A Podium at the Defi Paprec
During 2024 I had made peace with the fact I was not going to do any international races, instead quietly work away on the future. Well that all changed on the 12 August at 10:15 am with a message, “Hey David, hope you’re well, I don’t have your number!! Could you send it to me, have someone that has a sailing proposition for you (smiley face)” And thus began an adventure.
The proposition
25-minutes on the phone with Ellie Driver starting out on her journey in Classe Figaro Beneteau and the French Elite Offshore Championship. She was looking for a co-skipper, the 615-mile race, Le Defi Paprec.
The racetrack for this adventure
Into the unknown
With only 3 days before the race to make the start, we went to work with preparations. Looking at the big teams with their army of PR people, weather forecasters, boat preparaturs and sports psychologists, their lives seem relaxed. It’s easy to be jealous. Our little team: Ollie, Ellie and I, working feverishly to get everything sorted. Those pre-race days passed as a mix of boat jobs, to race briefings to supermarkets and stage appearances.
This ocean sailing race had one unique aspect, starting in the city of Rouen, which is nowhere near the sea.
One of our preparation days was in fact a 12-hour parade up the River Seine to Le Harve. During this parade Ellie and I did our very first bit of training together, we hoisted a sail. Yes, that’s right when I say we were strangers one week before I really do mean it, we would be doing every single little detail that goes into a sailing race together for the very first time during the race.
One day the world will find out the tail of that bridge and the fact theirs only one person on our boat
Going into the race we had 3 objectives
1. Finish
2. Learn lots
3. Have fun
We had a few considerations.
· We’d never trained or sailed together and only met for the first time 7 days before the event. While others had been preparing all season.
· Ellie was new to the Figaro 3
· I hadn’t sailed one in 11 months
To compensate for this, we planned to overcommunicate at the beginning, accepted the initial 24 hours of racing were more about finding our rhythm, learning how to race together and balance the different jobs onboard according to each person’s strengths.
Sporting performances were a dream not an objective leaving the dock.
The Start - Sunday 25th August
Start day arrived, a sunny day with 20knots of wind and a short sea state. At least these were the conditions for the first 1 minute 45 seconds of the race where the weather gods decided the first 5 hours would be light winds, mental test to exit the Seine Bay
Us with the white sail (spinnaker) and for future reference please remember the Red with white stripe
Into the first night we sailed past the Cotentin peninsula famous for 3 things: ferry terminal, the strongest tides in Europe and seaweed. Life was a mix of trying to sail fast, position ourselves relative to the tide and cleaning seaweed from the rudders. Starting slowly (we were last place) but finding speed as we got into our rhythm we began passing competitors. The relentlessness broken only by news of the abandonment of someone who had crashed into a rock and our engine not being all that happy (the engine is required to charge the batteries which provide electricity aboard).
Day 2 - Monday 26th August
Dawn broke, a brutal grey, rainy morning with low level clouds with up to 30knots (34mph) winds. The sea state made keeping the speed high, difficult and life was abject misery. Wondered why I’d given up going to Croatia for a friend’s birthday for this we continued overtaking boats.
Going west down the Channel, towards Wolf Rock off the Cornish coast (English friends you should hear the French pronunciation of “Cornwall”). The never-ending search for speed continued throughout Monday when we noticed we were in small group of 4 teams battling for the lower reaches of the podium. This group would never be more than 2 miles from each other for the next 30 hours. For Ellie and I our teamwork, communication and speed was improving with every mile sailed.
Day 3 - Tuesday 27th August
Tuesday began akin to those in the corporate world must feel on a Monday morning, with a bang. The gusty conditions saw wind speeds ranging from a fun 20 knots to a boat breaking 35 knots. A sudden lurch woke me from a nap, Ellie and I chatted about dropping one of the 3 sails we were using, called the code 0. At that very moment the sail (the Code 0) decided to break at a crucial point. With the wind conditions for the next 36hours not looking like we’d need this sail, we put our broken sail away and raced on. Rounding Wolf Rock, we were at the back of the group, damaged but not out.
Turning south around Wolf Rock, the long road south towards Spain began. Throughout Tuesday the rain eased off and waves began to reduce, and we started to dream of “Sunny Spain”.
The race could be categorized into 2 48-hour sections:
1. The first 48 with relatively certain weather conditions, making it a pure test of speed without any tactical options.
2. The second 48 with weather conditions becoming a mystery, putting an emphasis on an ability to read the conditions and creating tactical options for those brave enough to try.
In Figaro racing outside communication is banned, meaning that we were reliant on radio weather reports from the organizers rather than those in detailed computer files. Meteorological uncertainty means racing becomes defensive; 1st place puts defensive positioning on second place, 2nd place does the same to 3rd place and so on to reduce risk.
