Le Professeur speaks

We talk to Michel Desjoyeaux about the Vendee, his company Mer Agitee and Geant's 700,000 Euro refit

Aside from being the only man to have won singlehanded offshore sailing's 'triple crown' - the Vendee Globe, the Route du Rhum and the Transat (as well as the Solitaire du Figaro on two occasions) Michel Desjoyeaux also runs the French equivalent of Offshore Challenges, called Mer Agitee which managed the campaigns of both 2004-5 Vendee Globe race winner Vincent Riou's PRB and that of VMI for fifth placed Sebastien Josse.

Neither PRB nor VMI was new for the Vendee (read all about them here) but both boats and their skippers put in exceptional performances, Riou taking line honours, while Josse looked certain of at least fourth had he not collided with an iceberg.

Four years on from Desjoyeaux's race, the pace of the latest Vendee Globe proved more furious, the boats making it around the world non-stop in 88 days compared to his time of 93 days.

"I think they were faster for three main reasons," says Desjoyeaux in typically analytical form. "The boat speed is obviously better than four years ago and a boat like PRB is also about 500kg lighter plus all the materials carried were about 350-400kg lighter - things like spare parts and lots of things you don’t use but you carry because you don’t know if you'll need them. This is one of the main reasons and also because on all these boats they have added a lot more central ballast which doesn’t make the boat heavier when you are downwind but makes them much more powerful upwind.

"The second reason is for sure, the rhythm of the race, because there was always a fight between the two or three boats at the front. In the Southern Ocean downwind if you are pushed you go faster than if you just want to cross the ocean.

"The third reason is the weather they had at the start down to the Equator. They were 3.5 days ahead of me at the Equator. The only part of the trip where they were slower than me was the Equator to the finish, just 1 day and 15 hours more because we finished downwind in good wind and wave conditions and they finished to windward with a long tack. So it is possible to go faster than 87 days. I already said four years ago that it was possible to make the round the world race with the boat I had four years ago in 85 days - completely possible."

That his old boat PRB won for the second time doesn't surprise Desjoyeaux, who surprisingly feels that despite the fact that 15 years have passed since the first Vendee Globe was held, there hasn't been huge innovation in the Open 60. In the Vendee Globe you can get away with fielding a four year old boat - provided it has been modified - whereas it is highly unlikely this approach would work in, for example, Volvo Ocean Race.

"The difference is that the Volvo is a full crewed race," continues Desjoyeaux. "When you are alone it is the man who makes 60% of the result. When you have a full crew it is the boat which makes 70% of the result. And when you are alone there is only one person who is thinking about the course and the strategy instead of the full crew where you always have a navigator and skipper and watch captain and lots of people to check everything. So you make less mistakes and you push the boats harder. So if the boat is bad and all the rest of the performance factors are good, you make a bad race. Also in the Vendee Globe, you can see that it is more efficient to have a medium boat and go to the right place than to have a fast boat and go in the wrong place."

Desjoyeaux agrees that Riou acting as technical manager for the PRB team in 2000-1 put him in good shape for this race. Mentally he had already completed a Vendee Globe. "I think that if he hadn’t made the whole story with me four years ago in building the boat, preparing the boat and following the race, it wouldn’t have been so easy for him during this race and the result wouldn't have been same. He was never surprised by the waves or by the weather. It was funny when he saw his first albatross, he thought it was a seagull. 'I've just seen this really big seagull...' 'It is not seagull, Vincent. It's an albatross.' Otherwise there was little else which surprised him in this race."

Desjoyeaux says that he doesn't remember (or won't say) specifically what qualities Riou had that promoted his appointment to his campaign in 1999, other than that he is someone "who is not waiting for everything to fall on to his plate. It is not a problem for him to work on a boat, to put in the diesel or get the glue out."

Perhaps he was impressed by Riou's knowledge? "Yes, he knows enough about all the steps of the building of any boat. He worked in a shipyard where they were refitting wooden boats, nice ones. He worked around the fishing boats. He knows a lot."

