Nico's column
From the Mini 6.50 to the Volvo 65
Jean-René Guilloux and I go back a long way and together we wore out our foulies in the Tour de France à la Voile on a Farr 30 in early 2000. He is now gearing up to participate in the next Mini Transat 2019, all guns blazing. He’s been talking to me about his project for some time now: which boat to choose? How to organise yourself? And then the project materialised in early 2018. He’s chartered a boat for two years to prepare himself for the Mini 2019 in the best possible way. Indeed, this race may be run on small boats, but it’s not something you prepare for without proper consideration. To keep it simple, he’s using 2018 to cover enough miles to be qualified and make his registration official in early 2019. The number of entries being limited, priority is given to racers who already satisfy the qualification criteria. Next up, he’ll use the following year to specifically prepare for the Transat, which will be run in the autumn.
So here we are in Lorient in early April for this first event on the Mini 2018 schedule, which is raced double-handed. And the race is already sold out with a maximum of 60 entries! The split equates to around one third prototypes and two thirds production boats, with a load of Pogo 3s, of which we form part. We can’t say that our preparation is optimal: Jean-René picked up his boat a few weeks ago but he’s been working in Rennes in the week. For my part, I’ve never sailed a Mini 6.50 and I’m arriving on the eve of the start… I discover a few familiar faces on the pontoons, like Fred Duthil, a former Figaro sailor and now head of Technique Voile. My overriding feeling is that I’ve aged amongst all these youngsters! For a short while, some of them even address me with the polite ‘vous’ form… Well, I won’t keep you waiting any longer: I was like a kid in a sweet shop and I also realised that there’s a huge amount to learn on these little racing steeds!
No navigational tools
The course is adapted to the extremely light weather conditions: depart Lorient, circumnavigation of the Ile de Groix, Spineg (Penmarc’h headland), leave Belle-Ile to port then back to Lorient. It’s perfect for me as someone who’s criss-crossed southern Brittany for the past fifteen years, mainly on the Figaro. Except there’s a ‘but’: on a Mini 6.50, there’s no navigational assistance. You have to make do with your GPS and your paper chart as a chart plotter, computer and tablet are prohibited. There are no weather tools aboard either: you listen to the VHF report and you watch the clouds! To cap it all, there is low cloud with no moon for this early April…
It’s extremely formative to be in a position where you don’t have all the modern tools at your disposal. You have to plot your position on the chart and look at your watch and your speedo to estimate how far you’ve travelled. This requires a perfect visualisation of the race zone in your head and the ability to count the flashes from the cardinal marks and the lighthouses, etc. In short, the homework I had during holidays aboard the family Centurion 32 when I was a kid... Tinkering around with tidal calculations and geographical coordinates on a paper chart comes in useful in the end!
A small boat reminiscent of a big boat!
A Mini 6.50, as the name suggests, is very small. The boom is low and the twenty bumps I have on my head are testament to that! However, despite this, the boat has everything you might get on a big boat!! She keeps a stable course, she’s seaworthy and has a more than ample set of sails, which enables lots of different configurations: spinnaker, gennaker, code zero, she has it all. The prototypes take things even further with a canting keel, daggerboards and even foils etc. now. All that remains fairly easy to implement since the sails are very light so there are miles of strings in every direction and the manœuvres aren’t backbreaking. The Pogo 3, a production boat, is very agreeable and responsive, so the slightest change of trim has an immediate impact. The fleet is very compact, particularly among production boats where the standard is very similar. That makes for some great races, where there is inevitably lots to learn.
This race really reminded me of those I’ve done on the Figaro Bénéteau 2, except that on the Figaro circuit, you don’t end up shining a light on the swirl of rocks around Belle-Ile in the middle of the night to see if you can cut the corner! We finished the race as 4th production boat, just a few minutes behind the first boats (8th overall with the prototypes). I hope I’ll be able to do it again as soon as possible.
Right now, it’s over to the end of the Volvo Ocean Race for the next few weeks, through until late June and the start of the next leg between Itajaí and Newport on 22 April!
