Club Med - What we broke and whats next for the crew

by Club Med Media 7 Mar 2001 09:34 GMT

The giant blue Club Med catamaran that sailed to Marseilles and victory in The Race on Saturday evening didn't have as trouble free a passage around the world as the crew would have liked. During the high-speed battle around the planet, sailed at a record setting pace of 18.3 knots average, the advanced composite 32 metre long racing boat had several breakdowns.

They ranged from simple deck fittings to a broken canopy, torn netting, failed ballast pumps and fractured battens, all on top of the normal wear and tear that comes from sailing over 25,000 miles non-stop.

And just days from the finish line a routine rig inspection yielded reason for the mast to fall over, co-skipper Franck Proffit explained:

"Just three days from Marseilles, because of a lower shroud failure, we nearly lost the rig. Just near the terminal where the Kevlar shroud joins the mast a lot of extra wear had taken place, we added extra lashing and connections to keep it together to the finish."

But by far the most alarming problem was a primary structural failure resulting in an area of delamination around one of the main crossbeam roots, the area where the crossbeam that supports the mast, joins the hull. Skipper Grant Dalton explained:

"Before we left Barcelona we had to decide what to take in the way of spares. We had to think carefully because you don't want to weigh the boat down with unnecessary equipment. It is important to take universal things, things that can do a lot of jobs."

"Apart from a few spare parts we also took three amazing guys - our Three Man Army, Neal MacDonald, Ed Danby and Jan Dekker - they could fix anything, with hardly any parts. And when we found the de-lamination problem they just got inventive."

"The core between skins disintegrated over a patch of about 2 square metres in area in a really important structural part of the boat. The Three Man Army took the watertight bulkhead doors from inside and bolted them on to the inside and the outside of the suspect area. We had to steal parts from other areas in the boat, for example the bolts we used we 'borrowed' from the base of each winch, we took two from each winch, and we took a few from the generator..."

"We didn't talk about it at the time, we just dealt with it and anyway big boys don't cry - we fixed the problem and got over it. Importantly we didn't want the opposition behind us buoyed by the fact that they could smell blood."

"Before we left we had to decide what to take in the way of spares. We had to think carefully because you don't want to weigh the boat down with unnecessary equipment. It is important to take universal things that can do a lot of jobs."

The Next Few Days ...

The schedule for Club Med's International crew over the next few days and weeks is all in place. On Wednesday 7th March they will travel to Club Med World in Paris to meet and celebrate with the rest of the Club Med team including the GOs, Gentils Organisateurs, that work at the Paris Headquarters. Thursday sees the squad take their families to the mountains for a four-day skiing holiday in a Club Med resort. Thierry Barot, the catamaran's shore manager, will be in hot demand. When he is not involved in managing the boat's programme Thierry is a ski instructor.

After this long weekend together the team will start to go their separate ways. Some of the crew will return to Marseilles to work on the refit of the boat while others will return home to have a holiday before starting their next projects. Among the latter group navigator Mike Quilter will be returning to New Zealand to rejoin America's Cup defenders Team New Zealand where he will be working with Club Med's weather router Roger "Clouds" Badham. Englishman Neal MacDonald will also be stepping into the America's Cup arena when he joins the Great Britain Challenge team based in Cowes, Isle of Wight.

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