Читать книгу Nonstop - Boris Herrmann - Страница 19

He’s also having trouble adjusting to the sudden calm. Too many thoughts are jostling inside him. They’ve pushed him out of bed already. At the forefront: the images from the collision. How his Seaexplorer – Yacht Club de Monaco, which he had brought around the world with such skill, is now, just 90 sea miles short of the finish, hanging alongside the steel hull of a Biscayan fishing trawler, the bowsprit shattered, the foresail torn on the fishing gear, the starboard foil broken.

“Whenever I’m not otherwise distracted, I’m asking myself what could have been if that hadn’t happened. What a podium finish could have meant, which was absolutely on the cards,” the 39-year-old reflects. “Has this really cost me?”

And another thought: immediately after the crash, when he was on the forecastle retrieving the hanging shreds of the foresail, in a three-meter swell, and surveying the damage to the bowsprit, it suddenly hit him: “That’s that. There goes the small financial standby that I wanted to set aside as starting capital for the next months after the race.”

Then he shakes himself, puts his shoulders back, smiles a little even though this doesn’t make his worries go away, and looks out the window as if the assurance that he needs now is out there somewhere: “I don’t know how we’re going to manage it,” he says. “But we’ll get there somehow.”

This is the adaptability, the resilience, what he himself sometimes refers to as “my stubbornness”, that has accompanied Boris Herrmann throughout the entire Vendée Globe. Sometimes it was really more like being dragged along, so exceptionally hard and unrelenting was the race.

This is how the native of Oldenburg described it, practically unfiltered, almost from the very start. He never kept his doubts and struggles to himself, not even his worries about material matters.

Even in the first night at sea, in the first cold front of the Vendée, the first of many to come, he wrote on board: “It’s bumpy, and for safety’s sake I’m holding the speed at 20 knots. Compare Thomas (Ruyant) on Linked-Out, who is logging 27 knots at times. I don‘t believe this is sustainable. Wave from the front. Almost impossible to type.”

Two days later, after the front, he reports in a video: “For a while I’ve been sailing with three reefs (in the mainsail) and no foresail, in winds of around 40 knots. This is the Vendée Globe. My doubts have been gnawing at me a little. I haven’t slept at all. I couldn’t sleep.”

On this day, 11 November, Jérémie Beyou, the race’s big favourite, announces that he is turning back. One of the two rudder blades of his Charal is damaged, and fittings have been ripped from the deck. Sailing on would be irresponsible. Beyou returns to Les Sables d’Olonne, has repairs done, starts again, but has no chance from here onwards.

His setback is an early sign of the difficulty of this Vendée. And a warning for Herrmann, whose main goal is to sail to the finish. “Avoid indiscriminate risk at all costs!”

EVERYTHING ELSE THAN IDEAL

Around the Cape Verde islands, a hurricane moving eastwards from the Caribbean is waiting along the skippers’ racing line. Already the second storm in the North Atlantic. Briton Alex Thomson, Herrmann’s friend, boldly sails close to its eye. A coup de main. This gives him the lead, which he then manages to extend. But even the skipper of the highly-innovative Hugo Boss cannot set a new best time for reaching the equator. He’s three days behind the race record of 2016, and five behind the high expectations.

New, much longer and higher-performing wings, even more extreme hull forms, and a totally new software generation for self-steering have increased the speed of the boats in the middle of the field by ten per cent, and those at the front by up to 40. Fantastic times seem possible. But the weather isn‘t playing along. A week and a half later Alex Thomson drops out, with delamination in the bow and a broken rudder forcing him to dock in Cape Town. The second big favourite out of the race.

In Goltoft, on the Sly Firth in Germany, the speeds and susceptibilities of these winged monsters give a sailor who knows all about extremes pause for thought. Wilfried Erdmann, the only German to sail around the world in both directions, single-handed and non-stop, wrote in his blog on 30 November: “For me, 20 knots is too fast for one to be able to enjoy the most important things about sailing: the freedom and the wildness. When I go on a sailing trip, I turn very naturally to the sea. I lie on deck and look into the waves. For hours. The racers miss out on all this. It’s a totally different world.”

When a friend passes on these lines to Boris Herrmann in the South Atlantic, he responds: “A very wise man. What we’re doing is insane. It’s just crashing, clattering and rattling.”

Asked how this compares with his record attempt on maxi-trimaran Idec, on which he was travelling almost twice as fast, he writes: “That was easy. VG (Vendée Globe) is crazy.” What exactly? “Being alone.”

That same day Kevin Escoffier’s boat breaks apart when it crashes at high speed into a mountain of wave and is brought to a brutal halt. The PRB, comprehensively reinforced before the start, is full of water within minutes. Escoffier just manages to get out an emergency call, pull his survival suit on, and prepare the life raft before the swell washes him overboard. Absolute disaster. Shortly afterwards, night falls.

Boris Herrmann and three other skippers in the vicinity are instructed to help him by the race committee. When they reach the scene of the accident, they sail in search patterns to find the raft – an almost hopeless undertaking in waves of four to five metres and strong wind. Then, as if by a miracle, Jean le Cam, the 61-year-old veteran of the race, manages to save Escoffier. “Kevin is safe,” Herrmann writes to his team early that morning. “Thank God!”

THE HARDNESS OF THE RACE

He is shaken for days afterwards by the accident. It takes several hours for him to find his way back into the race. Firstly, because he has had to mobilise his every last reserve for the search, and secondly because something has happened here that he would have though impossible: that an Imoca 60 could be sunk in one blow. Herrmann, a dedicated sailor but no gambler, is no longer responsible solely for himself. He married a year ago, and now he has Malou as well. Perhaps thinking of his loved ones has magnified the horror of this night.