Mike Golding on his difficult Vendee Globe

The British skipper on how keel fairings, broke ballast tanks and major surgery on his hydrogenerators nearly kept him from reaching LSD

On his arrival into Les Sables d’Olonne Mike Golding entered the history books as the first person to have completed three Vendee Globes (having started four – this record was subsequently equalled last Friday by Swiss skipper Dominique Wavre). His latest and allegedly ‘last’ Vendee Globe, Golding claimed was by far the hardest yet.

“I suppose it was okay in the Atlantic going south, but when we got into the Indian Ocean and separated from the lead group, from that moment on, things didn’t really improve. And you think ‘the Indian Ocean has been rubbish, maybe the Pacific will be nice’. And...it wasn’t, it was horrible. And then the South Atlantic kicked us in the teeth and then the North Atlantic was okay, but then Bay of Biscay got a bit gnarly. So the whole race was tough. There were challenges all the way around, really right the way until the end. You have your challenges normally in the Vendee, but you get over them and you struggle through to the end, but here it was a fresh set of challenges all the time.”

Despite this, the day after he finished, Golding was fully firing on all cylinders, despite only managing two hours sleep during his first night ashore in a plush hotel bed, no doubt fired up on adrenalin having been on the Today program and Chris Evans’ show on Radio 2. Golding has been invited back to be both shows once he gets back to the UK.

Golding acknowledges that the worst weather of his latest lap of the planet did not feature in the many thousands of miles and weeks he spent in the Southern Ocean, but over the last 48-72 hours before the finish as he entered the Bay of Biscay, when gusts exceeded 50 knots.

“We didn’t get that kind of wind,” says Golding of what he experienced down south. “We got some very big seas, particularly at Cape Horn, but when you are in the Southern Ocean you have lots of sea room and whatever happens there are not many ships about, so all those risks are taken away. However if you are in Biscay in February in a gale, aiming at the shore with ships everywhere and the continental shelf...”

According to Golding as he crossed the continental shelf around 90 miles off the French coast, one rogue wave was so big that it struck Gamesa’s mainsail, knocking her over. But it could have been worse. “I was poking my head up, just looking out through the little forward facing window in the nav station and the boat moved so violently sideway that I whacked my head against the side of the coachroof and was seeing stars. I was thinking it wouldn’t be good to became unconscious at this point. I’d end up on the beach in Les Sables d’Olonne...” That would not have been a first to occur to a solo round the world sailor – the most famous occasion being Jean-Luc Van den Heede’s running aground on a beach south of Sydney during the 1993-4 BOC Challenge.

Throughout the race the weather seemed to always be more favourable for the boats in the lead and Golding says once his group lost touch there was no opportunity for them to play catch up. “You keep your hopes alive, hoping that it is possible they go around Cape Horn and park up and you come trundling in on a depression, but as the race went on it become increasingly obvious that they were running the dream ticket.

“But I think it is nearly always that way. The new generation boats obviously are very quick but the fact that Alex [Thomson] was able to hang on to their coat tails – he sailed a great race - tells me it was more about the weather than about the boats. And in my own experience in Le Defi for instance, we are not that much slower than the new generation boats. But they took the jump and Francois [Gabart] and Armel [le Cleac’h] and Alex and J-P [Dick] really sailed a stunning race - hats off to them. If you get it right like that, what can you say?

Golding counters this by adding that he doesn’t feel he sailed a bad Vendee Globe. After all he spent most of high lap of the planet racing his highly tipped French nemesis Jean le Cam who was sailing a similar Farr-designed 2008 generation boat to Thomson’s. “In fact I am pretty proud of my race considering what we had. I am pleased with some of my decisions and some of the tactical stuff I did. Because I was in the middle of the fleet I was able to be a little bit more...adventurous...I suppose, with my choices.”

