The race features 11 IMOCAs raced by four-strong sailing crews which must include at least one female sailor. The teams will also each be taking an Onboard Reporter, or OBR, to record and share their adventure.
Among the entries in an exceptionally high quality international field, which includes Thomas Ruyant and his crew on Vulnerable, Sam Goodchild skippering MACIF Santé Prévoyance, and teams led by Jérémie Beyou (Charal), Nicolas Lunven (Team Holcim-PRB), Sam Davies (Initiatives-Coeur), Justine Mettraux (Teamwork-Team Snef) and Elodie Bonafous making her debut in the Class on board the new Associations Petits Princes - Queguiner.
The Course des Caps is one of the classic racetracks in world sailing. It offers a tough, 2,000-nautical mile challenge to sailors and navigators with headlands, tidal gates and constantly changing coastal weather to deal with. The course is also littered with obstacles – especially in the North Sea – among them oil and gas rigs and wind farms, while commercial shipping traffic and associated exclusion zones at key headlands adds another challenging dimension.
For the Brittany-based British sailor Sam Goodchild the race will be his first as skipper on a fully crewed IMOCA as he takes over the Verdier-designed MACIF Santé Prévoyance in place of Vendée Globe winner Charlie Dalin who is taking a break from competition because of ill health. Goodchild, who finished ninth on debut in the Vendée Globe, says this is a great race with which to start the new season.
“It’s one of the most exciting racecourses we have,” he told the Class this week. “The North Sea may be a bit too high up on the obstacles scale, but if you prepare the nav well and you’re careful, you can do OK.
“The whole course is a challenge,” he added, “there’s always something happening, whether it’s the tides, the wind or the fact that we are going over 60 degrees North. It’s a racecourse on which we are not going to get bored – it’s got the potential to be a very exciting race.”
His compatriot, Sam Davies, will lead a team on Initiatives-Coeur that includes the up-and-coming French star Violette Dorange. Davies has raced on this track many times and holds the record for a female crew when she led Team SCA in 2014 as they got round in four days and 21 hours. Davies says the racetrack gets ever more tricky as more wind farms are built in the North Sea.
“It would be a great race to win and I think it’s going to be really hard to win,” she said. “Boatspeed is going to be the key. The latest generation boats and the boats that are more optimised for medium conditions will do well. Boatspeed is key because we are basically forced to travel straight lines between points to get round the course, so there are few options. I’m sure there will be a few snakes and ladders,” she added laughing, “but not as many as maybe in other races.”
Davies is delighted that the crew on Initiatives-Coeur for the race has been selected from in-house talent, and alongside Dorange will be boat captain Joseph Brault and shore team rigging specialist Vittoria Ripa Di Meana. This will be the first time in the history of the Initiatives-Coeur sailing project that the team will race fully crewed. “For us, it’s a great team building exercise and learning the boat and sailing ‘in-house’ and, given that we have had very little time to prepare, these are the people who know the boat best,” summarised Davies.
For Elodie Bonafous, the Course des Caps is the start of her IMOCA career as she plots a course to the 2028 Vendée Globe on board Associations Petits Princes - Queguiner. Horizon 29, the red, white and black sistership of MACIF Santé Prévoyance.
After some intense pre-season training, Bonafous, 29, says “we are ready to go racing now.” This will be a new course for her, the first time she has raced on an IMOCA and the first time leading a crew in the Class. “I think one of the key goals now is to really nail the crew dynamics because sailing around Britain and Ireland will be intense, both in terms of pace and the different segments of the course,” she said.
“I expect the weather to be highly unpredictable and there are lots of rocks, tricky sections and restricted zones. So we’re working on building a solid workflow where everyone is responsible for their own area – navigating, watches, decision-making – so we can be as efficient and responsive as possible once we’re racing.”
Bonafous is looking forward to a completely different sailing experience to her normal diet of training on the Bay of Biscay. “It’s a route I don’t know at all, places I’ve never explored, so that alone makes it interesting,” she explained. “It’s a real learning experience. When you always sail in the same places – around Brittany, the Channel, the Bay – you get familiar with the patterns, the local weather systems, the landmarks. But this race will require a lot of preparation and research. It opens up new experiences, so that’s great.”
Goodchild is an uncompromising solo sailor and he is looking forward to being able to work his boat harder with a full crew, and getting the best out of everyone on board as he circumnavigates his homeland. “For sure, it’s going to be an exciting race because we are fully crewed on an IMOCA which means we can push the boats hard like we saw in the last Ocean Race. On top of that comes the challenge of making the four or five people on board work efficiently together on a boat which is not necessarily designed for that but on a racecourse that requires that level of activity. So it will be trying to find that balance but also learning how different people do things too,” he said.
The Course des Caps marks not just the beginning of the 2025 season, but the beginning of the 2025 IMOCA Globe Series Championship which also includes the fully-crewed Rolex Fastnet Race in July, the fully-crewed Ocean Race Europe in August, the Défi Azimut-Lorient Agglomération in September and the two-handed Transat Café L’Or at the end of October.
For Davies the round Britain race is the beginning of her build-up to her last race as skipper of the Initiatives-Coeur project, a position she has held for eight years. “Personally, for me, every race is important in a different way,” said the veteran of four Vendée Globe campaigns. “But I think the Transat Café L’Or is the one I really want to do well in this year because it’s the last race I am going to do as skipper of Initiatives-Coeur,” she said.
Course des Caps - Boulogne sur Mer - Banque Populaire du Nord - 2025
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