|Issue 14.05 - May 2006
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Taming the Sea Monster
Damian Foxall is steering a sailboat through howling wind on a starless, bone-chilling November night on the North Atlantic. The yacht, Foncia, is an ORMA Open 60 trimaran, the fastest and most sophisticated class of sailboat on the water, a flighty thoroughbred born of computers and carbon fiber and capable of sustained speeds even few powerboats can match. There are nine other three-hulled boats like Foncia nearby, along with 19 traditional monohulls. They're racing from Le Havre, France, to Bahia, Brazil, in the Transat Jacques Vabre, one of the world's most prestigious transatlantic sailing races. Foxall, a lanky Irishman with close-cropped hair and an angular face, hasn't slept in 24 hours, but that's OK; Foncia is in the lead.
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At 4 am the wind drops and Foncia slows - a good time to refine course and tack. Foxall gives the helm to his sole crewmate, Armel LeCleach, and crawls into the cockpit. He pulls in the sails and drops the canting mast away from the wind. Suddenly there's a gust, and the massive boat, 60 feet long and 60 feet wide, lifts. Foxall dives toward the mainsheet to release the sail and decelerate. But another gust, 49 knots - just short of hurricane force - knocks the yacht on its side. In an instant, Foncia is upside down and Foxall is underwater, pinned between a winch and the boom beneath a 5-ton boat.
Somehow, Foxall wriggles free, gulps air, and pulls himself aft. LeCleach, marooned on the upturned hull, yanks him aboard. But Foxall's chest and right shoulder are in agony, and he's unable to stand. So LeCleach opens one of the watertight hatches in the hull, drags Foxall inside, and sets off Foncia's distress signal.
Twelve hours later, a French military helicopter - which first had to make a mid-ocean refueling stop on a French navy cruiser - hoists the men to safety. The helo is crowded: It just plucked two sailors off Orange Project, another trimaran that flipped within hours of Foncia's mishap. Nearby, a passing ship retrieves the crew of Sodebo, an ORMA 60 tri whose port hull broke clean off, sending its mast crashing to the deck in a tangle of carbon fiber.
All this, and the race is just 48 hours old. Over the next few days, two more tris capsize and another splits in half. While nearly all of the traditional single-hulled boats make it, only four of 10 ORMA 60s cross the finish line off Brazil - making the voyage less a race than an exercise in hubris and harrowing open-sea rescues. Even more remarkable, the carnage isn't a first, or even the worst: In the 2002 Route du Rhum transatlantic race, 18 tris crossed the starting line and just three finished.
ORMA 60 trimarans are a challenge like no other, powering over the water at nearly 45 miles per hour, far faster than the quickest sailing monohull. The skipper must control a large, complex boat that literally rises off the water and nearly takes wing. Since their introduction in the late 1980s, ORMA 60 tris have seduced the best sailors in the world.
"What we do with these boats is amazing," says Thomas Coville, who was at the helm of Sodebo. "To be flying on the foils at 35 knots with the sail at the perfect angle is such a feeling."
"There's no aspect of sailing that's more demanding or exciting," Foxall says. He should know: He has competed in the America's Cup and the globe-circling Volvo, and in 2004 he won the Quebec-Saint-Malo transatlantic race.
But the Jacques Vabre disaster posed a dilemma: In a sport made exciting by engineering and design innovation, have things gone too far? Maybe technology has taken sailors to a place they shouldn't be going in ocean racing. Even Nigel Irens, a multihull designer whose trimaran Banque Populaire won the race, admits: "The power of these boats is getting beyond the reach of sailors. The problem is that you either break, capsize, or win."
Multihulled sailboats are hardly a new concept - it was on huge wooden catamarans that Polynesians settled the Pacific Ocean's far-flung isles a thousand years ago. Modern seagoing catamarans and trimarans crafted from fiberglass first gained popularity in the 1960s. Their hydrodynamic advantages are well-known: Put simply, two or three light hulls travel faster than a single heavy one. If operated perfectly, a cat or a tri rises off its windward hull. That translates into a large sail area powering a boat that's dragging far less wetted surface through the water, enabling greater speed. And the faster you go, the faster you can go, because the boat generates what's known as apparent wind - the movement of air created by the boat's own forward momentum. These yachts can easily go twice as fast as the wind itself.
That speed has tradeoffs. A single-hulled sailboat uses a heavy keel to maintain stability and keep it upright; if it does capsize, the keel automatically rights the boat. A multihull has no keel. Keep the boat flat and you're stable. But rise onto one hull for maximum speed and you're balanced on a precarious edge. If you flip, you're going to stay that way.
In addition, the structural forces on a wide boat with two or three hulls connected by crossbeams are enormous as it batters through the waves. To survive, the vessel has to be incredibly strong. Until recently, boats made of wood or fiberglass simply weighed too much to be both robust and fast. In the past few years, however, computers and carbon fiber have produced boats that are remarkably light and yet still strong for their size. Computer-aided finite element analysis allows designers to calculate loads closely enough to shave every superfluous ounce.
In the last five years, a succession of custom-designed multihulls has rewritten every record in the books. In 2001, millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett's 125-foot catamaran, PlayStation, ripped across the Atlantic in four days and 17 hours, at an average speed of nearly 30 miles per hour. When the Jules Verne Trophy was conceived in 1990 for the fastest nonstop circumnavigation of the world under sail, Phileas Fogg's 80 days seemed barely possible. Last year, Bruno Peyron's 120-foot maxicat, Orange II, smoked 24,000-odd miles around the world in 50 days to claim the honor. The fastest powerboat circumnavigation: 74 days.