Brits in the Mini Transat

We speak to Andrew Wood and David Rawlinson about their campaigns

British competition in the Mini Transat (the Transat 6.50 Charente-Maritime/Bahia race to give it is proper title) has included some eminent names over the past decade including Mark Turner, Ellen MacArthur, Alex Bennett, Brian Thompson, Sam Davies, Phil Sharp, Ian Munslow, Nick Bubb, Paul Peggs, James Bird and the Brit still with the highest ever result, Simon Curwen, who finished second in 2001.

This year the UK's representation is in the form of just two sailors Andrew Wood (and David Rawlinson. A third, Oliver Bond, who Dee Caffarri has been sailing with recently as part of her solo offshore racing initiation, could have made the start line, but spent too much time on the waiting list for the race and had to stand down.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Wood and Rawlinson are the only ones to have made it to the start line, and no other Brits, is due to the lengthy procedure it takes to qualify for the race. This comprises a 1,000 mile passage singlehanded and another 1,000 miles of Mini-sanctioned racing. Rawlinson was one of the first to qualify because he completed the singlehanded race to the Azores and back last year and was no.14 on the list when it opened last December. After a few problems with his boat last season Wood scraped in - the last Proto on the entry list when it was finally published.

Wood and Rawlinson have many similarities. Both are from the West Country, Rawlinson from Bude in the north of Cornwall and Wood from Penzance. This may hold some significant for why they come to be doing the Mini, as back in the 1970s Penzance was the start port for the first Mini Transat. In fact Wood says that in 1979 his family hosted American Norton Smith, who ended up winner of the Mini Transat that year with his American Express. Wood would have been six at the time.

"I didn’t remember it as such," says Wood of when the Mini Transat was held from there. "But I remember two of the boats were there, really old boats. There’s one still down there, although I don’t know if did the race."

By coincidence both Wood and Rawlinson happen to work for the same company - Professional Yacht Deliveries - a job that in many ways is the perfect compliment and training for a Mini campaign. Firstly the job is flexible. Rawlinson for example has not had monetary sponsorship for his campaign and has pay for it himself by carrying out yacht deliveries whenever he's not been racing. The flexibility of the job fits in well. However it also means that aside from perhaps Actual skipper Yves le Blevec, who's raced around the world twice on Bruno Peyron's Orange maxi-catamarans, Wood and Rawlinson have probably sailed more miles than anyone else in the present Mini Transat.



"Most of the people in the fleet haven’t been across the Atlantic or been further than 300 miles offshore - well for me that’s quite normal," says Rawlinson. "I am pretty happy to do 28 days non-stop. It doesn’t bother me too much. It is obviously different doing it singlehanded to being on a delivery boat, but even on a transatlantic delivery you’d only go with three and you’d still do singlehanded night watches and day watches." Despite being just 24, ten years younger than Wood, Rawlinson has already sailed across the Atlantic 14 times and has 100,000 miles logged. With their high mileage experience both Rawlinson and Wood will benefit them come the longer second leg of the Mini Transat due to start weekend after next.

In addition to having experienced sea legs, deliveries are also a good training ground for making running repairs and this is something which has proved quite crucial this year for Rawlinson who's boat has suffered a number of near catastrophies. "I usually end up hand steering most races! The only race I haven’t had to hand steer this year was the first race of the season, the Mini Pavois, where I finished 15th which was one of my best results and everything worked."

Rawlinson's campaign is a shorestring one. After reading about the race, he came to France after the Mini Transat two years ago and bought the only boat he could afford, for just 15,000 Euros, although he reckons he has spent at least that again on the boat since. The boat he got was built in 1990 and although it has a recent hull number Rawlinson explains this is because the boat was built before hull numbers in the class were introduced! However she has an impressive track record - over her career she has been raced in eight transats, six with top 10 finishes.

"She is a good boat, she’s looked after me so far," Rawlinson explains. "I’ve had her almost two years now. I did the Azores race last year. I had to hand steer there and back. I had no electrics at all. That was pretty tough. She looks after herself upwind, like most boats, but downwind you have to stay awake as long as you can - until you start seeing things! And then you drop the kite, drop all the sails almost and go to sleep for 20 minutes, half an hour. But I finished 22nd on that, which was alright."

In the Pornichet Select this year Rawlinson very nearly sank - his boat almost fully submerged... "My water ballast exploded and the intake [below the water line obviously] blew off as well. The good thing with these boats is that they are unsinkable otherwise I probably would have gone straight down. The water was over the deck… The only way I could get out of it was to put the small kite up and get going to try and get the water out." So pretty much the same way as one empties water from a RIB at speed...

While most of the boats were having their rigs torn out in the 40+ knot winds of this year's devasting Transgascoigne race, Rawlinson had other problems to deal with. "In that I had to retire as I had a fire on board," he recounts in a frighteningly matter of fact way. "That was an electrical fire. It was a nightmare. One of the cables must have melted through. But I had a fire extinguisher and I just blitzed it. The problem is that it is a carbon boat and you have to put it out as fast as you can."

