On the eve of her 60th birthday, sailing the famous ‘Cigar Rouge’ - the boat on which she became the first woman to complete the Vendée Globe in 1996/7– Catherine Chabaud completed a successful, popular return to ocean racing when she finished the 12th Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe in second place in the Rhum Mono class. The only woman competing in the class – one of seven in the race – Chabaud crossed the finish line at 23:33:43hrs Monday evening 28/11/2022 some 2d 20h 20m and 52s after the class winner Jean Pierre Dick on his modern, faster Verdier designed 54-footer Notre Mediterranêe-Ville de Nice.
Upset by the amount of pollution and debris in the oceans Chabaud halted her prolific ocean racing career in the early 90s to ‘find solutions’. She became an environmental campaigner starting and popularising many different initiatives. Her return to the Route du Rhum – unfinished business since abandoning in 1998 – is prompted by the support of a French business school in helping promote her Ocean As Common programme which takes messages to major sporting and economic platforms.
Before the start in Saint Malo she said, “I stopped competing in the early 1990s after seeing the amount of waste at sea. For the last 20 years what has interested me is talking about solutions”
She has become a European Commission deputy minister since 2019 and a specialist adviser to the French ministry for social and environmental economics and writes widely on sustainable and environmental topics.
Chabaud finished sixth on the 1996/97 Vendee Globe and was dismasted on the next edition. This was her fifteenth Atlantic crossing, her fifth race including two The Transats and one Mini Transat. Her famous slender ketch rigged 60 footer – nearly 2m narrower than Alan Gautier’s Bagages Superior - was designed in 1991 by Philippe Harlé for Jean Luc Van Den Heede. Finishing into Gaudeloupe last night her boat is the perfect counterpoint to Dick’s design which is the ultimate fast modern racer cruiser.
“I'm happy to be here. I enjoy these times at sea. I love of all that it teaches me and it is absolutely wonderful, ”she said on the eve of her finish into Pointe-à-Pitre. “I am absolutely horrified to sail through sargassum (weed) fields. They are really everywhere it was really mind-blowing. When you think that all this is going to wash up on the beaches of the West Indies or the Caribbean, it's really scary. And we would like to really know and understand why this is happening.”
Exhausted but happy Chabaud was given a big welcome on the dock. She took the time to talk, “i’m exhausted, really tired. I had a couple of substitute meals today for ill people to pick me up but I have been very tired for a few days now. I have rarely been to this point of exhaustion before. Maybe you can’t be an MEP and a sailor! Physically I have suffered but you just don’t have the choice out there, you have to do your manouevres. You drive yourself with your head. Today you had to keep pressing with gusts to 35kts right into the Saintes channel. You have to reef when you need to you have to keep your head in the game until the end.
And a podium? Yes! Yes, Jean-Pierre and I had faster boats but I don’t think we sailed too badly. I’d like to thank Eric Mas who did my weather routing. Maybe not when I had three reefs in a storm maybe that bit was not so good but it did not last long.
Meantime it is good to challenge yourself. Our children age us quicky and so it is good to go out there and remind them what we are capable of.
Pleasure comes even in the hardest of times. There are fleeting moments of ecstasies. After one of the most severe fronts, I tidied my ropes in the cockpit, I reset some sails, there was rain and at one point, I fell back into the cockpit, I looked up and there was this starry, it was so beautiful, so magical. My son had prepared a playlist for me, I was going downwind listening to Aretha Franklin singing Freedom, Freedom and it just fitted the moment so well. Yes there are some moments that are magical.
Last night was magical under spinnaker with a starry sky. I regretted not having text book about the on the stars. But I had fun.
The ocean for the common good of humanity
In 1991 I saw a lot of plastics and now I think about the winds and what I find absolutely appalling are the sargassum and for several days I have been crossing fields of sargassum.
Halvard [Mabire] also described very well in a message how much he saw the impacts of climate change. The meteorological instability when we crossed a front and behind things before were like in books. There was the shift, the wind cleared up. Now the wind is always unstable. In the impacts of global warming, there is the warming of the deep ocean with the formation of cyclogenesis. Sailors see things that mathematical models do not! I am very happy that my colleagues from parliament are present here, and I will continue, with them, to try to make the sea more visible.