The return of Conrad Humphreys

British skipper returns with five year campaign starting with the Figaro

Since he finished seventh in the 2004-5 Vendee Globe, followed by a season continuing his sponsorship with Motorola in the inaugural Volvo Extreme 40 Series, so Conrad Humphreys has more or less disappeared off the sailing radar...until now.

“With the Extreme 40, effectively we got priced out with the budgets in 2007 and with the handover to what became the iShares Cup, we had to get out of the game at that point,” says the Plymouth-based skipper, who prior to the Vendee Globe, cut his teeth as the youngest competitor in the 1993-4 Whitbread and went on to win the BT Global Challenge as skipper of LG Flatron. The Motorola Extreme 40 ended up sold to TeamOrigin.

Since then Humphreys has not been sitting on the couch watching daytime TV. After he competed in the Transat in 2004, in 2006-7 he wrote the Plymouth city bid for what would become the 2008 Artemis Transat. “I secured the best part of £750,000 to underwrite the bid and orchestrate the whole event and move the event into Sutton Harbour. I got told repeatedly it couldn’t be done [the move], but it could and it was quite stressful because Sutton Harbour is locked and we had to hold a certain depth of water to be able to keep the Open 60s in there, despite a leaking lock gate and a falling tide on the Sunday [of the start]. We had to get the 40s out as well as the 60s with the gates open and the water running out!”

Humphreys’ involvement in the Artemis Transat has directed what he has gone on to do since. The bid for the Artemis Transat focussed on the ‘city-side activity’ including the cultural and education program, and with this under his belt he has moved into events. But most significantly he also rebranded his company ‘Sport Environment’ and launched a new environmental initiative called the ‘Blue Climate and Oceans Project’.

The aim of the Blue Climate and Oceans Project, he says, has been to get the public more engaged with the marine environment through “communication, education activity and participation” with the ultimate aim of using sport to get more people actively to care for the environment. The campaign signed up a number of ambassadors including Sam Davies, rowers, kite surfers, Olympic windsurfers, etc and from there they built a website and started to promote their message to schools and other organisations.

In 2009 this developed when they launched the Blue Mile. “It’s a little like Sport Relief, where people go and run their mile and raise what ends up being multiple millions of pounds for Comic Relief. The aim of the Blue Mile is the water equivalent – people can swim it, or paddle it, or sail it, or kayak it...” Humphreys continues: “It will evolve – it has taken 10 years for Sport Relief to get to the scale it has. I don’t imagine in the next 10 years we’ll get to that scale, but the ambition is for it to become the UK’s leading funding raising event for the environment.”

Funds raised for Blue Mile are going to the World Wildlife Fund, which, we initially thought – doesn’t sound very ‘blue’. In fact this is just the reason for the association, as Humphreys explains: “Most people think of the WWF as tigers and rainforests, so this is one of the reasons they have taken this on – at least one third of their work is on oceans. They have been going through a rebrand of ‘tigers and wildlife’ to having a marine focus.”

Within the Blue Mile program they have a flagship event. This was run as a test last year and the first fully-fledged affair will take place over 3-4 September this year at a venue (somewhere in the southeast) to be announced in the next two weeks. Looking ahead, Humphreys says that with the WWF’s involvement there is a real prospect of making the Blue Mile international in the longer term.

While swimming represents the most obvious ‘blue mile’, he also has plans afoot to involve sailing, although one images a mile in a yacht will be slightly less arduous. “There are some great media opportunities to do say speed miles in fast boats,” he advises.

Back to sailing

While it sounds like he might be quite busy ashore, Humphreys says he has a team in place running the organisation of Blue Mile and this frees him up to focus on his main focus for the next five years – a Figaro campaign, leading into an IMOCA 60 campaign with the ultimate aim of the Vendee Globe in 2016-17.

“I’ve always had the agenda that I want to get back and sail full time. In our industry, it is very hard to carve your niche as a professional Vendee sailor. The projects that have had funding have managed to keep going, but over the last two or three years we have had to diversify, as there wasn’t enough in the pot. I could foresee that 2008-9 was going to be lean, so we just started focussing on things that were more achievable and more in keeping with where sponsors want to spend money which is more on social and environmental projects than big sailing sponsorships.”

