In the weeks since Boris Herrmann’s Team Malizia syndicate launched its brand new IMOCA, Malizia – Seaexplorer, the team has been busy on and off the water getting to grips with their new boat
We caught up with Team Malizia’s British co-skipper Will Harris – a well-established name on the French short-handed offshore circuit and a past member of The Ocean Race’s Race Experts group – to find out more about how the state-of-the-art VPLP-designed ocean racer has been living up to expectations.
Harris said that launching the boat on time – in fact on the very day originally committed to a year ago – had taken a major effort from the entire team, with at times up to 50 people working flat out to make it happen.
The on-time launch was, he said, an essential milestone in the team’s campaign for The Ocean Race.
“It was a massive step for us,” he said. “We first said we were going for The Ocean Race about two weeks after Boris finished the Vendée Globe 2020-21 and we knew the typical build time for a new IMOCA was about two years.“That meant that if we were going to have a chance to do the necessary testing and preparation for the race we would have to cut that down to 18 months. So last summer we set our sights on July 19th 2022 as the date we were going to launch on.”
Given the fact that Malizia – Seaexplorer is the first new build project the team has taken on and the complex nature of the construction of the latest generation IMOCA yachts, Harris said last month’s on time launch had probably surprised a few people.
“These boats are just so custom,” he said. “Every little piece has to be carefully designed and thought through. Trying to get everything done on time – especially in the last month – was really tricky, particularly with the nightmare situation there has been with global shipping and deliveries.”
As soon as the launch was completed Harris said the team immediately switched into a new mode as the focus changed to trialling and testing the new boat. Impressively, just five days after splashing the 60-footer, the team was able to go test sailing for the first time.
Since then the Team Malizia crew – which as well as Herrmann and Harris also includes Netherlands sailor Rosalin Kuiper and Frenchman Nicolas Lunven – have been carefully racking up the sea miles. Although it’s still early days in the testing process, Harris said that the boat had so far proved reliable and showed great performance potential.
In keeping with latest IMOCA design trends Malizia – Seaexplorer sports a rounded scow bow. It’s a feature which Harris explained should help the boat deal with big waves out in the open ocean.
“The scow bow effectively cuts off about three and a half metres of the boat’s overall waterline length. There is a trade off here, though, because while you are reducing the chances of the bow smashing into the back of the wave in front, in lighter winds when you are not foiling the reduced waterline length will cost you some performance.”
The bow section of the Team Malizia IMOCA is not the only part of the new boat with some curvature designed in. As Harris points out, the boat’s overall ‘rocker’ – the curve of its underwater profile from bow to stern – is pronounced in the aft section too.
“We have continued the curve from the bow into the aft section too,” Harris explains. “The boat lifts up at the stern which is aimed at helping us adjust the pitch of the boat while we are sailing. So in big wind and waves we can really put the stern down in the water and lift the bow even more.”
Although the team is yet to test the boat in strong winds and big waves Harris believes Malizia – Seaexplorer’s rocker along with flat sections on either edge of the stern should enable them to sail the boat in what he calls ‘semi-skimming mode’.
“Our goal is high average speeds – rather than top speed,” he said. “I think that’s quite a different philosophy to a lot of other boats.”
Playing into this performance philosophy are Malizia – Seaexplorer’s unique chistera-shaped foils which Harris believes will improve performance in downwind conditions when the boat needs to be sailed flat.
“When you are sailing downwind with big headsails you really don’t want to be sailing with much heel – especially when there are waves – as you have much less control and can broach out and cause damage.
“We have designed the foils to be able to adjust how deep they go in the water and how much they work based on the heel of the boat. They sit very deep in the water full extension and the more you extend the foil, the more suitable it is for foiling when the boat’s sailing flat.”
A priority for the Team Malizia sailors and their design team ahead of the start of The Ocean Race 2022-23 in January next year is to discover the multitude of new modes – combinations of sail choice, foil deployment, and pitch adjustment – required to get the most out of their new IMOCA, especially on the race’s longest ever leg: the 12,750–nautical mile stint from Cape Town, South Africa to Itajai in Brazil.
Discovering these modes is a trial and error process which Harris described as being as tricky as it is time consuming.
“You can think that you found a fast mode with the biggest sail in the boat’s inventory. You are absolutely flying along but then when you put up a sail that’s half the size you realise that it’s way faster.”
“Finding the fast modes – especially in the big conditions we expect in the Southern Ocean – is going to be a big part of this next race. It is hard to find similar conditions to those, where you can sail a few days at a time to be able to experiment.”
This week the team will reach another major milestone in the campaign with the christening of Malizia – Seaexplorer on Tuesday in Hamburg – the team’s German headquarters. The crew used the delivery trip from France to Germany for further testing and data gathering – but also to get used to sailing their new boat in congested waters.
Next week Team Malizia will take part in the Défi Azimut regatta in Lorient which will be the first time they will line up against some of the other latest generation IMOCAs in fully crewed race mode.
In November Boris Herrmann will race solo across the Atlantic in the Route du Rhum from St. Malo, France to Pointe-à-Pitre on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
This challenging race will be a test of both Herrmann’s single handed skills and the resilience of the new boat in offshore race mode. The team will then use the delivery trip back to Alicante, Spain – host city for The Ocean Race start – to sail Malizia – Seaexplorer in fully crewed race mode.
“We will be sailing in Ocean Race configuration,” Harris said. “That will be our last chance [before the start of The Ocean Race] to do any testing and to work out what we do or don’t like about the boat in fully crewed mode.”