Desjoyeaux refutes the notion that his relationship with Riou is a Coutts-Barker style master-pupil situation. "We learned together and he took what he liked and he changed what he didn’t like. I don’t like this comparison between the teacher and the pupil. Before the last race neither of us had done much Open 60 sailing."

Prior to the 2000-1 Vendee Globe Desjoyeaux set up his Port la Foret-based company Mer Agitee which he grandly dubs the 'the Silicone Valley of offshore racing'. At present the company handles his trimaran racing exploits as well as those of Riou and Josse, while Star sailor Jean-Philippe Saliou is also on their books and currently lying fourth in the Worlds with Philippe Presti. "The way of Mer Agitee is to put in the same toolbox everything that we need to sail on our boats," says Desjoyeaux cryptically.

Effectively their company performs similar functions for their skippers as Offshore Challenges, except with a greater technical bent (they have more in house specialists for composites, electronics, etc) and skippers must find their own sponsors and once they have hooked them continue to maintain direct contact. Aside from pooling resources and know-how on the technical side of their campaigns, Mer Agitee also provide purchasing power, logistics support, communication, legal advice, accounting and budgeting for their skippers.

Desjoyeaux says he also set the company up to help ensure the maximum return for their sponsors including the building materials and stone cladding company PRB, the supermarket chain Geant and VMI, which makes industrial equipment for bakeries. "For example if I said Prost in France, everyone knows the team but no one knows the sponsors and that is a bad thing, because it is the sponsors who are the leaders. So Mer Agitee is a toolbox to ensure that sponsors get the best value."

Being part of such a company with the association to Desjoyeaux also gives confidence and credibility to the skippers on their books. "You can be very good and a very good sailor, but if you are alone you will have less with which to convince a new sponsor."

Following the Vendee Globe both PRB and VMI are up for sale. Desjoyeaux says that if VMI are to continue sponsoring Josse then they will need to find another partner. However it is highly likely that PRB will continue as an Open 60 sponsor fielding another boat for the 2008 Vendee Globe. Desjoyeaux won't be drawn yet on whether he will be behind the wheel.

Mer Agitee would like to field entries in this year's Mini Transat, Figaro and Tour de France a la Voile as well as the Volvo Ocean Race and a G-Class maxi-multihull project.

Meanwhile back at CDK Composites their neighbouring boatyard in Port la Foret extensive surgery is being carried out on Desjoyeaux's trimaran Geant, to the tune of 700,000 Euros. The bottom of the main hull has been loped off and is being replaced. There is a new centreboard, mast, foils and a few amendments to the deck layout. "We sanded all the paint and filler on the boat and we removed 150kg! So we have tried to win maybe 100kg just on the paintjob, something which doesn’t help make the boat be stronger or faster."

When Geant was originally built the boat was hurriedly put together using a number of existing moulds, Bonduelle's main hull and Belgacom's floats maintains Desjoyeaux. "It was the only way to be at the start of the 2002 Route du Rhum." No complete study was carried out into the design of the boat as for example has been done for Franck Cammas' Groupama II.

While Cammas' Groupama trimarans seem to have dominated the class recently it was Desjoyeaux who scooped up both the 2002 Route du Rhum, admittedly not in the best of styles (he made two pitstops) and also last year's Transat. Having won the two major solo races for the ORMA class, he hopes the modifications to the hull will make Geant better suited to the Grand Prix. "We had a very deep hull, very thin and very easy for offshore sailing, because the boat goes easily by itself, like it is on a rail. So far we have already won the two singlehanded races in the program with the boat and all the races we haven’t won are the doublehanded races, or fully crewed in Grand Prix and with medium-sized crew in offshore races. In those races you always have someone at the helm, so it is the opposite of the singlehanded program, you don’t want to have a straight line boat."

What is lacking from the Mer Agitee stable is perhaps a talented young female solo sailor in her 20s?