Thirteen skippers will line up for the Vintage Multi class on 1 November, each carrying a genuine attachment to their boat. It is a class built on old love affairs, and some of them have lasted decades.
Walking the Quai Bajoyer among these multihulls, which span 12 to 23 metres, the first surprise is how few catamarans are entered. Just two: François Guiffant's We Explore and Marc Guillemot's MG5 - Wellness Training. That is a fair reflection of the race's history, since a catamaran has won the Route du Rhum only once, Elf Aquitaine with Marc Pajot in 1982. Trimarans dominate instead, falling into two easily recognisable camps.
The first traces back to the American school of design. In the mid-1970s, Walter Greene and Dick Newick spent a decade pushing a pragmatic, almost organic approach to multihulls, built from wood for its natural stiffness and light weight rather than brute horsepower. Fifty fifty is one of the survivors of that era, a Dick Newick Creative design built in 1982 at La Trinité-sur-mer, with banana-shaped lines and a single wing-like beam housing two double bunks. "These are wooden boats, they need love," says skipper Laurent Etheimer, who is contesting his fourth Route du Rhum and has done serious structural work on the 12-metre.
Nearby in spirit is Charlie Capelle, 71, the oldest competitor in this year's race and a man who learned boatbuilding in Walter Greene's yard. His trimaran ACapella (Acapella Proludic-La Chaîne de l'Espoir) was salvaged as a wreck in 1983 and rebuilt three times since, including after two capsizes. He is not sailing to win, but still dreams of breaking 20 days to Pointe-à-Pitre, a mark his mentor Mike Birch bettered with 24 days back in 1978, when he last raced the Route du Rhum at 72.
Then there is the ORMA gang, the old 60-foot Formula 1 trimarans of offshore racing between 1990 and 2006. Four of them will start this year. Damien Seguin, sailing Arkea-Handicap International, tracked down the old Fujicolor II in Turkey after speaking with other competitors and consulting Francis Joyon, who races a sister ship. "He was very good advice, so I went for it," Seguin says. It is his first singlehanded multihull transatlantic.
Joyon, at 70, is racing his ninth Route du Rhum, all in multihulls, aboard the renamed Océans, the ex-Eure et Loire, a 1994 Irens design on which he won the 2000 Transat anglaise. "Everything is extremely intense, all the time. It doesn't know boredom or calm," he says.
Gilles Lamiré sails the oldest ORMA, Groupe GCA, built in 1988, while Eric Péron's French Touch Oceania Hotels represents the class's final generation, from 2002, the first with curved foils. "It'll depend a lot on conditions," Seguin predicts. "If they're kind, it'll be a good match. If it's rougher, everyone's smart enough to be careful, and Francis Joyon will probably have worked out the right rhythm."
Watch too for Romain Pillard's 23-metre Use it again, the former Ellen MacArthur round-the-world boat, which on paper may be the only one capable of beating the ORMA pack to Guadeloupe.
