Updated:11/03/2020 09: 49h
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The organization of the Vendée Globe – Around the World in Solitaire – has presented, six days after the start, the Race Direction (RD), which will be the link and vigilance between the earth and each of the 33 competitors of this edition 24 hours a day.
Through the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centers (MRCC) distributed along the route with a system created with the rescue coordination centers of France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina all the boats will be under strict security control.
The 33 IMOCAs were already supervised during the first week of their arrival at Les Sables d’Olonne to check their safety equipment. The skippers (after a medical examination and hard training) and their boats are going to sail for a long time and in difficult, but often unpredictable conditions.
The four-person race direction has a position record every 30 minutes and can therefore monitor abnormal trajectories and strangely slow speeds. In addition to being accessible at any time by skippers, the DR has set up a ‘Rescue’ website in which a maximum of ultra-detailed information on boats and skippers is indicated.
“Our mission is to check, verify and synthesize all the information in a table to make sure that each beacon number is associated with the correct boat and the correct pattern”, explains Hubert Lemonnier, deputy director of the RC
It goes on to state that, “Once all that was done, we duplicated it with a ‘Rescue’ website. The goal is to provide rescue authorities with the proper information 24 hours a day.
For this, each competing team must have provided the numbers of safety beacons, safety information on board, a photo of the skipper of the boat in TPS (survival suit), a photo of the boat with sails, one without sail, one of the ship lying down and one of the overturned ship.
Access to this site is limited to each MRCC. The access codes are valid from the entry of the first IMOCA in the given MRCC zone until the exit of the last IMOCA. With the difference in the speed of the boats, several zones are activated at the same time.
The most complicated ocean surveillance zone runs from South Africa to New Zealand, where a specific system has been established with the hiring of a safety consultant, Australian navigator Alan Neubauer.
Its mission will be to act as a link between the MRCCs in the southern hemisphere (South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) because it will be in the same time zone as the Vendée Globe competitors on its route through the Southern Ocean.
The control system is simple: in the event of a breakdown, the employer will notify the RC and his technical team by telephone. In the extreme case that a ship activates its safety beacon, the information goes directly to the MRCC which, thanks to the ‘Rescue’ site, has all the data. If a boat fires its beacon, it means that the problem is already very serious and that the skipper no longer has any means of communication and then all rescue operations are automatically activated.
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