SportTechie’s new series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. As part of this series, British sailor Alex Thomson explained the technology that makes solo round-the-world races possible.
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The Vendée Globe is a true race around the world, a solo sailing expedition that takes place every four years and covers more than 24,000 miles. Boats race from the Vendée region of western France down south around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Australia’s Cape Leeuwin, and South America’s Cape Horn. While some 3,000 people have climbed to the very top of the world, and 600 have visited the emptiness of space, fewer than 100 have sailed solo nonstop around the globe.
British sailor Alex Thomson has attempted the journey four times, twice retiring due to a broken boat and twice finishing in the top-three. In 2016, he completed the race in 74 days, 19 hours, 35 minutes, and 15 seconds despite damage to his starboard hydrofoil—second only to Frenchman Armel Le Cléac’h and faster than Phileas Fogg’s famed (and fictional) 80-day trip. Thomson became the youngest captain to win any round-the-world race when he led a crew to victory in the 1998 Clipper Race at age 25.
In the Vendée Globe race, Thomson is captain, engineer, mechanic, doctor, navigator, meteorologist, and communications specialist for two and a half months at sea. He must battle the elements, extreme temperatures, and an ever-changing sea state alone. He recently took SportTechie on a guided tour of the 60-foot Hugo Boss racing yacht he used in the 2016 race. His 2020 boat is under construction and will feature new technology courtesy of a recently announced partnership with Nokia.
The Draw of the Open Sea
“I wanted to be a helicopter pilot like my dad, but at 17, I was told my eyes are so bad that I couldn’t even be a seaman in the navy. I got a job at a sailing school where my chief responsibilities were cleaning the bilges, climbing the mast, and unblocking the toilets. And I just found my vocation in life.
“I did my first offshore race and realized that, when you’re in the ocean, it doesn’t really matter how big your boat is. When you can’t see land, you know how small we are as a human race. That’s a real humbling experience. In the last race, when the leader went around Cape Horn 800 miles ahead of me, the closest person to me was on the space station.
“This part of the sport isn’t really about technical sailing. It’s about human endeavor. It’s about adventure. It’s about man or woman versus the elements.”
Vendée Globe Boat Design
“One of the first rules says, if something isn’t specifically disallowed, then it is allowed. So that makes it very interesting for us. We desperately try to produce a boat that, on one hand, is fast enough to be able to win the race but, on the other hand, reliable enough to finish. That’s the biggest challenge because 50 percent of the people who start won’t finish, and they won’t finish because of technical problems.
“We’re not allowed to store power. We’re not allowed to have a charging reservoir to be able to do the job. We’re not allowed to have electric systems or anything like that. The idea is that the human becomes the limiting factor.
“There’s 20,000 components on the boat. In our world, the inches and detail mean a matter of life and death, really. There’s 400 screws in that mast. If one of those comes undone, I can’t get the sail down. If I can’t get the sail down, then I’m not in a safe position. I’m going to have to climb the mast.”
“You have to be very careful [with using new equipment]. New technologies are great, but, say, there are these new wenches. That new wench is one and a half kilos lighter than these [old] ones. There’s going to be four wenches, so that’s six kilos—a significant savings. But is it tested? Is it going to work? Are we going to have to carry more spares? How are we going to be able to do the [testing] time on it before we do the race? Because if one of those breaks during the race, it ain’t worth the six kilos. So it’s a bit of a balance, really. We try not to do too much. We try to do less better than do too much badly.”
Hull Construction
“This is the general construction, a bit like a Formula One car or racing car—thin layers of carbon fiber, paper in a honeycomb shape, so it’s very light. It’s very weak in one direction but very strong in the other. Than you put more layers of carbon fiber on the other side of it, stick it in a giant oven, cook it to 80 degrees [Celsius, or 176 Fahrenheit). It’s pretty light, if it stays together. So in terms of composite construction, there ain’t much more advanced than this.
“You can imagine that, in Formula One, there’s quite strict rules about construction and deflections. In the aerospace industry, [there are] huge safety factors. You can’t have planes falling out of the skies.
“Whereas, for us, it says the boats must withstand pressures of the ocean. So underneath this point, the maximum thickness is just 2.6 millimeters (1/10 of an inch).”
Sailing on Hydrofoils
“When we designed this boat, we didn’t even know it was going to work. Honestly, we didn’t know. We were prepared for it not to work but hoping that it would, obviously. Now we’ve been running these things with foils for nearly four years. We’ve got lots of data and understand it a lot more. We’re going to see bigger, longer articles. The boats will fly more than they will before.
“If you imagine you’re sailing along on a foil, you start bouncing up and down, and you can feel the whole thing. They move like 400 millimeters, [nearly] half a meter up and down. We don’t fully fly. If we had a foil on the rudder—we call it an elevator—then we would fully fly.
“You’ll see the keel, which is four and a half meters deep, come out of the water. So you can get some pretty big height on it.”
Life on Board
“The freeze-dried food has changed quite a lot—there’s more variety. Here’s a beef and potato casserole, it’s about 800 calories, 120 grams rehydrates to half a kilo. It’s the lightest way of being able to do it. I only carry about 10 liters of water on the boat at any one time. If we carry a desalination unit, we make water and you’ve just got to keep up.
“We use a company called Musto for the offshore technical clothing, and they do a great job. Their stuff is more breathable than it was before. I always think it’s a funny thing because, once you cover a piece of clothing that’s breathable with salt air, it ain’t breathable anymore, in my opinion.”
“Most people just have a normal bucket. I joked with my team once, ‘In the Southern Ocean every time I want to take a s—, I come down here, get a normal bucket, put a biodegradable bag in it, take off my jacket and probably five base layers, then every time you sit on it and commit to it, the wind will come, the toilet will tip over, and you’re in a difficult situation.’ So I said this to my team, and they decided to develop me a bucket that can withstand 80-degree keel without falling over. That’s a small detail—probably the world’s most expensive toilet.”
Sleeping
“A boat like this should be sailed by lots of people, really, so when you’re sleeping, you’re going slowly. The only way to be competitive is to cut the sleeping down to really short naps, 5-10-15 minutes at the beginning of the race. It gets a bit longer during the race, but the longest sleep I had in 74 days was just one hour. You do get used to it. We try to make life as comfortable now for the skipper, but it’s brutally hard work.
“Here’s the alarm, an egg timer, and I have an electric shock wristband in case I oversleep. I might set that alarm for 20 minutes and the electric shock wristband for 22 minutes. I always wake up.”
Hopes for 2020
“I’ve finished third, I’ve finished second, and now I don’t feel like I need to compromise anymore.”