Arkea Ultim Challenge – Brest: how did the teams prepare for this first round-the-world voyage in an Ultim?

Guillaume, 03/06/2024 – Replays on the link below are in French

How long before the start did the teams switch to solo round-the-world mode? How did they organize themselves before and during the race, so that the skippers could tackle this first round-the-world race in the Ultim class? SVR-Lazartigue’s Antoine Le Ster, Adagio’s Christophe Boutet and Actual Leader’s Sandrine Bertho answered these questions at a round-table discussion held on the sidelines of the race start in Brest. You can read the entire round table in this article.

Different degrees of agitation during preparation

At the time of writing, the first edition of the Arkea Ultim Challenge-Brest is well underway. But you don’t set out to sail the seas of the world without a minimum of preparation. Even less so when it’s a class’ first round-the-world race. Three team managers present at the start in Brest gave us some background on how to approach this round-the-world race.

At Adagio, we set up commando mode just a few months before the start. “Validation of the partnership with the sponsor came at the beginning of September 2023, and we had to hit the ground running. We had recovered a vessel that hadn’t sailed since the Route du Rhum. We had to try to be efficient and prioritize. So we divided the project into four areas: technical, with Loïc Le Mignon at its head, who saved us time thanks to his knowledge of the boat, partnership, communication and hospitality,” explains project manager Christophe Boutet.

The same is true of SVR-Lazartigue, despite a retroplanning that began the day after the Route du Rhum. The Transat Jacques-Vabre left its mark in the autumn. When we got back from the Route du Rhum in Concarneau, we had a broken foil, the repair of which put a slight dent in the training schedule scheduled for May and June, and at the end of the Jacques-Vabre, we had the unpleasant surprise of discovering a crack in the front arm of the boat,” relates Antoine Le Ster, MerConcept’s partnership manager. All the teams at Merconcept, as well as CDK, GSea Design and VPLP, worked together to find a solution that would enable us to carry out the repairs within the very tight timescale. The key word in this preparation is really adaptability.”

Sandrine Bertho, Project Manager at Actual Leader, rules out the word calm to describe the team’s preparation for this Arkea Ultim Challenge. This is due to major damage to appendages during the year, to foils and to a daggerboard during the Transat Jacques-Vabre. However, she is satisfied that the team has “reached the level of preparation we wanted before the Jacques-Vabre. Apart from overhauls and parts changes on the boat, we managed to deal with these major breakages, even if we had to switch to 2-8, 7 days a week, unlike our usual 5 days a week organization.”

Read also Arkea Ultim Challenge-Brest: what resources have been deployed to guarantee safety?

Stopovers to anticipate

A race dedicated solely to the Ultim class, as its name suggests, the Arkea Ultim Challenge is scheduled to take place just after a transatlantic race, a rare occurrence in ocean racing. This particularity is also accompanied by the possibility for teams to make technical stopovers in ports subject to the obligation to remain immobilized for 24 hours. During this time, the teams are free to bring in equipment and manpower to work on the boats.

“This involves a huge amount of anticipation on our part, so that all the situations we have planned for can be easily triggered,” says Sandrine Bertho. Antoine Le Ster continues: “This parameter has been fully taken into account in our preparations. We had a good example in 2019, with this Brest Atlantique. We had to take a rudder to Rio and make a stopover in Cape Town. So it was also on the basis of this experience that we decided we had to think ahead. This involves having the wooden crate that will contain the rudder or other part, having contacts in the various embassies of the places where we’re potentially going to stop, selecting the ports that are easiest to access, trying to have 2 or 3 contacts there who can intervene quickly. In any case, everything is anticipated, from the transport of equipment to team passports.”

Choice of ports, choice of airlines… All the parameters were studied in advance of the race. “We thought about the different objects to be transported, their volume, the type of aircraft to be used, the places where it would be easiest to transport the equipment, and how to approach the boat most easily in the predefined locations,” says Sandrine Bertho.

Read also What might the Ultim of the future look like ?

Organization during the race

This anticipation enabled SVR-Lazartigue to react quickly to the major damage suffered by Tom Laperche. The team had divided its workforce into two distinct groups. One dedicated to routing, led by Jean-Yves Bernot and including François Gabart, Corentin Nouguet and Charlie Dalin; the other focused on the technical side, “which includes more people, including boat captain Frédéric Bérat”. Unfortunately for the youngest competitor, and despite all the efforts made in the port of Cape Town, it proved impossible to carry out an express repair of the boat before setting off again for the Indian Ocean.

Actual also had its share of setbacks, but was more fortunate in that Anthony Marchand was able to set sail again after suffering damage to a foil which was removed in Cape Town. We set up the meteorological section with Christian Dumard in Auray,” explains Sandrine Bertho. He is accompanied by Yves Le Blevec and Thierry Chabagny. Another part is dedicated to the technical side. We’ve also mobilized a number of people so that we can be contacted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to be able, at our request, to envisage repair scenarios on the boat, for example.”

After the energy-hungry Adagio launch operation within the team, the decision was made to “split the load while not necessarily completely modifying the weekly workload. We’re staying with a single cell that operates from Monday to Friday during normal working hours. ” As far as routing is concerned, Christophe Boutet is proud to be able to count on a skipper who “is a Figaro sailor at heart, who makes his own decisions and determines his own routing. There is, however, support from our meteorologist David Lanier. The team is then present on the safety and psychological aspects for Eric during the week, and all the rest of the team will be on standby during the nights and weekends.”

Photo credit : © Thierry Martinez | Team Actual