A new bid for the world's hardest sailing record
An attempt on the toughest record in ocean sailing, the westabout round the world course, is being planned later this year by French sailor Romain Pilliard. The 46-year-old Figaro sailor and IMOCA crew will be sailing with another as yet unnamed co-skipper in a bid to break the 34,000-mile ‘wrong way’ record non-stop round the world against prevailing winds and currents.
Pilliard will sail the trimaran Use it Again!, the 75ft Nigel Irens design (then B&Q) that Ellen Macarthur sailed to a non-stop eastabout round the world record in 2005.
The wrong-way record has been completed by only five sailors since it was first set in 1971 by Chay Blyth. Then dubbed ‘the impossible voyage’ it was a record of greater duration and vastly greater arduousness than the downwind route, as it involved punching much more slowly into a greater number of storms across the expanse of the Southern Ocean, as well as battling counter-currents.
TESTING THE THEORY
While all the previous record breakers have been on conservative, robustly built monohulls, and sailing solo, Pilliard will sail double-handed and follow a different route. It has been a longheld theory that the record would next fall to a multihull, provided it was sufficiently manageable to round Cape Horn to windward.
The argument goes that a multihull would be fast enough to sail into the more clement latitudes of the Pacific and Indian Ocean – in other words, could make the wrong-way route more right-way, albeit with some very gnarly corners.
The theory was put to the test in 2017 by
Yves Le Blévec on the 100ft trimaran Actual. But Blévec capsized today off Cape Horn when one of the trimaran’s port linkages broke in winds of 30-40 knots and 6m seas. Fortunately he was able to shelter inside until airlifted to safety by the Chilean Coastguard.
Pilliard has thousands of miles of solo racing experience on the trimaran, including racing in the 2019 Route du Rhum transatlantic race. He comments: “The choice of [two skippers] makes sense. Even if I know my boat well, it’s still a multihull, it can turn over. There can be days of waiting [near Cape Horn] if the conditions are not kind and it’s less dangerous to wait doublehanded than solo, especially in bad conditions.”