A father and son are chasing the same finish line in Pointe-à-Pitre, each battling his own crisis at sea in a Route du Rhum neither will forget in a hurry.
Romain Pillard, skipper of Use it Again in Vintage Multi, and his son Titouan Pillard, racing Use it Again for Youth in Vintage Mono, are both competing in the race for the first time. It has not gone smoothly for either. Romain was forced into a stopover at Roscoff for repairs, while Titouan has battled a cascade of technical failures offshore.
Titouan did not hide how rough things got. "The boat did take quite a few breakages and I went flat out a few days ago," he said during a routine check-in. "It was chaos inside, I ended up hanging two metres above the bottom of the hull, it was pretty full-on."
The damage list was long: a water ingress problem, a broken rudder linkage bar, loss of his main autopilot, a hole in the boat, and damaged batteries. "I did quite a bit of patching up on Monday. Let's just say I'm not bored."
The weather offered no relief. "It's been a nightmare. The wind looks decent now because I'm starting to come out the other side, but for 48 hours I was back in the front. I've had one problem after another, and on top of that I've been seasick. It's starting to add up."
Titouan is thinking about the finish line more than the result. He welcomed his father's decision to get back underway after Roscoff, noting the strong public support behind both of them. "His boat is still pretty quick. There's maybe a chance he overtakes me, or we arrive in Guadeloupe at roughly the same time. I can't wait to see him in Pointe-à-Pitre. Whether he finishes ahead of me or behind me, it doesn't matter. I just want both our boats there."
Romain, for his part, spoke of the scale of the repair job at Roscoff. "The front of the boat was badly damaged. We quickly put a team together and did composite repair work. They worked flat out for five days. It was a big job and it's not completely finished, to be honest. We'll sort the rest after the race once the boat's out of the water."
He linked his decision to push on to the pair's decade-long commitment to their circular economy and ocean protection project, but admitted there was more to it than that. "There's the project on one side, and then there's the idea of catching up with Titouan on the other. He's putting himself through a lot, he's not in an easy position, and we really want to both get to the finish."
Asked about his son's race, Romain was candid. "Everyone's on their own path, especially as we don't have the same boats or the same weather. But he's dealing with some tough stuff after the damage he's had. I think he's still got a shot, that things could still fall his way. But I have a feeling I'll get there before him."
What began as two separate races has become something closer to a shared one, each Pillard willing the other on even as the ocean works against them both.