In retrospect Golding reckons that his sail inventory wasn’t ideal for the race, partly thanks to the time they lost following Gamesa’s dismasting last summer. They changed from a jibtop to an A7, a fractional reacher leading to the end of the bowsprit, but the hole this left resulted in Golding having to use his Code 0 more than he would otherwise, both in light air and reaching in stronger conditions. Ultimately he ended up losing the use of his Code 0 when the cover split on its furling line (when it was furled). “That was a big performance knock,” says Golding. “It was the A3 which was the wrong sail - that big masthead genniker, we should have exchanged for another fractional reacher. And the other sail that we could have foregone was the ORC. I only used it on the last day!”

Golding reckons this was one of the biggest long term set-backs for his race, along the splits in his ballast tanks. Splits? This was something Golding says he kept schtum about during the race. The splits in fact were not into the inside of the boat (fortunately) but were confined to the internal bulkheads separating the tanks. As a result Golding says he was never able to ballast the boat as he wanted. “The loading was always wrong. You either had one tank too many or one tank too few.”

Inconveniently the bulkheads that broke weren’t the same ones on each side. On Gamesa there are five tanks aside – three aft, one mid-ships, one forward – and according to Golding on one side it was the forward tanks that gradually became one, while on the other side it was the aft tanks. Thus the boat ended up having different sailing characteristics according to which tack she was on.

“I think that was more of a penalty than we thought,” says Golding. “But you know, it is not about excuses, the reality is that these are the things that you have to face. Did that make a difference to the outcome? I don’t know. It might have made a difference with Jean...”

If Golding and his team were keeping quiet about some of the key issues to beset them on their way around the world, the most critical incident occurred as Gamesa was approaching the latitude of Rio on her return up the Atlantic.

The incident stemmed from ‘a small fire’ they had in the control box for the hydrogenerators that occurred soon after they had entered the Southern Ocean. “We didn’t make a big play of it, because we figured, we have lot more fuel than guys like Alex took.” If Thomson took around 100lts and Gabart 175, Golding reckons he had closer to 200 on Gamesa.

“We didn’t think it was a problem and then coming up the Brazilian coast we realised it was a major problem, because we didn’t have enough fuel to finish the race. Literally the tank ran out, because the metering system isn’t very reliable on it. I had a reserve, but I knew it wasn’t enough to finish the race. And literally the discussion moved towards, ‘okay, if I am going to stop, I might as well stop here’. It was that serious. It wasn’t performance related, but psychologically it was quite harmful.”

At this point Gamesa shore manager Graham ‘Gringo’ Tourell, earned his keep. The hydrogenerators themselves were okay, but their control box was fully fried. “We chose the nuclear option,” describes Golding. “I got a bloody big wire, soldered it to one side of the PCB and soldered it to other side of the PCB and jumped all the whole control system for the hydros.”

Golding added that he hadn’t tried soldering anything in anger since he was 12 years old. “I soldered everything including my arm! I’m sure that I have now got particles of solder floating around in my blood stream.” Unfortunately on one occasion he managed to lean on the soldering iron. “I thought I’d made a little burn, but it is bloody massive, really deep.”

The not in-significant issue was that the hydrogenerators were capable of outputting 60v, and no regulator to make it compatible with Gamesa’s 12v circuitry. “The risk is that it can blow up all the electronics on the boat, your B&G, and the rest of it because suddenly there is 60v floating around the circuit with no regulation at all. So it was a real Apollo 13-type moment.”

There was something of a loud drum role as Golding stood back (think goggles and rubber gloves) to throw the switch on his make-shift charging set-up. “We threw the switch on it and bugger me if it didn’t work. We shunted the power and we came all the way home on that shunted power. It was a real revelation. Fortunately we have got a really good relationship with our battery company and Watt&Sea were very helpful.”

Added to the danger factor was that Gamesa is fitted with Lithium Ion batteries which have a nasty tendency of turning into small bombs if they offered the wrong voltage at an inappropriate moment of their charging cycle. “That was why we were all spooked, because there was a risk of not just a failure of the systems, but an explosion. So I needed to carefully monitor what I did and I needed to rewire it each time I changed hydros. There were certain specific levels I couldn’t go above or below, so I had to really work at maintaining the system because I had no normal regulation. But it was great, real Apollo 13 stuff, because without that I was really out of the race. Mentally I had already plotted a course to Recife or Salvador.”