Minis are fitted with block foam to keep them buoyant but in the event of a major fire it is hard to see how this would have helped...

Meanwhile Wood has been Mini sailing for a little longer. This is his third year in the class and he started out by chartering hull no 202, which like Rawlinson's present boat was an old fixed keel water ballasted affair. Then prior to the start of the last Mini Transat he put a deposit down on Nick Bubb's full-on, brand new Simon Rogers-designed boat. Probably thanks to his boat being just over two years old rather than 17 years old, Wood has not had the catalogue of near death experiences Rawlinson has had. Saying this he did break a spreader and run over a whale in the race to the Azores last year. His boat has also suffered a dismasting.



Where Wood and Rawlinson (above) differ is in their backgrounds. Despite not being a copper top, David Rawlinson claims Youth World Champions turned Yngling sailors, Victoria and Emma Rawlinson, to be his first cousins. Like his star cousins, Rawlinson went through the RYA school as a youth sailor. "I got up to the 420 with my brother and then my brother decided not to carry on and then I moved on into J/24s and keelboat racing. The long distance came from my yacht deliveries. I’ve always known about the Mini Transat and being from Cornwall as well...I guess I wanted to get into some ocean racing and the Mini seemed like a good thing to do."

Rawlinson says his famous cousins haven't been sailing with him yet. They were going to come and sail in the Prologue race prior to the start of the Mini Transat but for some reason the prologue race wasn't held this year. "I sailed with them before and they are insane! They are very intense! If I get another Mini they might come out."

Wood doesn't have the same elite grand prix racing background, although he too was born into an equally formidable sailing family. His father Richard Wood (not the west country multihull designer of the same name) competed in several of the Royal Western Yacht Club's shorthanded offshore races in the 1970s, but is more of the long distance adventure school of sailing. Since then Wood junior has joined his father and sailed many tens of thousands of miles aboard their steel-hulled yacht Norwegian Blue - in 2002 they sailed from the UK, all the way to New Zealand, back up to the Aleutian Islands (north Pacific) and then became the first British yacht to successfully navigate the dense pack ice of the North West Passage (ie above Canada) from west to east.

"The typical question is what do you do next? And I thought 'actually, I’d really like to get into this singlehanded sailing'. When I was in the Arctic, doing the North West Passage I met one of the guys who was second in the Mini Transat, so this is a follow on from that," recalls Wood of his leap from there to the Mini calss. "The more I looked into it and spoke with Nick bubb and Phil Sharp, it didn’t take me long to hire a boat."

While Rawlinson pays for his shoe-string campaign by his delivery trips and has help from marine suppliers like Harken and Raymarine with discounts, Wood has been fortunate enough to get sponsorship from furniture manufacturer domasofa.com.

"I took a leap of faith," continues Wood about how he managed to buy Bubb's Mini. "Nick was really good when I bought the boat, because he asked for a deposit, a fairly chunky deposit, so I took out loads of bank loans, not having a sponsor and not knowing where I was going to get the money or how I was going to pay it off. So I went to the bank and said - 'I’ll either get the sponsorship and give you the money or I won’t get sponsorship and we’ll sell the boat and I’ll give you the money. Luckily I managed to get my sponsor, domosofa and they were really interested in it."

Domosofa are based in Yorkshire and were suitably interested in Wood's exploits that they bought the boat off him and also gave him some money to cover his campaign costs. "The only draw back is that I have put a lot of my own money into the boat and at the end of the day I end up with nothing, but its worked out really well."

Apart from some time spent in dinghies in his youth Wood admits that he doesn't have much of a racing background but launched into it when he got the first Mini. "When I hired 202, I took it out for a day, got it ready, sailed it down to France for my first race and I came 25th or 26th. So it was quite enlightening that I could go straight from cruising. But I do yacht deliveries and on those you are aiming to sail the boat as efficiently as possible and I am used to doing ocean crossings and looking at weather systems and routing, etc. It is just a case of being able to manage you sleeping and keeping the boat going."

Over the course of three years Mini sailing Wood has mastered this most daunting aspects of solo offshore racing - sleep deprivation. "I'm pretty good now. I do 15-20 minute kips and offshore you have the radar detector so you can sleep for an hour or so. It is much easier offshore because there is hardly anything there, while closer inshore there are pots and fishing boats. You still keep an eye on the trim and everything. But you get into the routine and away you go and you can do it forever. I find it is not until you step on land that it hits you, but when you are in the role it seems quite normal."



Wood (above) continues: "I learned a lot in the Azores race because we did have 25 knots downwind for four or five days. You can’t stay up 24 hours a day so you just have to go to a smaller sail, go down below, get some sleep. When it got dark, I'd go down below get some sleep and get up really early and just keep that pace on and then I was always fit and aware and really on it during the day. I think that probably is better than trying to just push yourself until you are so knackered you can’t do anything and then you wipe out and break something. That is my method."

The lack of comms gear and not being able to speak to anyone for days on end also doesn't phase Wood. "I have done a lot of doublehanded sailing - I sailed non-stop for 6,000 miles with my girlfriend. I am not really a big people person anyway," he admits.

