Trimaran tweets after Queen Mary 2 enters ice zone

by The Bridge on 30 Jun 2017 Sodebo Ultim laid a penalty on the leader Queen Mary 2 on Thursday for entering the ice exclusion zone of The Bridge - Centennial Transat. It was a joke, or it came in the form of a tweet at least. But sleep deprivation deepened by a fourth night at sea spent making many manoeuvres on the multihulls in light shifting airs meant it was a comment not without feeling and it immediately found resonance in the fleet.

“Protest against Queen Mary 2. In the ice exclusion zone. 3-day penalty minimum,” Jean-Luc Nelias, the navigator on Sodebo Ultim tweeted.

The four multihulls will cross the halfway point of this 3,152-mile race during Thursday, entering the fog over the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Given the dead zones overnight, the uncertain forecast and routing in front of them – a Monday finish in New York is now looking likely - the constraints of the ice zone are telling on the crews and they would dearly like the option of heading north.

“We have to go between a high-pressure system with no wind and this ice limit where it’s forbidden to sail, and there’s not so much room,” François Gabart (Macif), still, just, the leader of the race, said. “It’s the same for all the competitors and we have to try and treat it as if was a coastline. We could be blocked between a high-pressure zone and the coastline. It’s interesting because there are such a lot of new parameters to look at and things to do until we reach New York.”

The 34-year-old Gabart, the youngest winner of the Vendée Globe, when he was just 29, is a natural at the chess match of ocean racing and is a past master at putting a happy face on a difficult situation. But he even he was moved to cast an envious eye over the QM2’s unilateral decision and agree with Nelias’s tweet.

“I mean, it’s not easy for us to sail around this ice limit, because of this high pressure area, but the Queen Mary is just going through it,” Gabart said. “You’re going crazy fast with this boat (QM2) and whatever the wind it’s always more than 20 knots, which is quite hard for us to do the same. It would be funny for there to be a penalty for a Queen Mary, if you have a three-day penalty maybe we could have a closer finish.”

In the past, races allowed skippers to chart their own course and make their own risk assessment, but the dangers are obvious and the rescues expensive and dangerous. The ice exclusion zone has been positioned to give the boats a large buffer between them and any possibility of ice. It not about avoiding icebergs, at the moment they lie further north, more about the growlers – the one or two tonne pieces that barely emerge above the waterline but would destroy a 30-metre long multihull.

“The difference with (us compared to) the Queen Mary, in terms of ice, is that if you have one or two metres of ice - around one tonne - it’s floating and you only have a few centimetres above the surface, so you can barely see it, but if we crash into one tonne of ice you have some really deep damage on the boat,” Gabart said. “And it’s impossible to see it on the radar we have on board, it’s not able to detect it. So, the best thing we can do is to sail in an area where we’re sure that there cannot be these type of growlers. It’s not so difficult in this part of the world because of the gulf stream and the limits between the iceberg growlers and the safe area is quite good. Of course, it’s not the same if the Queen Mary touches a growler and on the Queen Mary I suppose there are all the electronics you can have to detect bigger icebergs. There is no (question of there being a) Titanic anymore.”

At the 17:00 ranking (French time): Macif (François Gabart) led Idec Sport (Francis Joyon) by 15 miles, Sodebo Ultim by 53 miles and Actual (Yves le Blévec) by 223 miles. “Macif that is far from having won race,” Dominic Vittet, the race meteorologist said. “François Gabart is counting on a rotation of the wind from the north-west when he approaches the exclusion zone. That would be perfect, unless a shift was waiting. That would force him to tack, while the wind would still be southwesterly.

“In this place of uncertain forecasts, everything remains possible; that the depression displaces more quickly, Or that the Bermuda high, which is due to migrate north in the next few days, changes course and leaves room for a new low coming out from the coast of New York.”

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