Charles Caudrelier, winner of the last Route du Rhum, abandons the journey with a damaged foil

It had not yet struck five in the morning on Tuesday, the rising sun was still far away. Before the 39th hour, barely having covered a thousand nautical miles, the port foil (left side) of the Gitana 18 cracked. Charles Caudrelier's trimaran was then sailing under full sail, fourth in the Ultim classification, at around 40 knots of speed, a tailwind of 20-25 knots, over a cold and very rough Atlantic, three meter waves, 400 miles north of the Azores. The conditions were ideal for the flight, but the ship could not take off.

In the middle of the night, Caudrelier left the cockpit, descended to the float, and inspected the foil. He immediately realized the severity of the damage: the layers of carbon fiber along the trailing edge of the foil shaft had detached, taking with them the hydraulic hoses connected to the foil. After carefully studying the situation with the ground team, and coming to the conclusion that it was impossible to repair it, the last winner, with the previous Gitana, the 17th, in 2022, of the most legendary of the solitary transatlantic races had no choice but to retire. He turned around and headed back towards Brittany, to the team's base in Lorient, about 1,500 miles away, where he plans to arrive this weekend.

The goal of breaking the crossing record of six days, 19 hours, 47 minutes and 27 seconds that he himself established four years ago remained in the water. He paid the price for the risk of setting sail on a revolutionary ship barely sailed before.

"What we can confirm at this time is that the damage was not due to a collision with an external object. These appendages are innovative, and the systems that accompany them are unprecedented in this type of offshore multihulls. Sometimes that is part of the innovation," Cyril Dardashti, general manager of the Five Arrows team (the five arrows of the Rothschild shield), said in a press release. "But now is not the time to give detailed explanations. Our main concern is first and foremost the safety of Charles and that of the boat. He had to work inside the float to isolate the hydraulic system of the damaged foil so that we could continue using the rest of the systems on board."

Sailing slowly, at no more than 10 knots, on the floats of its 20-ton boat, a 32-by-23-meter monster with 600 square meters of beautifully decorated sail created to fly, the Gitana 18 headed for port at noon on Tuesday. The end of the first adventure of an ambitious disruptive project that sought to take a gigantic step forward in technology and navigation. "But it is a long-term project. It is the second generation of flying boats. All systems change. It is an immense challenge. We aspire to be as close as possible to the perfect flight," Caudrelier warned before setting sail. "But the ship has only been sailing for eight months. Although we set out with the ambition of being the fastest, this is a journey that will serve above all to begin to understand the ship, to become familiar with its complex systems, and to tame them, to be able to get the maximum performance from it, which will arrive in two years at the earliest."

The foil, a thin, light carbon fiber leg, 10 meters long with Y-shaped feet five meters wide, retractable and spectacularly innovative in the case of the Gitana 18, lifts the boat above the water as the wings lift the plane in the air. It's not magic. It's a simple principle described by physicist Daniel Bernoulli in the 18th century, when scientific discoveries allowed humanity to begin to free itself from the weight of religious superstitions: pressure decreases in a moving fluid (such as air or water) when its speed increases. The design of the foot of a foil or the wing of an airplane makes water or air circulate faster through its upper part, with a curvature that narrows the passage. As the pressure at the bottom is higher, the boat or plane takes off and flies.

At the end of 2023, shipowner Ariane de Rothschild, guided by her desire to always be at the forefront, several steps ahead of everyone else, without fear of risk, decided that better than extending the life of the Gitana 17 by modernizing rigging and equipment would be to design and build a new boat from scratch. He commissioned the project to the most renowned architect, Guillaume Verdier, with the collaboration of the Gitana team's studies office, led by engineer Sébastien Sainson. “It is very rare that a group of architects have the opportunity to work on a project like this, which allows for the introduction of so many large-scale innovations,” said Verdier, who also designed the AC75 foil monohulls for several America's Cup challenges. “It is a unique opportunity.”

In the heads of the engineers, one phrase above all, a desideratum: there is a boat that must fly 100% of the time. “And that's how we worked,” recalls engineer Sainson. “We did everything possible to make it fly always, although that meant losing a little performance in very light winds, in conditions in which you cannot glide.” This happened on Sunday at 1:02 p.m., leaving Saint Malo via the English Channel to Cape Fréhel. And this is what happened on the high seas due to the damage that prevented it from being deployed. “We knew we wanted to do everything we could to make it fun,” adds Sainson. "And that's why everything, the structures, the shapes in general, are much flatter, the boat is much more aerodynamic; everything is really designed to make it fly."

In the Gitana team they remember that the objective of the boat was not only to win the Rum Route, because then they would have simply made a boat a little better than the Gitana 17, without risking anything. "But in the Rothschild family, in the history of the team, we are more than anything to try, obviously, to win regattas, but also to break the codes and try to open a new era in winged sailboats. And so you can go a little further," explains Sainson. "The biggest challenge was to be ready in such a short time, that's why we incorporated all the innovations at the same time: mast, rudders, foils, daggerboard, beams, systems. We didn't say: 'Okay, first the foils and then the rudders.' "That's all right and one day it will work. I mean, maybe in five years all the boats will have double rudders or L-foils. It doesn't really matter, as long as you're still first all the time. Nowadays we learn a lot about how these foils work. And maybe next year we'll come out with a second version, and in two years we'll come out with a third version of the ailerons. "