Kevin Le Poidevin had already crossed the Tasman before the race even began. The Australian competitor arrived in Auckland nine days ahead of the start, having delivered Roaring Forty solo from Newcastle straight into persistent headwinds. "Nine days, two hours of brutal punishment on the nose," he says with a grin. His fellow competitors have not let him forget it, ribbing him for using up all the available easterly before anyone else had a chance.
Le Poidevin races under the Port Stephens Yacht Club burgee, and his offshore record is the kind that prompts a double-take. Before sailing, he spent 15 years as a mechanic, then 31 years in the Royal Australian Air Force, qualifying across avionics, instruments, radar, and radio. He has completed two previous Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenges, in 2014 and 2018, aboard Rogue Wave, a Sigma 36. Beyond those, he has crossed the Bay of Biscay five times, contested the Global Solo Challenge, sailed Sydney to Hobart double-handed, and completed a Melbourne to Osaka crewed campaign before soloing the boat home from Japan. By his own reckoning, he has roughly 35,000 miles on his current boat alone.
That current boat is Roaring Forty, and she is in a category of her own.
Built in Estonia in 1997 to a Dutch design, Roaring Forty is a Lutra BOC Open 40, measuring 12.2 metres, constructed entirely of carbon fibre, and carrying 1,000 litres of water ballast. Le Poidevin believes only around four Open 40s of any design are still sailing anywhere in the world. The rest have sunk or been destroyed, many brought down by the canting keels that were fashionable in the 1990s. Roaring Forty came through that era on a fixed keel.
The Open 40 class ran alongside the Open 50s and the IMOCA 60s that eventually eclipsed everything around them, and it was the direct forerunner of today's Class 40. "This is the actual grandfather to that," Le Poidevin says, gesturing toward a nearby Class 40. Design displacement sits at around 4,600 kilograms, climbing to closer to six tonnes in full race trim with water ballast loaded. The Class 40s she lines up against are built to a fibreglass construction rule with a limited carbon allowance and carry 750 litres of water ballast, meaning Roaring Forty has them covered on both counts.
Le Poidevin found the boat on the internet in the Netherlands and bought her in 2017. "It had a bit less wear. Met all my criteria. Water ballast, which you can't buy in Australia unless you're a millionaire." His sails come from Zoom Sails, run by New Zealander Phil Auger, who has worked across the major lofts and now operates independently, with sails manufactured at an OEM facility in Sri Lanka. After eight years campaigning the boat, he finally has a complete inventory.
Piecing together Roaring Forty's history took considerable effort. Le Poidevin tracked down the original designer, Adrian Konijnendijk of the Netherlands-based Lutra Design Group, who is still alive and still involved in the industry, and commissioned a VPP analysis. Konijnendijk and his fellow Dutch designers will follow the race closely, keen to see how one of the surviving Lutra Open 40s performs. Le Poidevin also contacted the Estonian yard, still operating today, and asked whether they recalled a boat called Roaring Forty. "Oh yeah, yeah, that's a bloody good boat that one," came the reply, along with a set of old photographs showing what appeared to be a dairy building, a tractor fitted with a makeshift crane, and the hull hanging upside down in a foam jig.
One result stands out in Roaring Forty's logbook. In 2007, under Belgian ownership, she was entered in the Rolex Middle Sea Race with a crew of four. It was a brutal year, with half the fleet failing to finish. The four crew made it through and took third on line honours.
There are no luxuries aboard for the crossing. Le Poidevin's setup runs to a freeze-dry meal system, a jet boil, a metho backup stove, and a watermaker. Sleep happens on a bean bag that slides under the hard top, letting him stretch out in the cockpit. "98 percent of the time on autopilot," he says. "If you're not doing jobs, you're napping."
The redundancy built into the boat's systems is extensive and deliberate. Two completely independent autopilots, a Raymarine and an NKE, are configured so that if one network fails, he can isolate the fault, reconfigure around it, and run on the backup while repairs are made. The daggerboard doubles as an emergency rudder, sliding into a cassette on the transom if the main rudder is lost. Power comes from two OceanPower hydrogenerators mounted at the stern, German-made and rated at 300 watts each, producing enough electricity to run both autopilots, a fridge, and Starlink continuously without touching the engine. He highly recommends the OceanPower units. On the solo delivery from Australia, he went six days without starting the engine.
Battery choice has been equally considered. He runs AGM rather than lithium, a deliberate call rooted in experience. "The BMS says I'm shutting off and you go dark," he says of lithium systems, noting that several boats in the Global Solo Challenge suffered exactly that failure at unpredictable moments. His spares inventory reflects the same thinking. "You spend four years preparing for a race and survive on hope and a prayer. It doesn't make sense."
Somewhere aboard, a yellow sign captures his philosophy for solo offshore sailing. It reads: Stop. Wait. Wait some more. Asked what he would pass on to less experienced competitors facing the crossing, Le Poidevin points straight to it.
"If you're used to crewed racing and there's a bit of a wind shift, someone goes 'let's put up the asymmetrical' and the crew jump to work. When you're solo, you sit there and you watch it. It might be 15 minutes, it might be an hour. Just crack your sheets and sail with what you've got." Rest is the other discipline he emphasises just as strongly. "Do an evolution. If you do a tack, have a nap. If you cook food, have a nap after you eat. If you navigate, have a nap before and after." Sleep management, he says, is the race within the race.
His target for the passage is seven days and 17 hours, though he holds no illusions about what the Tasman is capable of. Large high-pressure systems are sitting out there that cannot simply be sailed around, and conditions a day in could look nothing like those at the start. "All bets are off," he says.
Roaring Forty has already made one Tasman crossing this year on the delivery from Newcastle. Before that, she has seen the Southern Ocean, the Bay of Biscay, and the Middle Sea. Her fastest recorded speed is 21 knots, surfing in the Southern Ocean under four reefs and a heavy weather jib. She has survived a glancing strike from a ghost container ship, losing her bowsprit and cracking a deck joint in the process, then kept racing to Charleston with the breach held in check by the flooded water ballast tank.
Le Poidevin would like to think that kind of history counts for something when the Tasman turns ugly. He is probably right.
