A mini boat for a big dream - Part 1

Do you remember this eye-opening trigger after which I decided to quit my job and go live my dreams? Amongst those dreams there was the one of becoming a naval architect to imagine and build the sailing yachts of tomorrow and leave my fingerprint in a world that fascinates me so much. But that wasn’t the only dream, there was this one dream, deep inside me, which was reluctant to surface since "not very conventional", too insane, with many unknowns and a lot of insecurity… This dream is to become a real sailor and to train for offshore sailing so that the sailing yacht of tomorrow can become a means of transportation without any limits! So I decided to join the craziest of the offshore racing class: the "classe Mini"!

So, what is the "classe Mini"? It is a category of sailing yachts which is governed by the JAUGE Mini – defined by a set of rules on the dimensions of a sailing yacht and her equipment. The mini Transat is a a solo-transatlantic sailing race on a tiny boat of 6.50 m which sets start every other year, from France to one of the islands part of the French Caribbean – Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc.

The "classe Mini" is a bit of a crazy adventure since, as soon as you get started, even if you have sailed before and that during the first training sessions we sail double-handed (two people onboard), you are still aware that one day you will once be by yourself on a tiny boat and you’ll have to take care of everything – sea sickness, sails, navigation, safety, weather forecast, sleep, food, and I’m probably forgetting a few! What a better way to learn than to just getting started?!

To discover this fascinating world from the inside and help me make the decision to start or not the adventure, I talked about my desire to take part into a few training sessions and enter some double-handed races on this small mythical boat of 6.50 m. Luck came by quickly in December when a friend who was starting the adventure was looking for a crew for the first training sessions and the first double-handed race of the season! Early January, I joined Luc in La Rochelle over the weekends to discover with him the joy of sailing onboard a mini, on his brand new Ofcet! Wow! There were ropes everywhere – a rope in the sailor’s vocabulary corresponds to all the lines used onboard a boat to tune the sails and get the boat to move forward. So many ropes! So many different sails as well onboard such a small boat! I had only just set foot in the cockpit – aft part of the boat from where the sailor ‘drives’ the boat – and I already had so many questions coming with the fear of not being able to do it. And I thought I could sail, haha, I was about to get the opportunity to learn much more than I ever thought though…

The first sail was super messy since we were just discovering the boat and the complexity of the different types of tuning to get this sailing rocket to move forward. Thankfully our coach Jean with his patience and his good mood was following us with his dinghy to help us observing our sails and wind flow to tune our boat at its finest. What a pleasure to get this boat moving fast by just using and understanding the wind and the sea! One of the reason why I love this sport is because it allows me to learn and to comprehend the physical forces and laws that define mother nature. And thanks to my little brain it all suddenly starts to make sense when I see the boat accelerating because I have understood which shape I need to give the sail to use its capacity at its maximum!

After a few training sessions with Luc, we started to get used to it all even if we still had a long way of improvements ahead of us. Our first night at sea allowed us to discover the constraints linked to night sailing: precisely evaluate our location, tune sails we could not see well in the darkness, sleep but not too much… all these little things that we can’t really imagine until we’re facing them.

And then came the day of our first offshore sailing race: the Lorient BSM which took place in April 2016. 150 nautical miles – about 280 km – starting from Lorient, heading towards the Glenans archipelago to be left on port – on the left of the boat – then heading down South towards the Ilse of Groix, and then by the North of Belle île en mer before heading back up to Lorient. I must admit that the weather conditions were quite tough for a first race… Around 30 knots of wind – almost 60 km/h –and a rough sea state at the beginning which became rougher overnight – troughs that reached up to 3 m at times! The start went well, under the sunshine with a strong headwind – about 35o from the wind – all the way up until the Glenans! The problem is that those boats are conceived to sail in planning mode – with the wind coming more from behind – so they are not super-fast when beating up the wind and this point of sail is therefore slower and not the most comfortable one onboard with the waves and the wind coming ahead….

When the night came by after we passed the Glenans, the wind blew stronger with gusts going over 35 knots – 70 km/h – and the sea state became extremely rough. The beginners that we were at the time with Luc struggled to tune the sails to give the boat enough power to go through those big waves that were coming from three-quarter forward and got us drenched and shaken all night long. We drifted a lot and despite the foresail change to reduce our sail area and maintain the boat in the right direction we realised at dawn that we had lost a considerable amount of positions in the race and that we would never manage to cross the finish line before its official closure. Tired from the agitated night and since we couldn’t get the boat to move the way we wanted her to, we took the decision to head back to Lorient without finishing the race course… If I were to do it all again, I would finish it even I couldn’t go over the finish line on time. Why? Because there was no danger, because nothing was broken onboard and even if we were frustrated that we could not go as fast as the boat could go, we were still moving forward. We probably got ourselves influenced by the successive abandons of our friends and competitors who we could hear from the VHF over the radio frequency used for the race…

As soon as we arrived in Lorient, frustrated to not have been able to push the boat the way she should have been sailing, I went to see the crew that arrived first to ask them how they tuned their sails and boat. What’s amazing about the classe Mini is that although we may be competitors on the water, it is all and foremost a big family for which helping each other and partying are core values. The most experimented guys took their time to explain me how they tuned their sails and for which reasons; and then we all went out to celebrate this great race after all, with a few pints of course! I learnt a lot on that day and I am extremely grateful to Luc for giving me the opportunity to experience my first classe Mini sailing race.

Later on, in Concarneau, I met a few ministes – the youngsters who try out the adventure Mini – and I could do some double-handed training sessions with a few of them in the bay of Concarneau. Even if I did not have a boat, I wanted to make the most of that year to immerse myself in the life of a ministe and thus I also followed the training programme with the Centre d’Entrainement Mini de Concarneau – CEMC. Activities included coached physical training sessions, relaxation, sophrology, and jogging to keep in good shape and work on mental strength and other psychological aspects of solo offshore racing. Fascinating!

Even if this project appears to me as a tremendous challenge, from the sportive aspect to the more material one – finding the required funding, buying a boat and preparing it with care – everything I have experienced over the past couple of months has only reinforced my desire to try it out. I was only lacking one experience to make the decision of starting the full adventure: a longer race on a Mini, over several days, nights and days, offshore, to discover how I would get on. Indeed, I was wondering how I would react to the lack of sleep, life on-board such a small boat, dried food for several days…

How pleased I was – and also worried I must admit – when Stan, a good friend from CEMC called me one day to offer me to participate with him in the Mini Fastnet in June! – A double-handed race from Douarnenez in Brittany all the way to the Fastnet Rock in Ireland and back to Douarnenez.

But that is another story…

#Mini650 #MiniTransat #Fastnet #Offshore #Sailing