Ellie and I reviewed the situations; We were happy, happy with our speed, happy with our teamwork and potential future tactical moves. While the defensive wall in front of us was impossible to pass at that moment we believed our moment would come. Crucially we knew we had another level of intensity for that critical moment. While holding this pace was not, easy it was something akin to 95% effort.
Our plan to manage this uncertainty was to position ourselves to the west. New weather would arrive from the west, so we would be first into the new weather and closer to the new weather systems with more wind. The Bay of Biscay is large and “western positioning” leaves plenty of room for further tactical moves.
For my non-sailors - Blue areas mean not much wind, green mean more wind - Our aim was to be first into the green area
On Tuesday evening, like most in the race, we were heading not south but west, for better positioning, hoping in the long run this would be beneficial.
With wind speeds dropping, we decided to make our move to go south during the night. The weather forecast indicated that the wind would rotate from a south westerly direction to a north westerly direction, tacking onto starboard in the middle of the night we began to hope that the wind would rotate round like forecasted, allowing us to make good ground to the South while our rivals went west.
I wish I could tell you that the sky looked this idyllic for all of the race
Day 4 -Wednesday 28th August
Unbeknownst to us the day Oasis announced they were getting the band back together. The sun rose, and in some immense fog the wind began to turn as predicted. We changed sails twice onto our biggest spinnaker, the wind built, and we were sailing fast towards Gijon.
In Figaro racing outside communication is banned, so unless you can literally see the other boats you have no idea where anyone really is. We had 2 boats on our tail, but they’d dropped back quite quickly in vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.
The next 24 hours passed without seeing any evidence of human life. It’s funny how isolation plays with your head, and we began to question ourselves. Have we been left behind? Have we chosen the correct route? The longer this isolation went on for, the stronger the doubts became.
As day turned to night our nervousness about our isolation wasn’t helped by the sight of lightning on the horizon either.
Day 5 - Thursday 29th August
With 70 miles left, the forecast suggested the wind direction would go from northwest to northeast, but the direction kept rotating to more to the east. Remember that sail we had broken off the coast of Cornwall? This change now meant that we needed it!
We had 2 options: Use a sail that was too big for the wind speed and the wrong shape to be able sail the direction to the finish or concede defeat and finish slow. With a vastly overpowered set up and we were also heading 10 degrees to the right of the finish line. However, we were fast and kept the hope that we’d have an opportunity
Grey with more grey - And those oh so difficult to manage low-lying clouds
By 9am the unforgiving routine of pushing the boat and us to the limit, balanced with boat preservation under thick fog clouds, had been established. In and out of thick fog we went. The routine broken by the sight of our rivals. As difficult as this was and as tired as we were after over 3 days of racing, we were in a strong tactical position, level with podium fight and they had no way to defend from us…they’d gone too far west the previous day. We were free to push our advantage all the way to the finish.
With confidence increasing and a wind direction rotating back into our favor, we began to believe that with 20 miles to go, something was possible. We were fast, and only getting faster and better as a team. With that little extra 5% intensity level saved for just this. A quick, this is our time to push chat, an energy drink and mint chocolate. Raising the intensity level higher than we had all race the miles began to pass even faster.
The final sprint
With 3.4 miles to go, we could suddenly see the water surface looking like a mirror. Figaro racing is some of the cruelest racing and the final 3 miles of 615 would be played out in the harshest of circumstances, almost no wind. 612 miles of racing suddenly meant nothing.
We had a slow-motion sprint finish on our hands. We began a process called changing gears, a little bit like what you do in a car to get it up a steep hill. The boats behind had more wind and with that our rivals were level. It wasn’t a physical race anymore it was mental; to find the slightest 0.1knot of speed more than the others.
2 painful hours of racing to cover those 3 miles. 2 hours of making tiny little adjustments to exact every 0.1 knot from the boat we could. Noticing that all the time the boats previously far behind us were closing in with more wind.
Rounding the final buoy into the bay of Gijon, we could see the finish, that final mile, that final mile of hell with everyone closing in behind us.
Remember that Red with white stripe sail? Well, after 4 days of racing they were some 30 seconds behind us. The white boat anchored is the finish line.
The gap was shrinking, however they were running out of road to close the gap. After 4 Days 13 minutes and 37 seconds we finished.
What happeed next is somewhat of a blur - The conversation went something like
“So what position do you think we are?”
“Second, I think”
“Yeah I think second too.”
“But let’s wait to see in the harbor if someone else hasn’t got in before us”
The moment we were told to head for the 2nd place parking spot, we knew we’d done it. A team that had not even done so much as the most basic manoeuvre in sailing before the race had pulled off a shock podium at some of the highest level sailing in world.
I think it’s starting to sink in what we did on those 4 days, and I hope we get to team up again sometime in the future because that was a lot of fun.
Huge thanks to Ellie for inviting me, to Ollie for his hard work before the start, and to my friends and Family for putting up with my love of sailing.