HEAVY FOULING
One of the biggest surprises was the amount of barnacle growth sustained on the bottom of most boats. It was not a good advert for toxic effectiveness of current antifouling paints.
Two of the yachts were so badly affected by the time they had crossed the Indian Ocean, after just three months at sea, that they had to stop in Australia. By Hobart, where all the skippers made a short film drop, all but Van Den Heede’s Rustler had their speed sapped by fast-growing goose barnacles. The first three took the opportunity to scrape their hulls clean while anchored within the sheltered waters of Storm Bay, but the publicity led Australia’s Bio Security Authority to enforce a rule that hulls cannot be cleaned within 200 miles of land. That put those that followed at a severe disadvantage, forcing them to dive in deep, open conditions, where the sight of sharks – perhaps attracted by the barnacle growth – proved a major deterrent.
Mark Slats, the ‘hard’ man in this race, dived whenever he was becalmed, but after cleaning his hull during the return voyage up the South Atlantic, he was very surprised to find his Rustler encrusted again just three weeks later.
Jean-Luc Van Den Heede was the only skipper not to be troubled by growth, and apart from small patches of growth above the waterline at bow and stern, Matmut returned to Les Sables d’Olonne in very much the same pristine condition that she had left seven months before. His secret: three coats of Awlgrip Seajet 033 Shogun topped with a further coat of Seajet 039 Ultimate SPC Platinum self-polishing antifouling.
Lionel Regnier, Matmut’s shore manager explained. “We applied the antifouling a month before the start, and kept the boat in a chlorine bag in the marina for the last two weeks. That ensured that no spores attached to the surface before the start. The selfpolishing effect of the Platinum coat was expected to wear off after the first 7-8,000 miles to leave three coats of Shogun through the Southern Ocean and back up the Atlantic, and it has worked well.”
Regnier also assisted Uku Randmaa with final preparations for his Rustler One for All. “I had sailed her in the 2017 OSTAR and when we pulled her out in Les Sables d’Olonne, the hull was remarkably clean, so we over-coated the existing antifouling with one coat of Seajet Shogun, but this didn’t work. The boat was infested with barnacles at the Hobart stop just like the rest of the fleet.”
There’ll be a future report into the effectiveness of the antifouling treatments.