In terms of the cuisine on board domosofa.com it is mostly freeze dried, made somewhat harder by Wood being vegetarian. "There are a few other things I put in - pasta and rice and some sauce, lots of nuts and raisins and dried fruit." As ever he uses the perennial Mini cooking set up of a kettle with a single camping gas ring welded to the base of it. However most of the boats are now using a particularly efficient burner called a JetBoil. "It is super fast. It is very efficient. Rather than having the flame go around the outside it is on the inside and it is really really efficient. It hardly needs any gas. It boils water in about a minute." Presumably it would be handy for some spot welding too...

To date Wood's best result was in the disastrous Transgascoigne when he finished tenth overall. "There were four complete rolls and dismastings and three or four airflifts. I shredded my jib. I did get knocked down - I was down below at the time and everything was stacked on one side and suddenly it was all stacked over on the other side. I was just holding on the ceiling. She must have gone over more than 90degrees as we were going down a wave."

Apparently all but one of the boats that came acropper on the Transgascoigne were Pogo 2 series boats which have wider fixed keels and may have been more susceptible to being rolled by the waves compared to the Protos which had their keels canted. "It allowed us to slide down the waves easier so that was probably our saviour. Other than that I broke a few bits and bobs."

Since buying Bubb's boat, Wood immediately replaced Bubb's heavy rotating wingmast with lighter carbon fibre fixed mast. However this spar broke and he has since had another built. Changing from the wingmast allowed him to shed around 30kg from the bulb.



Domosofa.com still has mostly the same appendage package - a keel that not only cants, but can be slid fore and aft in the boat on a track, a daggerboard that cants, plus twin rudders. However he has changed the rudders to ones that are larger and also flip up - like Open 60s, Minis now sail along with their windward rudder flipped up out of the water to reduce drag. For charging Wood uses a solar panel but has also fitted a fuel cell.



Rawlinson's boat, being of an older vintage, has a much narrower transom than the newer Protos or even the Pogo 2 series boat and her skipper admits that the boat suffers when power reaching because of this. "She’s very good in light wind conditions because she’s got nothing in the water so she’s just off, so I can normally pass some people like that. I have 200lts of water ballast each side of the boat which I pump in, but it would be nice to have a canting keel and a wider stern." He says he could have fitted a carbon mast but if you start going down this route you might as well simply buy a boat from the outset with these features. At present his boat has an alloy spar, one of the heaviest in the fleet he reckons, even with jumpers securing the top mast.

We fantasise for a moment about what the ideal way to do a Mini campaign is and Rawlinson reckons it is definitely the Simon Curwen route - buy a fully sorted newish secondhand boat and go from there. He cites Yves le Blevec's brand new Lombard design that is up for sale at present for 120,000 Euros (compared to 160-170,000 Euros plus the major headaches and teething problems of building new).

However he has replaced pretty much everything on board including a new suit of sails from the present sailmaker of choice in the class - All Purpose in La Trinite.

Rawlinson claims that despite the age of his boat his top speed to date has been 23 knots (remember we are talking about a 21ft long boat here...). "It was on the Azores race when I was hand steering. When you have to hand steer for so long you get a little bit pissed off with it all, so you leave the big kite up and just keep on going and holding on and the whole boat is jumping around and we hit 23 knots which is pretty quick… Like all Mini sailors will tell you - I have had plenty of wipe-outs with the mast in the water - it’s how you know when to drop the kite!"

Didn't he find it a little daunting when he joined this French class as a Brit who was only 22 years old at the time? "It is a good class. Classe Mini is the best class I have ever ever been in. it is very French, but the Mini is very different to the Figaro. The Figaro is very secretive, whereas the Mini is very open. I can walk along the dock and talk to anyone and you can chat about the weather and the routing. We talk about sail shapes. It is one big pool of information and we all chip in and discuss it. There is no top secrets like a dinghy class. That is a good thing. It may be very French but if you look at the entry list the number of foreigners in the entry list is very high. For an English person, most of the French speak English and after two years you end up picking up some French."

In terms of their futures both Rawlinson and Wood are waiting to see how the Mini Transat turns out for them. "If I can surprise some people and beat some people I shouldn’t be beating, then I might be in better shape to get a sponsor," says Rawlinson. "Then I’ll get another Mini or I might charter a Class 40. That is a big up and coming thing and there are a lot of boats doing the TJV. A lot of people who are getting into singlehanded sailing who are just missing out the Mini now and going straight into the Class 40."

Wood is equally undecided. "All the guys that are going to do well in this are on their second Transat at least. The only way you can win is to do at least two unless you are exceptionally hot with a good boat. If I get in the top 15 I’ll probably call it a day. Top 10 would be really nice. But after that I don’t know. I just want to do this and then re-assess. I’d absolutely love to do the Vendee Globe, but I am not trying to kid myself."

The outcome of the Mini Transat won't be known for a few weeks yet, but keep an eye out for these two Brits.

Read Andrew Wood's account of leg one here and David Rawlinson's here.