Written by Ivor Wilkins for Doyle Sails / Photo Credit : PKC Media for L’Occitane Sailing Team
For Clarisse Crémer, just making it to the startline of the 2024 Vendee Globe race was a victory over formidable odds. “Along the way there were many opportunities to question whether I should keep going,” she says.
Crémer, who finished 12th in the 2020 race and the first woman home, was dropped by her sponsors when she gave birth to her daughter, Mathilde; she subsequently faced an anonymous smear campaign accusing her of accepting forbidden routing advice during the 2020 race; and, despite her proven record, she had to go through the full qualification regime for the 2024 race, which involved completing a Fastnet Race and four trans-Atlantic races in a year.
The Banque Populaire bombshell sparked widespread outrage. “People talk about accepting women as equals, but then ignore some of the specifics of being a woman, like motherhood,” Clarisse says. “If you are a team that claims to value women, then your values should reflect that.
“The cheating accusations were awful to deal with and a very hard time for the whole team,” she recalls. After a formal enquiry she was fully exonerated.
With her dream of competing in 2024 in tatters, British Vendee Globe veteran Alex Thomson threw her a lifeline. The five-time competitor with two podium finishes, gave her call offering the support of his 5 West Ltd project management team. What happened to Clarisse was “a travesty” he said.
Starting from scratch with less than two years to the race start, time was of the essence. In short order, the skincare and beauty products giant, L’Occitane, stepped up with a sponsorship offer and Thomson purchased Charlie Dalin’s IMOCA 60 foiler, Apivia, which finished 2nd in the 2020 race.
“The boat was in pieces in a yard in Lorient,” recalls Richard Mason, who was appointed COO, of the campaign. Mason has competed in four crewed round-the-world races and occupied management roles in two others.
“We trucked the boat to the UK and put it back together in a hurry to make the start of the Fastnet Race. It was a huge operation.” But, the bigger challenge of bringing the campaign up to a competitive level still lay ahead – made more complicated by a total lack of performance data and a constricted timeframe that allowed for very little testing or experimentation.
“All the 2020 boats that competed in the 2024 race had the benefit of a lot of development and improvements,” Clarisse explains. Facing a full slate of offshore racing to meet the Vendee Globe qualifications, she had no time to follow that course.
“It would have been a risk to the reliability of the campaign. Even without experiments, we struggled a lot to get to know the boat.”
Lack of time had a similar impact on the sail program. “Typically, sail development would go on for four years and you would start with a very strong performance profile from your previous campaign,” Mason continues. “We didn’t have any of that.
“Given the lack of data about this particular boat, we knew we would have to make performance decisions purely based on past experience with the Alex Thomson’s Hugo Boss campaigns,” says Mason.
“That drove the decision to return to Doyle Sails. We knew we had the entire company behind us and that Richard Bouzaid would throw all his knowledge and experience at it.
“The key thing is that Richard has been in the Southern Ocean and has spent a lot of time sailing on these boats. He understands completely what the sails need to do to get the most out of the design characteristics of the boat.
“Based on previous working relationships, there was a very high level of trust in Doyle Sails. We needed to get the best heads together around making decisions that were not based on testing or data, just experience.”
Clarisse was not so sure. For a start, in the scramble to resurrect her Vendee hopes she was facing a barrage of changes on multiple fronts. Wherever possible, she wanted to stick with what was familiar.
“Because we had so little time and so much going on, I wanted to reduce unnecessary change wherever possible,” she says. “I wanted to simplify the equation and concentrate on sailing, training and finishing the race.
“The switch to Doyle Sails was not an easy start for me, but I must admit I was super happy with my sails throughout the Vendee,” she says. “I had absolutely no issues with the sails themselves. The couple of problems I had were to do with the hardware, not the sails.”
For Richard Bouzaid, the lack of time meant basically sticking with the original rig geometry. “The forestay positions were quite different from Hugo Boss. This boat had a particularly big J3, which meant that forestay was quite a long way forward, making it difficult to fly three headsails.”
Changing the forestay positions and all the sheeting positions would involve significant modifications to the deck structures. “We basically didn’t bother. We just double-headed in reaching conditions.
“We also played around with the mast rake a bit, but ended up pretty much with the rake back to how it was. The style of mainsail was a bit smaller in the head to mitigate against falling off the foil and noseplanting.”
The first priority was to produce a mainsail and jib for the Fastnet Race. The sails that came with the boat from the previous race were in poor shape, but for the first couple of races, Clarisse had to make do with a mix of old and new sails while Doyle Sails set about building a full eight-sail inventory: mainsail, storm jib, J3, J2 (solent), J0, fractional A7 (yankee), fractional jibtop, A3.
“Because Clarisse is quite small, we put a huge effort into making the sails as manageable as they could be,” Bouzaid continues. “The mainsail alone would have been close to 20kg lighter than the Hugo Boss mainsail and the headsails would have also been lighter by a similar order.
