Arkéa Ultim Challenge: meet in unknown seas!

How many will there be on arrival? And in what condition? After completing the loop without any stopover (authorized by the regulations)? And how many, supreme drama, will be unable to bring back their boat, forced to abandon it to the good will of the oceans, never kind to intruders? So many questions, doubts, uncertainties which challenge us on the eve of the big departure from Brest. This Sunday, for the first time in the history of offshore racing, six sailors, and not one more, will set off at the helm of an Ultim trimaran to challenge each other in an unprecedented race around the world and in lonely.

The Arkéa Ultim Challenge, its official name, looks exactly like the legendary Vendée Globe, with one major difference: the new kid on the block does not compete on 18.28 meter (60 foot) monohulls but on monsters with three hulls almost twice as large (32 meters) and capable in width of accommodating a tennis court (23 meters). Not to mention their mast, which towers over a 13-story building…

Also read: Arkéa Ultim Challenge: Éric Péron, penniless entrepreneur and navigator

To make matters worse, which is already highly complicated, these giant behemoths have the other particularity of literally flying above the waves. No need to imagine them at staggering heights, 1 meter will be enough for these 15-ton machines which defy the laws of weightlessness thanks to their foils and other supporting fins and can thus travel at astonishing speeds. Thirty, 35, 40, 45 knots, or between 55 and 90 km/h. At these speeds, on the water, imagine yourself going 200 km/h on the highway... Suffice to say that any exit from the road can be fatal.

Scheduled for 2019, this innovative global race has also fallen four years late, the time to “mature” these Ultim victims of incidents of all kinds during the 2018 Route du rhum. “Now the boats are ready”, the navigators proclaim in unison in a beautiful burst of confidence and self-persuasion.

The last two Route du rhum and Transat Jacques Vabre were indeed much less “boat-breaking” than the previous episodes, but they only lasted one week for one and two weeks for the other. Far from the 45 to 50 days expected for this world tour via the three capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin, Horn) and via the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and re-Atlantic oceans. With its raging seas, its gigantic waves, its Dantesque storms and its majestic albatrosses, the Great South (between Good Hope and the Horn) will reveal its truth. And will open, or not, the door to paradise to those who know how to deserve it.

Six sailors will cast off, along with their wives, children, friends and team, this Sunday, to challenge the planet. And, on the pontoons of the Brest commercial port, there is an air of déjà vu, between questioning and worry, excitement and a lump in the stomach. For those who are leaving but not only. On November 26, 1989, there were thirteen of them, one mast on the edge of the void for the very first Vendée Globe in history and seven were going to return classified after having succeeded in taming the “Everest of the seas”. “We are going a little higher than Everest,” summarizes Armel Le Cléac’h in Le Figaro (read below), placed in the clan of favorites by a number of observers with Charles Caudrelier, their Maxi Banque Populaire XI and Maxi Edmond de Rothschild, efficient and reliable, having won the last Rhum and Jacques Vabre.

Behind the two lads who have won at least once a world tour solo (Vendée Globe for Le Cléac'h) or with a crew with stopovers (Ocean Race for Caudrelier) and the Solitaire du Figaro (three times for Le Cléac' h), the young Tom Laperche, crowned in 2022, is the third favorite on the fast SVR Lazartigue, who, for the first time, is embarking on a circumnavigation. Other rookies around the planet, Anthony Marchand (Actual Ultim 3) and Éric Péron (nothing to do with Loïck Peyron, Adagio trimaran) have boats that know the route, are proven, but also slower than the latest machines.

Finally, there is a certain Thomas Coville in the shape of a question mark. A navigator with eight circumnavigations of the world (therefore a solo record), a unique experience, but also a Sodebo Ultim 3 which does not seem capable of going at the same speed as these little friends of the same age. “The question is to know where we are going to put the cursor to hold on over time”, once again asked the extreme sailors together. “I take 60 days of food to give to those I would recover,” laughed Éric Péron, the slowest on paper. So, how much on arrival? For once, the famous “Good luck” put into all the sauces on the ground is appropriate.