Mike Golding and co-skipper Javier Sansó made a safe, conservative start to the ninth edition of the Transat Jacques Vabre, starting the 4500 miles two handed race from Le Havre to Porto Limon, Costa Rica in a gentle 7-10 knots breeze under grey skies.
Golding and Sanso unleashed their gennaker in good time to cross the start line in good shape this afternoon, tracking on the stern of 2007 race winner Michel Desjoyeaux on Foncia.
While brisker reaching conditions are predicted into the first night, a transition zone of light winds will have to be breached before breaking into stronger winds later on Monday and Tuesday.
The weather picture remained complex for the first week of the race at least, with several options. Golding admitted that his primary goal, before departing, was to race a competitive passage with as few problems as possible. But, he observed wryly, “When the race head is on, you are out there to win.”
“ My confidence in the boat as is good, if not better than ever.” He commented, “We have had a lot of time. We have not done a lot of testing. The boat does feel good. The team, Harry, Tim and Dom, have done a very good job – a small team – to have her in such good nick.”
“I would just like to finish the race in good shape, have a decent result and that would be just fine. As soon as you get on the race course, you get your race head on and you want to win it.”
Even now, entering his sixth consecutive Transat Jacques Vabre, after competing in every one since 1999 when he finished third with Ed Danby, the butterflies are still there on race morning:
“I’m still nervous, especially with such a potentially fruity forecast. In fact I am happier now because it has settled a little, but our ideal scenario here is a VMG downwind race, and whilst it might be a while before we get in those conditions, it does look like what we will ultimately get.”
Having done relatively few miles with his Spanish co-skipper, he says they will inevitably settle in as easily as possible:
“ I think it is awkward for us to start with because if we are doing lots of sail changes, spinnaker to gennaker to headsails, gybing the pressure is on a bit. We have not had time to practise. And so we might just have to make some calls which are safe in terms of sail changes.”
“We need to try and not put ourselves in any situations where we break stuff, but the pressure is on to get to the weather front out to the west, to get there first and be able to head south first.”
He expands on the weather strategy:
“ At the moment it is all very active, Le Havre has been at the centre of a small, quite intense depression system which is dissolving. The breeze will slowly back round to the left as the day reaches its end and overnight, and then dropping quite light. Then it will keep going left until we are in SW’ly flow.
Then we push to the west and front which is quite active comes through. We will be tacking on to starboard and heading south. The question is when to tack south. That will be the difficult call.”
“ My feeling is we have to cross the high ridge and so you might as well get on and do it and not risk anything in the north. The isobars are very close together. The systems are activeThere is another hurricane going over the USA and that these systems will be spun around by the jetstream and they will come this way. That does not mean we will get hurricanes, but we will get the systems.”
“The further you go, and it is a typical scenario where the rich may well get richer further down the track.”
“If that high ridge fills in front of us though, the race might re-start again and everything we do up here might be for nothing.”
“The temptation is to try and sail near the rhumb line, but the routing we are seeing pushes us south much harder. That will be the big call.
If you sail the rhumb line you are going to look quite good on the position reports, but then you might well run out of breeze first. And the boats to the east of you will just rotate around you.”
“So that is the difficulty. The option to go south and the question is whether you will make it down far enough to cross the high ridge and be able to get ourselves west on the trades.”
“To me, it looks quite tight. The reality is that staying north is not a real option, because up there you are just going to get hammered. Maybe Artemis or Hugo Boss will try that, but for me it is Novemeber in the North Atlantic. I just don’t think that is the smart way to go.”
“It does look advantageous for the first five to seven days, but…but, and this is the big but, you do have to cross the high ridge. And you can’t see out far enough at the moment to see when you will get far enough south again. The routing looked so favourable yesterday because the last file showed a favourable flow down the coast of the USA and normally that would never be there.”
“The routing file thought ‘you have to go this way because the weather file thinks you have to run with the last file, to the finish and that is not right.”
