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Battered and bruised maybe, but Bruno Peyron's dream for the ultimate sailing race became reality on 31 December. CHRISTIAN FEVRIER gives his thoughts as Peyron's fantastically fast, but in some instances still financially patchy fleet heads out into the Noth Atlantic
The Race
Club Med
After the spaceship shape of the Pete Goss’s strange catamaran, many observers were a little disappointed with the ‘conservatism’ and monastic simplicity of Gilles Ollier and Yan Penfornis’s three catamarans.
Loďck Peyron, skipper of sistership Code One, disagrees: ‘Conservative? From the exterior, maybe. The innovations are there but you cannot see them. Only results talk!’ And the numbers talked immediately: 34.7 knots on the day of the official launch. One month later, Club Med smashed the previous 24-hour record with a new mark of 625.7 miles at an average of 26.07 knots.
As a member of the Ocean Passage Committee, I was fortunate to be dispatched to San Salvador to check Club Med’s time after her new record on Columbus’s old track. Along with sails I had enjoyed with Dalton’s team in Brittany, the brief 400- mile journey on to Miami was helpful in better understanding the power of the beast. During my first watch at the helm, approaching Nassau, I was literally amazed by the immediate reaction of the rudders. The boat is a true bicycle, so responsive to a slight touch of helm! The same pleasure as steering a Dragon. There was nothing to compare with PlayStation. In seconds you jump from a peaceful 20 knots to 27-28 knots with ease.
Fred Le Peutrec, the Tornado helmsman, was ‘locked’ at the wheel during
the 24-hour record. Adding some last miles in the final hour, he regularly pushed the speedometer over 37 knots! ‘On the polars, we know the boat will easily do 650 miles a day, maybe 700,’ predicted Gilles Ollier. As an example, they sailed from Villamoura in Portugal to Portofino, Italy at 25 knots average speed!What makes the design so fast?
See Seahorse February 2001 for the remainder of this article
© 2001 Seahorse Magazine. All rights reserved.