trimaran actual

Actual Ultim 3

MACIF 100 then Actual Ultim 3

Macif was designed in close collaboration with François Gabart and his technical team, fresh from their wins in the Vendée Globe and the Route du Rhum. The remit was to produce a boat for solo and short-handed racing and record-breaking . Launched in 2015, she is almost as beamy as her rivals and carries the same amount of sail, but weighs in two tonnes lighter .

Her most obvious innovation is the compact cockpit – “the shed” – which contains the working ends of the lines, the accommodation and the nav station in the same sheltered and enclosed space . Accessed via a hatch in the cockpit, the centre hull houses the engines, batteries, ballast tanks, food store and the equipment locker.

The rudders feature adjustable-pitch elevators to trim the boat, while the foils provide maximum stability when in foiling mode. She was fitted with new appendages during a major refit in 2018 to improve her foiling capabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3mDe-uj0jU

With François Gabart at the controls, Macif won every race she entered (Transat Jacques Vabre, The Transat, The Bridge), except the 2018 Route du Rhum when, hampered by the loss of a foil and a rudder, Francis Joyon beat her by a canvas. Unsurprisingly she currently holds the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Trophy , the solo round the world record under sail of 42 days, 16 hours and 40 minutes.

In 2021 she was sold to Actual, giving skipper Yves Le Blevec ’s ambitions on the Ultim circuit a serious boost.

VPLP Design

CDK Technologies

440 m² / 650 m²

Sun Fast 30 One Design

Paris +33 1 42 77 24 00 Vannes +33 2 97 44 74 19 Nantes +33 9 85 11 79 77

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ACTUAL ULTIM3

Eighteen months after the start of its construction, the Macif trimaran left Keroman CDK Technologies shipyard, Tuesday, August 18, 2015, to be launched.

10 December 2020: The Trimaran Macif officially becomes Actual Ultim 3

Launching under her new colours on 13 April 2021, skippered by Yves le Blevec

Photo © Thierry Martinez - Team Actual

Anthony Marchand / Actual Ultim' 3 2024 - l'ARKEA Ultim' Challenge Brest 4th 2023 - Transat Jacques Vabre Normandie Le Havre 5th 2023 - 24H Ultim 4th

Yves Le Blevec /ACTUAL ULTIM3 2022 - Route du Rhum 5th 2022 - FACAE2022 4th 2022 - Winner Armen RACE 2021 - Transat Jacques Vabre Normandie Le Havre 4th 2020 - Actual Leader buys TRIMARAN MACIF

François Gabart / Trimaran MACIF 2019 - Rolex Fasnet Race 2nd 2018 - Route du Rhum 2nd 2018 - July 30 and 31, launch, after 7 months of work. 2018 - January 12th at Keroman Technologies in the process of optimization 2017 - November 4 record attempt around the world alone 2017 - Winner The Bridge2017 2017 - Winner Armen RACE 2016 - Winner the Transat Bakerly (ex Transat anglaise) 2015 - WInner Transat Jacques Vabre

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New Extremes On the Horizon

• By Kimball Livingston
• August 6, 2024

On his solo 50-day circumnavigation with a 100-foot foiling trimaran, Charles Caudrelier averaged 23.74 knots through the water and finished two days ahead of second place. The new speeds are so great, they shrink weather systems to the status of puffs on a pond. Be in the right place, get your puff, and you’re gone—with a few complications.

The faster you go, the harder you hit. Heading down the Atlantic, outbound from France, Caudrelier’s Gitana 17 was pushed hard in a neck-and-neck duel with up-and-comer Tom Laperche on SVR Lartigue . Even following from ashore, with just a touch of imagination, it was a breathtaking match. Then Laperche dashed/crashed/smashed head-on into an all-too-common UFO—unidentified floating object—and limped away to South Africa with too much damage to continue. “Could have happened to anybody,” Caudrelier mused. “When we started, we really didn’t know if we could do this.” 

Of the six giants that blasted hell for leather across the starting line, five completed the Arkea Ultim Challenge Brest. All took damage, but Gitana ’s only significant damage came in a nonstructural fairing kicked out of kilter by diving through a wave. Thomas Coville, second, sailing Sodebo , sat two days in Tasmania to repair his main bow pulpit and port trampoline, but that did not account for ­finishing two days behind the winner. Caudrelier caught the dream-ride puffs early and eventually built a cushion of thousands of miles. Had his lead been threatened, he might not have ducked into the Azores to wait out a depression lying across his route, threatening an otherwise sure victory. We can leave the rest to the what-ifs.

With one lap accomplished, the Ultim class is the new holy grail for the very-French fascination with ultimate speed and going solo. In these circles, that boat you learned to sail on and the one most readers sail now is known as Archimedean. With no disrespect intended for the Greek mathematician and physicist who developed our principles for calculating ­buoyancy, displacement boats in these circles are so five ­minutes ago.

