Vendée Globe

It’s a perfect morning around the Vendée Globe village and docks.

Still, calm, clear with an Autumn brilliance picked out by the warm sunshine, ideal for a promenade down to see the assembled fleet and savour the wonderful atmosphere. The pontoons are busy already.
With Le Weekend upon us and the prep work completed, about half of the boats are quiet this morning, still locked up. A couple of the British skippers – those with young families – have headed home today to enjoy their last spell of quality time before they return for what promises to be a manic build up beginning next weekend.
Livewire Bernard Stamm is hard at work showing sponsors´ guests over his boat.
One team who have no time to even catch a few minutes of sunshine are the Hugo Boss repair team. Their carefully planned schedule is holding up well, and the excellent news this morning is that the skilled surgeons – under the direction of Paul Quinn and Neville Hutton – have the replacement panel in the hull side fitted, taped in, flush and perfect ready for lamination.
“We have dry fitted the hull section yesterday, that is one of the easier parts but it fitted nicely that’s the main thing, but now there is a lot of laminating to do. Hopefully by the end of today it will be temporarily glued in, and ready for the lamination to begin and then the core and the inside skin to go in. So a lot of work to be done. The mast parts arrive in Heathrow this morning and then will travel down overnight in a van and so they should be here in the morning. Then, into it with the rig.” Reports Team ORIGIN’s David Duff this morning. “And there is a full set of rigging coming from Future Fibres, simply because some was damaged, the whole lot has to be replaced just in case there was some damage that we did not see.”
“The hours are long, we have lot to do in a short space of time, but that is the nature of boat-building, we have been doing probably 15 hours a day. We will run a night crew next week they will be following us up when we get stuff prepared during the day, we will split the team. If you are good, this is a fairly straightforward repair. We have a very good team of guys and there are three here with me who built the boat. So it is good.” Explained Neville Hutton this morning.
“There has been a fair bit of planning and thinking required to actually put the plan together, between myself, Neville and Paulo the engineer. We started by phone Saturday morning and since then I have just lost track of days totally. It is still coming together to be honest. The biggest single issue, full stop, is time. Just for the processes. You would never try to do this in a week, we have in the past, maybe over two weeks with less people. I’ve fixed a few boats like this, Club Med and New Zealand Endeavour for example.” Paul Quinn, who also built Séb Josse’s BT, said

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