Sailing, Sailing…: With so many frigging boats at sea right now, here’s a quick rundown on what’s happening:

Vendee Globe: The two runaway leaders, Vincent Riou and King Jean Le Cam, are 300 miles in front of the chasing pack, and surfing their asses off across the Southern Ocean (position update here). Le Cam is loving it. “Impressive surfs! The boat heels right over at over 20 knots! 24, 25, 25.5 knots! That’s the record! At the top of the wave, the boat accelerates in the strong wind and hurtles down the slope at high speed. You ask yourself when it’s going to end!” And he’s only got another 10,000 miles of it ahead of him (latest daily report here). It’s tempting to say that the race for the top spot on the podium is down to just the front two, but the chasing pack (Sill, VMI, Ecover) is within 300-500 miles, there is a very long way to go (Ellen MacArthur made up almost 400 miles on leader Michel Desjoyeaux in the 2000 Vendee), and my bet is that at least one of the leading two boats will suffer a major breakdown. So stay tuned…

Ellen, Ellen, Ellen…: Way, way back, off the coast of Portugal, le Petit Anglais is fighting hard to stay up with Francis Joyon’s blistering record pace. Right now she’s about 2.5 hours behind, just completed a critical gybe to head west, and is hunkering down in expectation of strong winds of 35-40 knots (latest daily report here). The main theme so far, is just how damned hard it is for a 5 foot 5 inch, 130 pounder to manhandle a 75-foot tri. Here’s Ellen’s description of her night:

“Got the gennaker up…wind was too light for too long…I had to put it up, we were going too slowly and not deep enough…i’m f*****. Because of the strong breeze I had the sails all stacked back in the cockpit…took me 10 minutes to get the sail forward and another 35 minutes full-on doing moves lines, pulling sails up. No comparison to the monohull, its so hard. I could have it up for the last 12 hours. But of course wind has shifted now! So I will have to take it down again soon to gybe…expecting 40 knots for 6 to 8 hours…”

And only 70-plus days to go. And if you want to follow it all on a chart, here’s a cool site that is doing the plotting work for you. And a good newspaper profile…

Fedor, Fedor, Fedor…: Russian adventurer Konyukhov has already suffered light winds and technical problems (latest daily report here; position reports, courtesy of the Ocean Rowing Society, here). None of this will surprise the guest editorialist at Sailing Anarchy, who rips into the “Mad Russian,” accusing him of hype and flat-out misrepresentations. Here’s a taste of the rant, but click over to read the whole thing:

“Not only has Fedor failed to complete every single-handed long distance yacht race he entered, he created a large amount of publicity in Russia and Europe based on potentially false reports, misstatements of facts and carefully or not so carefully-worded PR releases…

First and foremost, despite his assertions, Fedor has no intentions “to break the record for the fastest single-handed non stop round the world voyage” since, according to the same PR statement, “Fedor expects to complete his journey in 120 days.” Some very slow boats in the last Vendee 2000 edition finished the nonstop round the world voyage in less time. The winning Vendee 2000 boat won the race in 93 days, which was later bettered by Francis Joyon at just over 72 days. In 1991 Christophe Augin took just over 120 days to sail from Newport to Newport with 4 stopovers on an Open 60 mono…

The mention of Francis Joyon brings our attention to another lie in Fedor’s PR statement, which says that this is “the first time that a yacht of this size [85 feet] has been sailed single-handed.” While arguably a trimaran is not a “yacht,” Joyon’s IDEC trimaran is approximately 10 feet longer than Fedor’s monohull, not to mention the 100+ foot monsters of the old single-handed Transat days…”

Ouch. Picture of the day goes to Ellen…



“Holy Sh*t! If I have to keep the hammer down like this for another two months, I’m going to look like Popeye, and the boat is going to look like that wreck from Waterworld…”

(Photo: DPPI)