Saturday morning, Tom Laperche continued his race against the clock to reach Cape Town, in South Africa, as quickly as possible, in order to be able to repair his boat suffering from a major leak following the collision with an Ofni during Thursday night, causing serious damage to the centerboard of his giant trimaran.
The navigator, third in a race largely dominated by Charles Caudrelier (Edmond de Rothschild) ahead of Thomas Coville (Sodebo, 2nd at 990 miles at 9:00 a.m.), published a video showing the extent of the damage. In the images, we can see a central hull completely filled with water. We can also see the affected drift. “It tilted and moved back, tearing part of the central hull so we have a leak,” confides the young sailor (26 years old) who hopes to be able to repair and complete the solo round-the-world trip. “It’s super hard but I see after twenty-four hours that it’s almost manageable. To go to Cape Town, I am confident that I will be there within two or three days,” added the youngest of the fleet.
The organizers also published a video and the crisis meeting within the SVR Lazartigue team having just learned that the boat had hit something at sea. Defeated mines and a nevertheless mobilizing speech from François Gabart, former skipper of the giant trimaran, which recently handed over to Tom Laperche. “We hit something quite hard in terms of the drift. It’s not news… well you know about it. Tom is fine, in any case physically he was not hurt. Obviously he is a little disgusted, which is completely normal, like all of us,” says Gabart before Laperche returns to the circumstances of the incident.
“We were neither going too fast nor too slowly. The averages were good with speed intervals that we like, around 35 knots. At the end of the night I take a little nap again and I start to lie down but a few minutes later I am in huge shock. I was sleeping in the middle of the cockpit and moved forward a meter. Immediately a huge crash. As a result, there is a lot of water entering the central hull in a fraction of a second. There are all the alarms going off and it’s difficult to know how far there is water and what has been reached or not,” says the very emotional navigator. “I was dejected, I exploded and screamed like I have rarely screamed in my life I think. So disgusted that it happens like this. In a fraction of a second everything collapses and you feel that the boat was going well until then,” added before concluding, his throat tight with tears and disappointment: “I have never experienced something so hard in my life. life and right now, I’m not very calm because there are 1200 miles to go to get to Cape Town.
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