Latitude 38 April 2010

SIGHTINGS

TEAM GROUPAMA

groupama smashes jules verne Franck Cammas and his nine-man dream team became the first sailors to circumnavigate in under 50 days when they passed the Ushant lighthouse on March 20 after 48d, 7h, 44m, 52s at sea. Six days earlier, the question of whether Cammas’ VPLP-designed 105-ft trimaran Groupama 3 would surpass the mark set in ‘05 by Bruno Peyron’s Orange 2 — 50d, 16h, 20m, 4s — was anything but decided.

With the Bay Area’s Stan Honey at the nav station and Sylvain Mondon routing from ashore, G3 passed the Ushant light heading the other direction on February 1. They barely squeaked by a big wind hole before hooking into some solid pressure and using it to set the second-fastest recorded time to the Equator.

Carrying a lead of just over a day into the upside-down part of the globe, Cammas’ team — Honey, watch captains Fred Le Peutrec and Steve Ravussin, helmsmen/trimmers Loïc Le Mignon, Thomas Coville and Lionel Lemonchois, and bowmen Bruno Jeanjean, Ronan Le Goff and Jacques Caraës — got the inverse of the weather they’d had up to that point. A Papa don’t take no mess — high-pressure system bumbling along off the Stan Honey added the Jules coast of Brazil joined forces with the St. HelVerne Trophy to his already ena High and created a weather scenario that impressive resume.

Honey said reminded him of the ‘79 TransPac: one massive, inescapable blanket of nothingness. In the meantime, G3’s roughly 600-mile lead turned into a 385-mile deficit by the 12th day of their trip, when they made only 274 miles down the track. If that doesn’t seem too bad of a day’s run, consider that G3 sailed 719 miles the next day, after they escaped the vacuum!

It would take the team another week to get ahead of their virtual competitor’s pace, just before crossing from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. The hurry-up-and-wait trajectory around the globe didn’t end there. Ultimately the giant tri spent nearly as many days behind Orange 2’s pace — 22 — as it did ahead.

The Pacific Ocean was key to the overall success of the mission. In ‘05, Peyron and his crew — which, incidentally, included Lemonchois, Le Goff and Caraës — absolutely demolished this section of the course.

If they kept in touch with their ‘competition’, Cammas’ boys — all of whom are older and have gone through more pairs of seaboots than their 38-year-old skipper — could have a fighting chance on their way back up the Atlantic. But the jet stream wasn’t going to make it easy on them. After they’d passed New Zealand and were sailing fast toward Cape Horn, going as far as 55°S, the upper-level flow turned zonal and spit a big, fast-moving depression right at them — one they couldn’t safely stay ahead of. This forced them north, as far as 47°S, and cost them nearly 300 miles over the reference time. But by the time they reached the Horn, the G3 sailors had given back only one hour of their lead.

The South Atlantic once again proved challenging. Cammas said that Groupama 3 would need to be within a day of Peyron’s track by the time they reached the Equator. A narrow corridor of northerly breeze up the east coast of South America meant overtime work for the navigator as the team beat their way north and ultimately crossed the Equator 1d, 2h, 4m behind Orange 2’s time. Fortunately for Cammas, Honey and the rest of the crew, the North Atlantic would once again prove to be very charitable. When they found the trades, they were off to the races, finally catching their ‘competition’ on day 46, and racking up nearly 2,000 miles against the reference time in the last 4,000 miles of racetrack.

This was the first Jules Verne-winning effort since the first in ‘93 continued on outside column of next sightings page

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Latitude 38

• April, 2010

low In the January ‘09 issue of Latitude 38, we featured the sailing resolutions of our editorial staff and challenged readers to set their own for the year. Sean and Jennifer Palmer, who sail their Catalina 34 Allegro with their two daughters, Abigail and Margaret, out of South Beach, met the challenge and, in the process, bested every single one of us.

“Thanks to Latitude for suggesting a sailing New Year’s resolution last January — something we have never successfully done (sailing or otherwise). We considered a number of possible and improbable ideas, and settled on one with a really