Jules Verne finally beaten!

On April 20, 1993, when a large dark blue catamaran was in sight of the Créac’h lighthouse, the distress flares fired by the crew lit up the dusk and the tired white sails of the Commodore Explorer. The five sailors, who were as dazed as they were happy, did not seem to realize quite what they had achieved. And yet, Bruno Peyron, Marc Vallin, Cam Lewis, Jacques Vincent and Olivier Despaignes went down in history, after sailing around the world in 79 days, 6 hours and 5 minutes. After 28,000 miles at an average of 14.39 knots, they passed this symbolic milestone that was so dear to Jules Verne and his hero Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in 80 Days”. On board the former Jet Services V, designed by Gilles Ollier and Yann Penfornis and built in 1987 by Multiplast, their journey had been anything but easy. The “monster”, with its overall length of 28 meters and its width of 13.60 meters, its 10 tons and its downwind sail area of 777m2, was still a flighty catamaran that could overturn like a beach craft at any time. The two floats had been designed as “survival packs” where the crew could spend a month if the boat capsized in the southern seas. “It’s an initiation to Hell. Brutal. Violent. Powerful. Outrageous! There are no specific adjectives for describing what’s happening here at the moment. We almost capsized…”, explained Bruno Peyron about his 42° south experience in a brief message sent from the Roaring Forties. “We’ve changed scales and changed planets. Commodore Explorer is without a doubt the biggest catamaran, but here it just doesn’t exist…”

The sea was appalling. Bruno Peyron and his “commando crew” struggled for 40 hours in their attempt to keep the monster under control… barepoled. These sailors, who were more than experienced, had never seen such a violent sea. And to cap it all, the Nagrafax making it possible to receive weather charts on board broke shortly after setting out from Brest. Bruno Peyron, who was both skipper and chief navigator, could only count on the written weather forecasts that arrived by telex, but were still not particularly accurate at these high latitudes. “We’re still upright”, wrote Bruno Peyron in his logbook on March 22… “and yet with 45 knots of south wind against us as we approach Cape Horn, they say this is only the case 10 % of the time…” Despite his intuition and seamanship, the skipper from La Baule is unable to avoid these two depressions in one of the worst places on the planet. Then caught up in winds gusting at 70 knots (force 12 and over), the Commodore Explorer finds itself sailing ahull… “Inside, we’re getting everything ready for the possibility of capsizing”, admitted the skipper, with his giant catamaran drifting at 4 knots towards the coast… When passing the infamous “hard cape”, a sign of deliverance, the five heroes in their survival suits, sent a selfie from in front of the Horn. While the resolution left something to be desired, this was nevertheless the first digital photo sent from the sea to land via satellite… some 30 years ago!