23.01.09

Temenos II bound for Europe

Temenos II on the platform in Australia © Bleue Salée

Over three weeks have passed since Temenos II’s arrival in Fremantle after Dominique suffered serious problems with the keel during the Vendée Globe. Barely had he set foot on Australian soil when the skipper set to work in an overpowering heat bordering on 40° in the shade. On site the three Imoca 60 teams, Temenos II, Gitana Eighty and Ecover opted to team up and thus "Team Gitanover" was born, with each team working on each of the monohulls in turn.

Contacted yesterday as he prepared to take off for Malaysia, Dominique described his Australian stopover: “Together with Mike and Loick’s teams, we opted to team up to get the job done. As such Gitanover saw the light of day! All of us were then able to work on each boat, one at a time, which enabled us to be a lot more efficient. We put a lot of work into the dismantling and preparation with a view to loading the boats. The Australians gave us a great welcome and were extremely helpful. This was especially true of the Fremantle Sailing Club, and even though the infrastructure in Fremantle isn’t specially designed for boats of this size, they had a great attitude and really helped us out.”

Once out on the hard, Temenos II’s hull was positioned on some huge bags filled with polystyrene and then loaded onto the container ship, which cast off for Malaysia on Sunday. It’s there that Dominique will join up with his monohull again, which should be placed in a transit zone in the immense commercial port of Tanjung Pelepas for 5 days, prior to being loaded onto another cargo ship on 30th January. The latter will be bound for Le Havre in north-east France, where she is expected around 15th February 2009.

“The boats will perform half a circumnavigation of the globe. As such we’ve tried to protect them as much as possible with protective covers, tarpaulin and foam. The loading onto the Maersk Garonne went very well and the Australian dockers took really great care of our boats. Luck would have it that we ended up with one of only two French registered container ships belonging to the shipowner. We were allowed to go aboard and the ship was really impressive. The Maersk Garonne measures 292 m long and can transport something like 4,300 containers. Temenos ended up perched 25 metres up. It’s not the usual position you’d expect to find a 60 footer in. She’ll really roll around up there during the trip so we had to ensure she was lashed down firmly. The partially French crew were very nice and the guys on deck send us news everyday. It was an emotional moment to see Temenos leaving.”

Really caught up in the preparation of his boat, Dominique hasn’t yet been able to get some real respite. In a certain way though, these past three weeks of intense physical work have proven to be beneficial to the skipper as they’ve enabled him to evacuate his feelings of disappointment.

“Having to set to work straightaway wasn’t such a bad thing in the end. There was so much to do that it kept my mind from wandering. Despite all that you can’t stop yourself from continuing to follow the race. It remains in a corner of your brain and I reckon it’ll remain like that until the first arrivals make port. Even after a retirement you feel like you’re still part of the race. It’s a strange feeling that of not finishing off the story. You can’t stop going over the race and imagining yourself still at sea with the rest of the fleet. The huge number of messages of support helped me out a great deal; it was a difficult time for the entire Temenos project.”

For the time being the breakage of the monohull’s keel head, which was the root of the skipper’s retirement and disillusion, still remains unexplained. This is something the experts will begin to tackle on the boat’s return to Europe. Dominique will be joined in this by the British skipper Mike Golding, who chose the same keel with a view to its reliability.

The broken keel head at the root of the retirement  © Bleue Salée

“The boat will arrive in Le Havre on 15th February. The mast and hull will be loaded onto two lorries and will head down to La Rochelle as a wide load. On zone, we’ll begin our investigations and schedule in the analysts. The aim is not to point a finger at a guilty party but above all, to understand why the breakage occurred so as to avoid such a thing happening again. Mike and I realised on examining the two keels in Fremantle, that though mine had actually broken, his was also heading that way. In all likelihood we both have the same type of problem and we strongly suspect that it was the same causes which resulted in the same effects. We’re just waiting for the scientific analysis to confirm that and at that stage we’ll work on finding the solutions together. Depending on the results, we’ll see if it’s possible to make repairs or if it’ll be necessary to manufacture an entirely new keel.”

The results and conclusions of this investigation will doubtless encourage further thought within the Imoca Class, so as to prevent this type of serious damage from putting the sailors’ safety in danger again in the future.

“As we sensed prior to the start, there are already a vast number of  lessons to be learnt from  the boats that were forced to retire from this Vendée Globe, but the experiences from those who are able to get all the way around the globe will also be extremely beneficial to the class. From the safety to the reliability to the solidity of the boats, not to mention the evolutions in the class measurement for the future, we certainly won’t be short of jobs. There is a serious amount of in-depth work awaiting all the skippers. I hope we’ll be able to do it as quickly as possible whilst things are still fresh in our minds.”

After this short stopover in Malaysia, the skipper will head back to Switzerland on 5th February after a brief stopover in France. Expected to arrive on 1st February, Dominique is likely to be able to see in the race leaders as they bring this Vendée Globe story to a close and hopefully enable the skipper to turn a page.

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