BATTLE OF THE GIANTS

THE FIRST BIG OCEAN TEST FOR THE ULTIME TRIMARANS BROKE NEW GROUND. HELEN FRETTER TALKED TO THE SKIPPERS TO FIND OUT WHY

- HELEN FRETTER

On Tuesday 5 November four giant trimarans – Maxi Edmond de Rothschild, Macif, Sodebo and Actual Leader, and their double-handed crews – left a grey and sodden Brest on Brittany’s most westerly tip. They were two days later than planned after a North Atlantic storm created monstrous 8m seas in Biscay, and hurtled out under triple-reefed mainsails and bare forestays. But still the leaders passed Madeira by Thursday morning and the Canaries by teatime that same day.

The Cape Verdes whistled past their port bow late on Friday night. Then, after crossing the breadth of the Atlantic in less than a weekend, Maxi Edmond de Rothschild was first to arrive at Recife, Brazil, in time for breakfast on Monday.

And so it went on: Franck Cammas and Charles Caudrelier on Maxi Edmond de Rothschild sailed from Rio to Cape Town – the entire South Atlantic leg, diving down to 43°S – in six days.

Only when you plot their track around the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean do the incomprehensible speeds the newest foiling trimarans travel at become real.

Not until the northbound return stage did they slow down: after rounding Robben Island off Cape Town to port, the next mark of the course was the finish at Brest, necessitating a climb past Namibian shores at mere 20-knot averages before skirting the St Helena High. By the finish, the Ultimes will likely have sailed some 14,000 miles around the Atlantic Ocean in fewer than 30 days.

The Brest Atlantiques Race was borne out of the crumpled carbon of the 2018 Route du Rhum, which had been hotly anticipated as the first transatlantic contest for the trimarans, but turned instead into a demolition derby.