail. Thomson reckons they probably lost 20-30 miles in down time on the eventual winner Virbac Paprec 3.

Ironically being further north on this occasion Thomson believes they saw less wind and, importantly, less seas, than those further south. “After we went through the front we had a peak wind speed of 47.7 knots. It was only for about 10-15 seconds, but apart from that we really didn’t see much more than 40 knots.”

Going into the second low Thomson says he and Altadill considered going south, but the apart from one set of GRIBs, the routing was always telling them to continue west.

“A few days beforehand, there did appear to be a route to the south, but it was only available in one forecast and all the other forecasts said go west. We were looking at the low and I was of the opinion - having done two years ago when that big low was there for a week with the horrible sea and 55 knots - because this system was moving so fast, it didn’t look like there would be very big seas and it is the seas that are part of the problem. So it was no brainer really.”

However it was still worrying and Thomson says he resisted the temptation to bang the northerly corner early. “It was quite tough – to take the west option when everyone was going south towards the high. I was saying ‘Guillermo, we have to go!’ And Guillermo was going ‘we don’t want to go on our own’. So it was quite nice that Virbac went with us. It made you feel like you were not on a wing and a prayer. We could have committed to that option much earlier and then we might have had a chance to win, but then we would really have been on our own and we didn’t want to do that.”

Co-skipper

Thomson says that he trialled a few people before finally opting to do the race with Guillermo Altadill. “He seemed to be strong on all fronts, very polite, objective and we get on really well. I didn’t really know him. He has got an interesting reputation, as maybe I do as well, but it has been an absolutely pleasure working with him. He says it how it is, which is good. He has worked well with the team and he has been very objective. He has helped a lot with the decision making over the boat.” Altadill was the original co-skipper of the boat when, as Estrella Damm, it competed in the first Barcelona World Race.

“We hadn’t done any proper offshore stuff before, or more than a couple of days at least, and he was very good. He is a very attentive sailor. He worked really hard on deck, he has got a real knack of being able to make a boat go fast. Often the sea state would be a bit funny and we would end up with funny combos of sails and ballast, etc, but he was really strong on that side and I very much enjoyed sailing with him.”

Thomson says that due to their lack of time on the boat they kept the manoeuvres simple and he reckons that despite this they still sailed slickly.

Even though Thomson says this year’s Transat Jacques Vabre wasn’t the brutally tough race they experienced two years ago, they still arrived in Costa Rica fairly exhausted, partly because their boat wasn’t fitted with a bunk on which to get quality sleep.

Three IMOCA 60s for AT Racing

There were some eyebrows raised in mid-September when Thomson announced that in the Transat Jacques Vabre he and Altadill would not be racing the Juan K-designed former Bahrain Team Pindar, which last year they had acquired, altered substantially at Green Marine and rebranded in Hugo Boss corporate black and white. Instead they would sail the Farr-designed former BT, Seb Josse campaigned in the last Vendee Globe and which was nearly lost in the 2009 Transat Jacques Vabre.

According to Thomson, after much time training with Guillermo Altadill on the Juan K design, including the Rolex Fastnet Race, they finally came to the conclusion that the boat was not ideal for singlehanded ocean racing as the boat, with its huge beam, massive ballast and giant sail plan was just too hard to handle. It would be fine doublehanded, which is what the boat was originally designed for, but Thomson believed he would not be able to sail it efficiently and realise the full performance of the boat in the singlehanded return race, the Transat B to B, the an all-important Vendee Globe qualifier due to leave St Barts in December. In his calculations, since proved true in the TJV, even though the Farr design was on paper not as fast as the Juan K boat, they could realise a greater percentage of her potential and so it would end up faster overall.

“It was a difficult decision to make,” admitted Thomson, who’s company now owns three IMOCA 60s, including the Juan K and their previous Finot-Conq design. “This year was particularly bad at the beginning of the year. The hard thing about [not sailing] the Barcelona World Race was that I would have found out about the Juan K much earlier, so my not doing that race has put us back.

“The main thing with it is that it is easy to perform,” he says of his latest boat. “You just don’t have to push too hard. If you are down to three reefs and staysail in 32 knots of winds, if you are sailing in 27 with three reefs and staysail you are still performing to 95% of the polars. That difference is going to bigger singlehanded.

“Upwind the boat seemed pretty on the pace. Reaching and downwind we are lacking a bit of pace against the new boats. But one of the great things for me, was that we raced against MACIF, Virbac, Cheminees Poujoulat - all those [new generation] boats we were alongside at some point - so now we have a good understanding of where we are weak or strong now.”

Having acquired the former BT so suddenly prior to the start they replaced sails and rigging and the branding but otherwise did no modification work. Despite having to pull out of the Vendee Globe and its near-destruction in the last TJV, the boat notched up a major achievement when Roland ‘Bilou’ Jourdain raced her to victory in last year’s Route du Rhum. In fact Thomson has always done well in Jourdain’s cast-offs. His first IMOCA 60, a Marc Lombard design, was Jourdain’s former Sill et Veolia.

Prior to the start Thomson reckoned the boat would be competitive with the new generation IMOCA 60s except reaching. And so this proved during the race. “Bilou found in the Route du RHum that having less volume in front and the boat having less wetted surface area was good. In the last TJV it was leading before it sank...”

Thomson says he hasn’t made a final decision about which boat he will be taking in the Vendee Globe next year – this will be finalised by the end of this year. However certainly the TJV result has pushed him towards the Farr. He adds that even before they acquired the boat they were already talking to the Farr office about possible upgrades.

So on 5 December Thomson is to set off on the Transat B to B singlehanded back to France from St Barts to Concarneau. “I had a good chat with Armel le Cleac’h [skipper of the Banque Populaire IMOCA 60]. We were both laughing that neither of us have sailed our boats singlehanded at all! With this result I feel the pressure is off a little bit. The important thing is to learn the boat and make good gains towards the Vendee.”

So another 24 hour record? “I’m not sure this boat has the top end speed is hasn’t. It is more all-rounder.”

Meanwhile the Juan K 60 is being shipped to Australia where it is due to compete in the Rolex Sydney Hobart, although it is uncertain yet whether Thomson will be able to complete his solo transatlantic race and make it down under in time. Their third IMOCA 60, the Finot-Conq, as Alex Thomson Racing CEO Stuart Hosford said week before last, is up for sale or charter, although he is actively trying to find backing for Oscar Mead to race the Vendee Globe in her.

“The last few years as a team we have worked really hard,” concludes Thomson. “We do a lot of corporate work. Out of all the teams we physically work the hardest and to finally get some reward for that hard work is a great feeling. With what happened in the Volvo and what happened in the TJV I hope people realise that it is not just me. Look at poor old Bernard [Stamm] - that Transat in 2004 when the boat turned turtle and he missed the Vendee Globe and then the 2008 Vendee when lost his boat and now he has nearly lost this one.”