Maxi Edmond de Rothschild goes out to the Jules Verne Trophy
From Lorient shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, November 24, the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild have set sail for the island of Ushant, where the starting line of the Jules Verne Trophy is set, around the world. sailing without scale.
At 03:26, after waiting for the arrival of a low pressure front, the Cammas-Caudrelier couple and the other four members of the Team Gitana crew finally set out to tackle the theoretical 21,760 nautical miles necessary for the circumnavigation. of the planet.
The time to beat in the record attempt is 40 days 23 hours and 30 minutes, obtained by Francis Joyon in another maxi multihull, Idec Sport, for which the Maxi sailors Edmond de Rothschild and his crew will have to return again in front of Brest in at 02:55 on January 5, 2021. If this happens, the Gitana Team would be the tenth team in history to win the prestigious Jules Verne Trophy.
The six sailors – Franck Cammas, Charles Caudrelier, Morgan Lagravière, Erwan Israël, Yann Riou and David Boileau – on alert for more than two weeks, realized that it was time to leave, yesterday around 7.30pm local time. Already outfitted in boots and weather gear, head or hand torches, the six heard the latest valuable weather information from the Marcel van Triest router. It was necessary to leave quickly so as not to lose a low pressure window that, according to their calculations, will allow the great trimaran to reach the equator in about 4 days and 10 hours.
At 9:37 p.m., in Lorient, to the cheers of encouragement from all the Team members and their loved ones, in a joyful atmosphere, the two skippers and their men arrived at the starting area in front of the island of Ushant and then After some maneuvers, they finally left at 03:26 o’clock, with 18 knots of NW wind and waves of three meters. With J3 and full mainsail they crossed the finish line, in fact they took off in search of the record… at 40 knots!
