Yachtsman draws on endurance and technology to smash solo record

Frenchman Thomas Coville has become the latest in a long line of solo sailors to tackle what many consider to be the ultimate test of human courage, when he set sail from the French port of Brest on board Sodebo Ultim, a 31-metre trimaran.

French skipper Thomas Coville navigates aboard his multihull "Sodebo Ultim" off La Trinite-sur-Mer, western France. Coville crossed on December 25, 2016 at 17:57 the finish line of the solitary round-the-world. Jean-Sebastien Evrard / AFPShow less

“I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston …”

So began the historic voyage of the Spray, a once derelict and ungainly former 11.2 metre oyster sloop, on board which Nova Scotian maritime adventurer Joshua Slocum would become the first person to sail around the world singlehanded.

Slocum was in no hurry – he stopped off in many places en route and the 74,000 kilometre journey took him more more than three years to complete. But the astonishing tale of adventure he told in his 1900 book Sailing Alone Around the World lit a beacon of imagination to which sailors have been drawn ever since.

On November 6 Frenchman Thomas Coville became the latest in a long line of solo sailors to tackle what many consider to be the ultimate test of human courage, when he set sail from the French port of Brest on board Sodebo Ultim, a 31-metre trimaran.

On Sunday – 49 days, three hours, seven minutes and 38 seconds later – Coville crossed a line of longitude off the northwestern tip of France to complete the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe, smashing the record set in 2008 by fellow Frenchman Francis Joyon by eight days.

Slashing the record for a solo circumnavigation of the globe from 57 days to 49 is equivalent, in percentage terms, to cutting the world record for the men’s marathon from 2 hours, 2 minutes and 57 seconds to a little over 1 hour and 45 minutes.

It’s hard for landlubbers to grasp fully what a voyage like this means. After all, 50 days doesn’t sound like a ridiculous amount of time to be away from the comforts of home, hearth and human companionship – it’s less than two pay-days.

But 50 days out of sight of land, in sole command of a 102-foot bucking bronco of a barely controllable trimaran, travelling at an average speed of 45 kilometres per hour through the worst sea conditions the planet has to offer, represents a challenge that very few human beings are mentally or physically equipped even to contemplate, let alone to handle.

To put Coville’s achievement into perspective, his voyage took just five days longer than the current circumnavigation record for a crewed trimaran, set by French skipper Loick Peyron and 13 others in 2012. Doing the same job solo is an enormously physical task during which food and sleep can only be snatched. A trimaran on the scale of Coville’s is a delicately balanced, twitchy monster, always teetering on the edge of a catastrophic capsize – if the weather worsens while you are sleeping and you are slow to shorten sail, it’s all over.

A solo circumnavigation, as Yachting World magazine put it, "is arguably the ultimate expression of self-sufficient seamanship and endurance, just as it is the … pinnacle of semi-masochistic adventure". For context, while more than 4,000 people have reached the summit of Everest, barely 200 have tested themselves alone around the world at sea.

Coville’s three-hulled rocket ship would have been as alien to Joshua Slocum as Apollo 11 to the Wright brothers. But each man would have understood implicitly the almost primeval urge to “throw off the bowlines [and] sail away from the safe harbour”, as Mark Twain put it, and the existential challenge of testing one’s mettle against the most demanding of natural environments.

The sea is the harshest opponent, as Slocum’s fate made clear. Few sailors could claim to be as proficient as the master of the Spray, but in 1909, a decade after his circumnavigation, he and his boat disappeared at sea while en route to the West Indies.

It would be 69 years before Slocum’s historic solo circumnavigation was emulated. In 1969 65-year-old Briton Francis Chichester, sailing the 16-metre ketch-rigged monohull Gypsy Moth IV, cut his record down to nine months and one day, stopping only once, in Sydney, for repairs.

Despite his best efforts, the curmudgeonly Chichester, who skulked below deck to frustrate airborne newspaper photographers as he returned to British waters, found himself reluctantly in the eye of a storm of national hero-worship. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, wielding the same sword with which her predecessor, Elizabeth I, had knighted Sir Francis Drake in 1580 after he and his crew had become the first Englishmen to circumnavigate the globe.

What followed next was a fitting testimony to the glorious lunacy that is solo circumnavigation.

In 1968 the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper sponsored the Golden Globe, the first solo round-the-world race, and there were nine entrants – six British, two French and one Italian. Only one, Briton Robin Knox-Johnston, sailing a 9.8 metre boat he’d built himself, finished.

Six skippers retired, one had to be rescued after his boat sank and another went mad and committed suicide. Ahead of Knox-Johnston, who won in 313 days, was Frenchman Bernard Moitessier, the archetypal French philosopher-sailor. Moitessier, sailing a 40ft ketch he had named Joshua in tribute to Slocum, rounded Cape Horn ahead of the pack and on course to win the race. But instead of heading north up the Atlantic to claim victory he instead turned right and embarked on a second circumnavigation, for no better reason (or worse) than “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul”.

To the chagrin of the British, who have always considered Britannia to be the ruler of the waves, circumnavigating the globe under sail has been a magnificent obsession dominated almost exclusively by the French. After Knox-Johnston’s victory, with the exception of one American (Dodge Morgan, 150 days in 1986) and one Englishwoman (Ellen MacArthur, 71 days in 2005), the record for solo circumnavigation has always been held by Frenchmen.

The key to the terrific speed achieved by Coville lies partly in the triple-hulled design of his boat. Put simply, for any given hull length, wind speed, sea state and sail configuration, a trimaran will travel faster than a traditional monohull. The fastest solo circumnavigation in a traditional yacht remains the 78 days and two hours set by François Gabart – French, naturally – in 2013. By comparison, compatriot Francis Joyon’s trimaran IDEC had set the all-comers’ record at 72 days and 22 hours almost a decade earlier, in 2004. Briton MacArthur shaved a little more than a day off his record the following year, but Joyon reclaimed it with an astonishing 57-day run in 2008 on board a longer trimaran.

It is that record, which has stood for eight years, that Coville has now shattered.

There are, of course, enormous advantages to multi-hulled yachts, freed from the cloying grip of immersion that limits the speed of traditional yachts and capable of going airborne, like a skimming stone, under a tremendous acreage of sail. But the secret of Coville’s triumph is to be found not only in the vast proportions off his craft – 31 metres long and 21 metres wide, with a 35 metre mast capable of flying up to 680 square metres of sail – but also in the scale of his courage. If a conventional yacht is capsized it will right itself, but with a catamaran a capsize is game over.

“Nothing else in the world resembles this exercise,” said Olivier de Kersauson, a fellow French solo yachtsman who set the record at 125 days in a multihull in 1989, celebrating his compatriot’s feat. “It requires total focus. It’s severe and extremely violent and that’s what’s so magnificent about it.” With a multi-hull, he added, “if you get it wrong, you’re dead.”

It was a point graphically illustrated in October, when Chinese sailor Guo Chuan disappeared while attempting a record crossing of the Pacific ocean, while sailing the trimaran previously used by Francis Joyon in 2008 to set the circumnavigation record Coville was chasing.

For 48-year-old Coville, a veteran of five failed attempts on the record over a 10-year period, his victory was a triumph of the human will.

“Great dreams never come off first time,” he said after tearfully reuniting with his wife Cathy and son Elliott on Sunday in the western French port of Brest. “I tried, I failed, I fell, I picked myself up again, I rebuilt myself.”

His story, he told Le Parisien, was not about technology, but "about a guy who one day believes he can do it, who one day makes good his dream. I want to tell people … that dreams are possible. Perhaps my dream will unleash other dreams."

It will certainly unleash other, larger trimarans.