First of all… La Trinite is a pretty small and cozy coastal town in Brittany with a beautiful harbor surrounded by seaside shops, restaurants and boating related businesses. Private homes are tucked up into the trees along the shore. The highest elevation in town tops out at 40 feet, or so, above sea level. You’d just never imagine that there is a fairly hefty collection of the most exotic, state of the art sailing machines sitting within the safety of its moorings, but there they are.

 

As of this writing, the highest of high end fully seaworthy maxi multihulls are represented by the nearly twin trimaran designs from Nigel Irens and Benoit Cabaret in the form of Francis Joyon’s, World Record holding IDEC and Thomas Coville’s Sodeb’O. These two trimarans are nothing short of pure wonderment as they sit quietly on their mooring lines while representing totally coiled power that takes them to frightening speeds when under sail in the hands of a talented and experienced skipper.

They sit about a hundred yards apart in the harbor, staring across the water at one another as if to say, “Yeah, dude, what have you got?” I’ll touch on both these boats in my next post, but there are other distractions for a sailor at La Trinite that should be described before I get carried away with the globe shredding multihulls.

 

 

 

  Monohull sailors will rejoice in the fact that tied up on moorings, just feet away from IDEC were three, big fast ocean racing monohulls being readied. We pulled up to the harbor to get our first view of things. Arrayed before me on moorings and dock were, Safran and Gitana80, both Open 60 designs destined for the Vendee Globe race beginning November 9th… http://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/  and Bostik, a Veolia Oceans One-design at 52′, http://www.soloceans.com/en/veolia-oceans/   slated for the SolOceans, solo round the world competition… Each of these racing boats had crew aboard who were going over last minute prep work for their respective big events.

 

Prior to flying over to France, I had done some Google Earth work to get a feel for how the whole scene was laid out in La Trinitie and one of the photos you could see showed IDEC, just bobbing along on her lines. While I was not sure that she would be in harbor when I got there, I was seriously hoping that it would be true so I could take in both the big trimarans in one session. But the big bonus of having the mini fleet of 60 footer’s with some fairly active team mebers aboard just put everything onto a new level.

 

For me, a boat designer who has just begun his budding career, this was a huge opportunity to take a long look at these incredible boats and absorb all the little details up close that you just can’t get from looking at photos, no matter how cool the shots are.

The Safran team was loading a mainsail in to the lazyjack flaking bag on the boom and by the looks of things, it wasn’t anything like an easy job at all. Two guys were standing on the foredeck lifting and shoving while one guy was well out on the boom, swinging around a bit while trying to lift the aft end of the sail bag up so it could slide into place. Apparently, they had some urgency as the very next day, Safran went out in gale force conditions for some last minute testing in full, 30-40 knot winds. A day in that stuff would tell you what is and what is not working and might save you some hassles once the Vendee Globe gets fully underway.

 

Here’s a collection of monohull images…

 

Bostik

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gitana 80

 

 

 

Safran