Designers, engineers, and the brave souls who sail Ultims now are debating, running tests, and laying bets on a next generation of foils, sails, and new builds, all beyond human scale but as much a set of compromises as any boat. Big foils will lift a sailing craft into flying mode at low windspeeds. Advantage, big foils. As winds pick up, and boatspeed too, big foils become drag and a liability. Critical advantage to smaller foils, but how much smaller? And suddenly, heavy versus light enters the conversation as a complication.

When first launched, Gitana 17 was slow to the point of being a joke to insiders. The foils weren’t right, and “the boat was heavy. No one expected good things, and no one expected us to one day be racing around the world on foils,” Caudrelier says, remembering a time when he was not yet skippering Gitana . After his 50 days at sea on a revamped boat, Caudrelier speculated publicly that the next Gitana ought to be even heavier. 

Whether that was information or misinformation, only time and new launches will tell. Though a lighter boat will take off sooner, once on its foils, a heavier boat might be more stable and capable of sailing deeper into high-wind ranges, or foil developments could render any such advantage moot. The design process is competitive and secretive, but the pieces of the puzzle are known.

The sailors to a man pronounce these foiling giants more comfortable and, yes, safer than previous oceangoing multihulls. The comfort comes from flying above waves rather than slamming into them.

Safety follows. “It’s like a suspension system in a car,” Caudrelier says. “We’re no longer constantly afraid of capsizing. The foils work together to stabilize the ride.” If that seems counterintuitive, consider that, unlike an America’s Cup foiler, the aim is to rarely if ever hit maximum speed. Caudrelier reported that, flat-out, he was using only 80 to 85 ­percent of the boat’s polars. 

Xavier Guilbaud, of the VPLP design firm, responsible for SVR Lartigue , notes that sea state is less of a limiting factor with the hulls raised on foils. Instead, “wavelength is critical. Close waves are a problem, but if you’re climbing up and down ocean swells, even a wave height of 5 to 6 meters might be OK.”

Aerodynamics matter on deck, Guilbaud says: “Hydrodynamics matter on bottom because the boats are not fully flying. The trend is to fly the windward float, but the center hull might catch a wave and cough up spray.”

Meanwhile, you can almost but not quite set aside your mental images of speed-­record challengers losing flow in the gas-bubble zone of cavitation and launching away to a crash landing. There were no such incidents in some 152,000 accumulated ocean miles of the Arkea Challenge. However, any burst of 50 knots or above is, shall we say, a thrill. With considerable understatement, Caudrelier observes: “You can lose directional control. Think of a modern car that holds the road so well and you feel safe, until something happens.”

Absent shape-shifting foils to adapt to different flow rates, foils are optimized for boatspeeds in the mid to high 30s. Cavitation is more of an endurance issue than a barrier. As the designer for the Edmond de Rothschild group that fields the racers named Gitana , Guillaume Verdier says that the ­damage to carbon-laminate foils from speeds above 40 knots make them look “like they were blasted with bullets.” 

Minimizing cavitation ­damage is on everyone’s must-do list as existing boats are tweaked for their next outings. And although Caudrelier at one point suggested, or joked, that aerodynamics might take a back seat in development, Verdier isn’t buying that, not with apparent winds of 40 to 50 knots most of the time. On a quieter note, Verdier hints at factions on how tightly to control any rule-based particulars for the Ultims. “I’ve never been good in class meetings,” Verdier says. “If you restrict too many things, people will find stupid ways to get around the restrictions. If a class is open, you tend to not make stupid things.”

Verdier is a Paris native long since removed to the ­quieter reaches of Brittany, where he avoids office norms like a plague, enjoys a view of megalithic religious stones from his window, and ponders the path forward. He is enthusiastic about shore-based monitoring. He proselytizes the need for effective whale-avoidance systems. And he looks forward to races with boats accumulating energy as they sail, “to demonstrate that it is possible to go without fossil fuels at all.”

Speaking separately, Verdier, Guilbaud and Caudrelier each predict double-skinned mainsails, America’s Cup-style, as a next experiment. Guilbaud says: “While we have made big advances in appendages over the past six to seven years, sail plans have stayed pretty much the same for 15. Maybe it’s time for a smaller sail plan with the same power and a lower center of effort. Things are changing. There were people sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see how this race would go. Now they know.” 

A smaller sail plan would make the boats easier to sail or less daunting, at least. Guilbaud was lucky enough to once cross the Atlantic aboard SVR Lartigue —among the design/build team, that’s a competitive position—and it was an eye-opener. He says: “Getting off the computer and onto the boat, I understand better how they live on board and cope with loads that are simply incredible. Every maneuver is a nightmare. It was difficult to reef or jibe with four people on the coffee grinders, but Caudrelier south of Australia had a day when he solo-jibed 15 or 16 times. I can’t imagine that. Charles says he was exhausted for three days.”

