Yachting-Live

Veolia Environnement Returns to Concarneau
The final stage of the voyage for Roland Jourdain’s monohull. After being unloaded from the cargo ship on the 12th March in Zeebrugge, Belgium, which brought it back from Australia, Veolia Environnement made it safely back to its base in Concarneau. With an audible sigh of relief from the technical team who were waiting to have the boat back on home ground. Since Wednesday the building yard has been able to get on with a complete cleaning of the hull before getting it into the shelter of the Kairos hangar.

After half a world tour and a dismasting, Veolia Environnement is now going into the hands of the experts in the workshop. With 8 months to go before the start of the Vendee Globe, the countdown for the preparation of the boat for its next voyage round the world, this time without stops, officially starts now ! The programme is as follows : repairs, reliability checks and upgrades of all tlhe systems checked in the Barcelona World Race. In total 5 weeks in the hangar, with every day carefully planned, with the aim of going in the water and the new mast put in on the 15th May.

Roland Jourdain describes the most important aspects of the refit :

The hull
Roland Jourdain : On the hull, we’ve got to repair the breakages from the dismasting. There are some minor composite repairs on the deck and the guardrails, the stanchions, the pulpit, the lifelines… they all need redoing.

The engine
RJ : The engine gave us problems in the Kerguelens. It did end up starting again but we need 100% reliability this year so need to get to the bottom of what really went wrong. If we don’t find the cause we’ll have to change it to a more traditional one.

The rudders
RJ : We’ve got to make sure the rudder system is reliable, that’s another really important aspect. Its got nothing to do with the way they were built last year, but we still want to improve the way they lift and we’ll be looking at them with a magnifying glass to make sure they are fully reinforced.

The mast
RJ : It’s happening in the shed next door : its the mast that’s really making us scratch our heads as we still can’t find the reason for it coming down. We’ve already spent lots of time thinking about it and looking for explanations… whilst reviewing the links between the design, its build and the cables that support it… there’s a real mast epidemic at the moment, so we are looking at everything. And as we’re starting all over, we’re really going to push the investigations further, which means we’ve got a lot more thinking to do, more meetings, discussions and lots of comparisons to make.

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