Vendée Globe

Of the 15 competitors taking part in the third Vendée Globe (1996/1997), there were four strong favourites:  Christophe Auguin, Yves Parlier, Isabelle Autissier and the Canadian, Gerry Roufs. They all had one thing in common.  They all had one of those "fireballs" as Hervé Laurent called them, in other words, the latest Finot-Conq designs, which were flat, powerful and light, which could outrun their elder cousins in downwind conditions.  Consequently after a month of sailing, the four sailors were at the head of the fleet. Auguin led the way in front of Autissier, Parlier and Roufs. A real battle was expected in the Indian Ocean… But it was not to happen, as Isabelle and then Yves had to abandon the race, each suffering from a broken rudder.

1st December 1996: On the way into the Indian Ocean, Isabelle Autissier was due to make her entrance crossing the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope the next day.  The first storm in the Southern Ocean was welcoming her.  As dawn broke, the wind gauge started to rise. The French yachtswoman then in second place, thirty or forty miles behind the skipper of Geodis (Christophe Auguin) had just taken in a reef, when the boat suddenly broached.  The tiller was hard down , but the boat did not come around: «Bizarre, said a surprised Isabelle… I turned off the pilot, and the steering was all loose, and not reacting…» She went to take a look at the  transmission links under the cockpit.
Everything was fine. She went back on the deck, gybed to see more clearly what was happening under the water on the other side.  There was no longer anything there! The starboard rudder was broken was broken off at hull level. PRB, like the other new boats had two rudders.  With one, the boat could still be steered, but continuing the race was out of the question, as when the intact appendage comes out of the water, when heeling over, the boat goes out of control.  
Isabelle, clearly unlucky in her round the world races– dismasting in the 1990 BOC, and again in 1994 near the Kerguelens aboard her Ecureuil with her canting keel, then the loss of her boat to the south of Australia – had no choice left to her.  She had to put in to Cape Town.  She set sail again a few days later with new rudders delivered by plane from France and then reached Les Sables, still sailing alone, in record time but outside of the race.
 
6th December 1996: Amnesty International, the Joubert/Nivelt designed boat skippered by Thierry Dubois, hit something, which was to snap off the starboard rudder. Totally gutted, the young sailor decided to head back to France and abandon the race. He then changed his mind, headed for Cape Town, set sail again with a new appendage and continued on his way until he lost his boat a little later in a storm in the Indian Ocean.
A few hours later, the race directors learnt that Yves Parlier had broken his port rudder with a growler being blamed. The incident happened a long way after the tip of South Africa and so he decided to continue to Fremantle (in SW Australia) to carry out repairs.  Consequently, Christophe Auguin, with two rivals out of the way, found himself alone at the front of the race, more than 500 miles ahead of his nearest rival.  He went on to reach the finish  in Les Sables way ahead of the following boats, which made it all the way home in this particularly treacherous Vendée Globe.
 
Epilogue: Jean-Marie Finot, the designer of these little rockets with his partner Pascal Conq, could not understand what lay behind this series of incidents: «The rudders were manufactured in exactly the same way as in the last Vendée Globe. Those on Crédit Immobilier de France (Marc Thiercelin) are on their third round the world voyage and we have never had any problems.»  Bad luck, according to the experts, as these carbon parts (stock and rudder cheek) had hit a UFO at high speed.  As Jean-Marie explained: «At ten knots a rudder, which hits a 100 kg mass is damaged. At 20 knots, it suffers the same damage when hitting a 25 kg mass, but it literally explodes if we're talking about a 75 kg mass…» In any case, higher speeds mean worse damage. That is why the new Vendée Globe boats have rudders that can be raised manually and are fitted with an automatic kick up system in case of collision.
 
Patrice Carpentier

 

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