Graphic: Out on their own - the route to success

Every hour that passes allows Francis Joyon to bite farther into the solo round-the-world record set by Ellen MacArthur. In his giant red trimaran, IDEC II, with ever-present petrels and the occasional albatross following in his wake, Joyon has been eating up oceans like they were morsels and yesterday morning he set the latest of his string of records by crossing the Indian Ocean in 9 days, 12 hours and 3 minutes. That was a massive 3 days, 6 hours and 54 minutes faster than the record set by MacArthur. He was just 59 minutes off the record for a crewed vessel crossing the Indian Ocean, set by Orange II in 2005.

Joyon, a 51-year-old father of two from Trinité-sur-Mer, is heading south of New Zealand more than seven days earlier than MacArthur, 31, got there in 2004. Ever modest, Joyon said simply: “I’m just doing my job as a sailor, you know.” He has not seen a soul since leaving the coast of Brazil to head into the Southern Ocean, but is already more than halfway around the world after just 26 days at sea.

Joyon is reinventing the art of the possible for solo sailing, as he did in 2004 when he smashed the solo record by 20 days and took the small matter of 53 days off the solo circumnavigation record by a trimaran, completing 27,150 miles in 72 days, 22 hours and 54 minutes. A year later, MacArthur, in her 75ft B&Q, took 30 hours off that mark.

From the moment Joyon had a boat built 22ft (about 6.7 metres) longer, which is a generation on from B&Q, MacArthur has expected her most cherished record to fall. The camaraderie between them means that she is full of admiration for the Frenchman.

“I’ve spoken to him a couple of times since he’s been out there and it has been really interesting.” MacArthur said. “If he doesn’t break the boat he will break the record.”

MacArthur has already had a significant design difference confirmed from those conversations, which will be crucial should she go for the record again. She is acting as a spokeswoman for the Barcelona World Race and is taking a break from racing until next year. “If he wasn’t going that fast on average when the weather was good, which it has been, then something would be seriously wrong,” MacArthur said. “He’s got a boat which is bigger and his mast in relation to his boat isn’t as big, which means he can sail the boat under full sail more than B&Q. My mast ratio meant I had to put a reef in sooner because I was on the edge sooner. I had a reef in for most of the Southern Ocean.”

In 2004, Joyon, on a shoestring budget, bought from IDEC, a small French construction firm, Sport-Elec, the 90ft trimaran that had been built in the late 1980s and trashed on multiple record attempts. He reconditioned the boat and used some of the old sails. Unlike MacArthur, he could not afford a shore team or weather router, so made all the decisions himself. This time he has a weather router on shore in Jean-Yves Bernot, but IDEC II is as simple and light as they come. He does not even have a heater in the cabin. “He’s got no big communications kit and no fuel. He’s running everything off solar panels and wind, which is fantastic,” MacArthur said. “He has an Iridium phone and switches on the computer every now and then, so he’s sailing in a very different way.”

Of course, the weather could turn against him. “I was five days ahead at Cape Horn and then lost the lot in the South Atlantic,” MacArthur said. As he passes south of New Zealand today, the high-pressure system to the north is forecast to spread south and steal his wind. If he dives farther south, he risks heading into iceberg waters.

A fascinating element to his attempt is that Thomas Coville, another Frenchman who was supposed to leave from Brest with Joyon, set sail on his own solo record bid on Monday. His 105ft Sodeb’O was designed by Nigel Irens and Benoit Cabaret, the same team that designed MacArthur’s B&Q. After just 23 hours in the North Atlantic, he was already six hours ahead of MacArthur’s record pace.