This is not about ­sailing for Everyman. The Arkea Ultim Challenge Brest and the Ultim fleet would not exist ­without sponsorship money, blessed with a fan base for the ­rocketmen of sail. Their course included boundaries for ice zones and animal habitats. Even the Southern Ocean was not wide open. Optimal sailing angles be hanged—the sailors had to thread a line through the wilderness and what was, even for veterans like nine-time circumnavigator and former record-holder Thomas Coville, one of the great adventures of their lives. Anthony Marchand, finishing in 64 days on Actual , last of the foil-equipped boats, spoke of “two months on a boat with alarms going off every five minutes, always listening on high alert.” Eric Peron, finishing in 66 days with the nonfoiling, thirdhand Adagio , reported the only near-­capsize of the race, and he may have mentioned that he was “­jealous” of the foilers.

For Caudrelier, the race and the win fulfilled a dream that he’d seized upon as a teenager, a dream that he clung to like a junkyard dog as he went through his young years sailing any boat he could, often with the legends but not as That Guy.  He had a slow climb highlighted by a Route du Rhum win and a Volvo Ocean Race win, and now this. The husband and father turned 50 the day before he sailed across the Arkea finish line and joked about ducking out of birthday hoopla only to be greeted by cheering thousands when he hit the dock­—star-struck dreaming teenagers included. With Gitana 18 in the works and his sights set on skippering an upgraded Gitana 17 next winter for a fully crewed attempt on the Jules Verne record, he is That Guy.

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World’s toughest sailing record: New bid announced

• Elaine Bunting
• June 8, 2021

French sailor Romain Pilliard to take on the world's toughest sailing record - around the world non-stop against the prevailing winds and currents - in Ellen MacArthur's former record-breaking trimaran

An attempt on the toughest sailing record, the westabout round the world course, is being planned later this year by French sailor Romain Pilliard .

The 46-year-old Figaro sailor and IMOCA crew will be sailing with another as yet unnamed co-skipper in a bid to break the 34,000-mile ‘wrong way’ record non-stop round the world against prevailing winds and currents.

Pilliard will sail the trimaran Use it Again! , the 75ft Nigel Irens design (then B&Q ) that Ellen MacArthur sailed to a non-stop eastabout round the world record in 2005.

The wrong-way record has been completed by only five sailors since it was first set in 1971 by Chay Blyth. Then dubbed ‘the impossible voyage’ it was a record of greater duration and vastly greater arduousness than the downwind route, as it involved punching much more slowly into a greater number of storms across the expanse of the Southern Ocean , as well as battling counter-currents.

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While all the previous record breakers have been on conservative, robustly built monohulls, and sailing solo, Pilliard will sail double-handed and follow a different route.

It has been a long-held theory that the record would next fall to a multihull, provided it was sufficiently manageable to round Cape Horn to windward. The argument goes that a multihull would be fast enough to sail into the more clement latitudes of the Pacific and Indian Ocean – in other words, could make the wrong-way route more right-way, albeit with some very gnarly corners.

The theory was put to the test in 2017 by Y ves Le Blévec on the 100ft trimaran Actual . But Blévec   capsized off Cape Horn when one of the trimaran ’ s port linkages broke in winds of 30- 40 knots and 6m seas. Fortunately he was able to shelter inside until airlifted to safety by the Chilean Coastg uard.

French record challenger Romain Pilliard

Pilliard has thousands of miles of solo racing experience on the trimaran, including racing in the 2019 Route du Rhum transatlantic race. He comments: “The choice of [two skippers] makes sense. Even if I know my boat well, it’s still a multihull, it can turn over. There can be days of waiting [near Cape Horn] if the conditions are not kind and it’s less dangerous to wait double-handed than solo, especially in bad  conditions.”

Pilliard has been working closely on all the route options with weather expert  Christian Dumard . He is using the project to promote the ethos of reduce, r euse and recycle and says his boat is an example of the philosophy.

“I want to show that not only will the human adventure be no less beautiful than a Jules Verne Trophy with a new boat, for example, but that it is necessary to make the greatest number dream differently.”

History of the world’s toughest sailing record

1971 – Chay Blyth, British Steel (59ft Robert Clark-designed cutter, steel), 293 days. Average speed: 3.85 knots

1982 – David Cowper, Ocean Bound (41ft Sparkman & Stephens cutter), 221 days. Average speed: 3.91 knots

1994 – Mike Golding, Group 4 (67ft steel Challenge cutter, David Thomas design), 167 days. Average speed: 5.61 knots

2000 – Philippe Monnet, UUNet (Philippe Briand design Open 60), 151 days. Average speed: 5.97 knots

2000 – Jean-Luc Van Den Heede, Adrien (85ft Giles Vaton-designed aluminium cutter), 122 days. Average speed: 7.43 knots

(2006 – First woman non-stop: Dee Caffari , Aviva, 72ft steel Challenge cutter, Rob Humphreys design, 178 days. Average speed: 5.09 knots.)

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