Over the latter part of 2010 Humphreys did the hard yards with the Artemis Offshore Academy and of which he is now an ‘associate member’, ie he is not part of the official squad, but having his own boat he can use their resource and take part in their training. His involvement has taken him down to the training base in La Grande Motte in the south of France over the winter and he will be joining them again once the Academy is back up and running in Weymouth later in the spring.

“It is great to see Artemis has put some resource into giving it [Figaro sailing] a lift in the UK, because typically it is under the radar of sponsors in the UK, but it is good way to train and perform and to get some core skills, fitness, etc.

“There are a number of things linked to squad training, sailing down in La Grand Motte - there are also some activities that are shared among the whole training camp with content and tuning figures and settings, etc. But ultimately once have got my boat I am going to be spending all my time with my boat, so I won’t spend too much more time doing Academy-related sailing, I will just be on the water doing lots of windward-leewards on Plymouth Sound initially, getting to know the boat very well.”

So since deciding to embark on his five year plan, Humphreys has not only been training whenever possible with the academy but has been sponsor hunting, rounding up partners for his campaign and securing a boat. In this he has succeeded on every count.

His chartered Beneteau Figaro 2 he has been campaigned most recently by double Velux 5 Oceans winner Bernard Stamm and before that was Financo, Nicolas Lunven’s 2009 Solitaire du Figaro winner. The boat is being prepared in France and will be delivered to Plymouth by the end of this month. This doesn’t leave Humphreys with too much work up time before the first event he will be competing in this year - the Solo Figaro Les Sables, starting on 15 March, his first qualifier for this year’s La Solitaire.

So why the Figaro class? “Two reasons – firstly I just think, I sailed the boat last year and it is absolutely fantastic to race. It is a very strict one design, so everything is equal. It is important to get a boat that has been well prepared and we have rented Bernard Stamm’s boat from last year, which is a good starting place. I love the fact that you are sailing against some incredibly talented people so it will be a massive learning curve as any of the Brits who have taken have seen.

“I am under no illusions as to how difficult it will be. It has been a personal ambition to do it, but often these things are tempered by the ability to secure funding to do what is effective a 100,000 Euro campaign. I am integrated it into my program for the next five years, so I’ll keep a boat and keep dipping in and out like all the top guys do. I think some of the UK skippers miss that opportunity. Sam [Davies] benefitted greatly from doing it and Johnny [Malbon] would have benefitted massively by doing it and I want to get that same opportunity.”

Humphreys reckons 80-150,000 Euros is typically the annual budget range for a competitive Figaro campaign, depending on if the program includes the transatlantic race (this year running from Bénodet to Fort de France, Martinque starting on 10 April), although a starter campaign can be achieved with 50-60,000 Euros, he reckons.

“It’s one suit of new sails for the year, unless you are doing the Transat in which case you are allowed two suits of sails, the racing and the branding and that is not including a salary. Add on a salary on top of that, and you are in that ball park.”

The main objective for the year of course is the Figaro’s premier event, La Solitaire, which this year runs over 31 July-28 August from Perros-Guirec to Caen to Dun Laoghaire, down to Les Sables d’Olonne and back up into the Channel for the finish in Dieppe. Key to Humphreys potential success in this will be the amount of time and resource he can put into training and preparation. Initially he says he will train out of Plymouth and if possible out of the Figaro training mecca of Port la Foret, and will use the qualifiers such as the Solo Les Sables, as well as May’s Solo Concarneau and the Solo Basse Normandie in June to gauge his progress. He will also be doing some training with fellow Brit Nigel King, who also will be resuming his Figaro campaign this season.

There is also the UK Figaro Nationals due to take place out of Weymouth over 13-16 June, immediately after the Transmanche. While the Notice of Race has yet to be published, the racing will all be doublehanded, comprising a feeder race from L’Aberwrach, round the cans racing in Weymouth Bay and an offshore race to Cowes (simulating the mid-section the Solitaire’s opening leg).

“The key aim of the year is to use the program to communicate well and get as much coverage as we can, to let people know we are back in the game and making a return, that this is a five year campaign, starting with the Figaro and next year we’ll do the Transat and by that point I’d like to feel we will be committing to a new Open 60 campaign for 2013-2016. We have got funding in place to get us through this year and next and then from there, if all goes well and we have secured a main sponsor, we’ll move forward into a new 60 program.”

Details of Humphrey's sponsor are due in March. See his nice new website here.