Golding adds that they kept quiet about it because he was convinced that if they spoke about it it would suddenly stop working...

Conversely the day before Alex Thomson arrived the external fairing for the forward end of the canting keel pivot point fell off and on that occasion they felt compelled to release it so that the news wouldn’t steal any of the thunder of Hugo Boss’ finish and Thomson’s exceptional Vendee Globe performance.

This was the final challenge that effectively cost Golding fifth place. The result of the fairing coming away was the front end of the keel pivot point would force water up into the keel box (a sealed box where the head of the keel has room to cant from side to side, with a giant hydraulic ram attached to its head). But because the box was sealed it was creating incredible pressure inside it.

“I had a ray of hope in Biscay [of finishing in 5th] because I realised that I was on a faster line than Jean, much fast and if I could have put my foot fully down, I think I could have won the outcome, going the way I did. But I couldn’t put my foot, because every time we got over 18 knots, the keel box was fully pressurised and water was squirting out.”

The keel box is sealed as typically sea water is designed to be Venturi-ed out of the box when the boat starts travelling at any speed. But this typically creates a vacuum in the keel box, whereas with water being forced into the box at a rate substantially faster than it could escape, the opposite pressure was occurring. As a result Golding said that everything that was plumbed into the keel box, in particular bilge pumps (normally assisted by the vacuum at their opposite end) suddenly stopped working. “It was amazing how such a simple little thing as a fairing could cause so many problems. It was uncanny the amount of problems that it created,” recalls Golding.

Impressively Golding was able to (finally) make use of his fireman’s training to help solve the problem. “I figured it was all about nozzle discard – so 2/3rds the nozzle diameter squared x the square root of the pressure gives you the nose discharge – I bet you didn’t know that?! Basically if you close down the aperture, you reduce the flow and then the Venturi can take back over and you can start to manage the level in the box.” Golding was able to pass a small line through one side of the keel, but not the other. “It did work for a while, but I could only get the line through one side. It did help but when I tacked and was coming into Biscay we had a smaller aperture, but we were going much faster and so it was just filling the box up and squeezing against the lip and it all looked very dodgy.

“The lid of the box has got about 50 screws going around it and a couple of them are missing and when it fully pressurised, when I was doing over 20 knots, it was squirting out of the screw hole and hitting the ceiling! So there was a lot of pressure in that box. One simple little fairing gone and suddenly you are in dire straits...”

Golding says that had it been the difference between second and first the outcome he may have pushed harder but having made it 99% of the way around the world he was unwilling to risk this situation getting the better of him. “If the gator on the ram had failed, it would have flooded that area very quickly and then you are potentially looking at massive battery failures. The consequences of a blow out would be very bad indeed and it could terminate your race even that close. And I wanted to finish the race.”

While the weather may have been less co-operative on this Vendee Globe than on previous ones, Golding’s lap of the planet was transformed by having a sliding cabintop, that has been all the rage of the IMOCA class since before the last Vendee Globe. This had a full thumbs up from Golding: “What a revelation! What the hell were we thinking to do it without that sort of thing before? It was fantastic. The roof was a real success and the configuration of that roof is damned near perfect.”

As a result he certainly went out on deck more. “Even coming across Biscay when there was water everything, I was out trimming sails with just my fleece on, because I could! Before you’d have had to put your foulies on. It was just discouraging...”

So aged 52, Golding’s retiring from solo offshore racing? “Everyone has got me retiring. I am not planning on retiring, I’m just not doing the Vendee again. Everyone has me signing up for Saga holidays!” (“Only behind your back!” interjects Gamesa PR girl Emily Caroe.) “I am always open to offers I can’t refuse!”

So really no plans at present? “I really wish I had a clear answer to that. I don’t know. I am open to offers literally, from billionaires or anyone really!”