“They are by far the lightest Vendee Globe sails we ever made – and that is despite a rule change for 2024 which outlawed carbon in the sails. We went with Stratis Technora, which is not quite as stretch resistant as carbon, but very resistant to breaking. When we are comparing stretch characteristics, we are talking about a ridiculously small difference of elongation.
(One reason for the significant weight saving over the Hugo Boss sails lies in the way the skippers race. With Alex Thomson pushing hard in all conditions, his sails had to cope with much higher loads. He would be typically pulling up to 7 tons of load on his mainsail cunningham, while Clarisse would be more in the order of 2 tons.)
From the campaign perspective, another attraction with Doyle Sails was its Structured Luff concept. “We put quite a high priority on getting structural loads out of the boat as much as possible,” says Mason.
“We were pretty conscious that one of the main potential fail points on this generation of boats was the rig, so we wanted to minimise the risk by keeping the compression loads down. Structured Luff enables that.”
Bouzaid: “The ban on carbon meant we had to reinvent the Structured Luff a little bit for these sails. With Technora, we had to rework the structural design and adjust the ratios of how much fibre we put in the front of the sail and how much load could be shared between the sail and the stay.
“All the principles remain the same, with the Structured Luff reducing forestay sag and retaining shape integrity through a range of conditions. These sails require very forgiving leading edges, because the boats are steered by autopilots and do not have a full crew constantly trimming for every tiny change in wind direction of pressure.
“The apparent wind moves around all the time and you do not want the headsails constantly collapsing and flogging against the rig.”
The philosophy Clarisse expressed for the sails was for all-purpose sails with wide crossovers and, above all, reliability. For single-handers, sails that are able to perform across a broad range of conditions reduce changes and save energy.
As it is, the foiling IMOCA’s are labour-intensive in terms of trimming. “When the wind is unstable, it is very tough on a foiler because the mode changes very fast,” notes Clarisse. “Just a 2-3 knot change in wind pressure can be the difference between flying and not flying and then you have to redo everything you did five minutes ago.
“Reliability in the Vendee Globe Race is huge,” she says. “When you see so many boats around you fighting to repair damaged sails, it is a big boost when you feel you can rely on your sails.
“From one minute to the next, you never know when damage may occur, but after the Indian Ocean, I began to realise that several of the boats were reporting sail damage. That was not happening to me. I could see my sails were holding up very well.”
Long before the Indian Ocean, the inventory was reduced from eight to seven when a chafed furling line failed and her big A3 sail unfurled in a squall. Unable to bring the sail under control and fearing for the rig, Clarisse was forced to cut the sail away.
Coming only three days into the race, this was unquestionably a blow because the sail would have been useful in the lighter airs of the Atlantic. However, one of the big mental disciplines she improved for this race was to move on quickly from any setback without being emotionally overwhelmed.
In post-race interviews she spoke of being much more in control, serene, better equipped to cope with damage management. “Last time, I spent an enormous amount of energy despairing over my damage, but that wasn’t the case at all this time.”
Accordingly, her attitude to the loss of the A3 was philosophical. “It actually simplified my decision process,” she laughs. “There were moments where I could have used the A3, but I saved energy by not having to deal with this very large sail and from not even having to make the choice.
“When you are single handed, these things make a difference.” She adapted her reaching and downwind sail combinations and, according to Bouzaid, still managed to “keep the boat ripping along pretty well”.
A more costly issue came in the Southern Ocean when the halyard lock on the mainsail car failed. The three hours it took to change the car saw Clarisse slip off a vital weather system. She watched in frustration as the group of boats she had been part of sailed away.
Now back on shore and reunited with her two-year-old daughter and husband, Tanguy Le Turquais, who also completed the 2024 Vendee Globe race, she looks back at everything she overcame and achieved.
“I am super happy with what we did,” she says. “I was not expecting to perform to that level. I was in amongst very good boats with very experienced skippers. Of course there are things I could have done better, but I have very little regret.
“Our project had many challenges. It was not easy in many respects. What was very nice was that it felt like we always improved, kept learning and building relationships. We accepted all that the Vendee Globe Race dished up.
“I was just so happy to be at sea. About five or six days into the race, I realised that everything was a bonus. It was a huge gift.”
In the end, she improved her finishing position from 12th to 11th in this edition. Swiss sailor Justine Mettraux finished 8th, the first time a woman accomplished a top-10 result since Ellen MacArthur’s remarkable 2nd place in 2001.
Which begs the question, can a woman eventually win this race, surely one of the toughest endurance events in the world? “I definitely think so,” Clarisse replies. “Of course, statistically, if you are only 10% of the fleet, it is harder to win, but I believe it is possible.”
And what of her own plans? “When I am at sea, it is almost like a drug,” she reflects. “It is so incredible alone on such a boat and going around the world. It is completely amazing. It is a way of life that takes all your life.
“I have had four very demanding years, very exhausting at times. I am now taking time to settle back and reflect on what I have done and the impact it has had on me. I am super lucky and super privileged to have done two Vendee Globe Races, but I need a bit of time to understand what comes next.”
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