Sailors in the Vendée Globe faced multiple challenges including icebergs.
An iceberg greeted Eric Bellion on the first day of 2025. This was not good news; he was not on a cruise ship bringing tourists to the Antarctic — but alone in the Southern Ocean — on Stand As One, a high-performance 60-foot sailboat weighing only around 8 tons, racing home to France via Cape Horn.
The Vendée Globe is a round-the-world, solo, non-stop, without-assistance race that’s been held every four years or so since 1989. Ice is a real threat for any boat that heads into the Southern Ocean, but before Bellion it had not been seen on the race course since Samantha Davies encountered it in 2008.
This is largely because the Vendée Globe team and CLS (Collecte Localisation Satellites), a French organization that tracks ice with satellites and a digital oceanographic model, establish an Antarctic Exclusion Zone designed to keep boats north of the region of icebergs. In a round-the-world race, skippers want to sail as close to the Antarctic coast to reduce the distance sailed and the exclusion zone is drawn as far south as possible to still minimize the risk of collision with icebergs. Race instructions call for penalties for boats that stray into the zone and fail to correct their course.
OV: What was it like to see an iceberg in the middle of the ocean?
Eric Bellion: A 100-meter-long block that CLS had been monitoring had now drifted out of the exclusion zone west of Cape Horn. It was as big as a cargo ship. I called it a “little gift from the Pacific Ocean.”
Icebergs in the Southern Ocean are bits off the great ice sheets that extend into the ocean from Antarctica. Initially they’re picked up by the Antarctic Coastal Current and taken west, then north, where some of them join the Antarctic Circumpolar Current driven eastward by the relentless west wind. The northern border of the current, roughly corresponding to the delineation between the Pacific and Southern oceans in Bellion’s neighborhood, is around 55° S latitude.
When ice is sighted by CLS, the race team can alter the exclusion zone but not if the lead boat would benefit from changes to the theoretical minimal length of the course and disfavor anyone still coming up. In this case, the leaders were already heading north up the South Atlantic and CLS could only monitor the ice, spotted at around 54 degrees, and give out constant warnings and updates of its position to Bellion and two other racers who saw the iceberg on the same day.
OV: When did you pick up ice on Tut Gut’s radar:
Oliver Heel: It was at sunset on January 8. It was quite a cool experience. Not many people experience sailing past an iceberg in the Southern Ocean.
Close Encounters
Ice is never a welcome sight for sailors. Racers, of course, want to use the circumpolar current and the westerly winds to drive their boats toward Cape Horn, setting up for inevitable encounters. And, all round-the-world sailing races have ice exclusion zones.
For the highly competitive development class boats that race the Vendée Globe, it’s a particular problem. With composite (carbon) hulls, IMOCA 60s are an open design class managed by the International Monohull Open Class Association. All IMOCA 60s must measure between 59 and 60 feet long with a maximum draught of 15 feet. Sailors and designers are free to innovate within the limits, but IMOCA design rules are intended to control costs, ensure safety, and create some degree of sporting equity for older designs of the yachts. The Ocean Race also sails around the world on IMOCAs but the boats are fully crewed, not single-handed.
Bellion says of his close encounter, “I remind you that my hull is 3.6 mm (.14 inch) thick, I can’t afford to hit that. Icebergs are beautiful with expedition boats equipped with steel hulls but not with our carbon racing boats.”
Further behind on New Year’s Day, Conrad Colman on Amlin saw an iceberg as the sun was starting to set after the race committee contacted him about “targets” he might want to avoid, telling him, “Here are their positions, good luck. Try to avoid them.”
In a video posted to the race website the same day, Colman said it was unclear how many bergs there were, which way they were moving, and whether any were false positives. The berg he did encounter was two miles away, close enough to see spray from waves breaking onto its flanks. The ice showed up on his radar screen, but he worried about growlers and bergy bits that often run in front of the big one and are difficult to spot. “If you hit anything out here, it’s game over.”
When he checked his radar again, the ice was gone from the screen. As the video ends, he said, “Now I’m going to sheet on and get the hell out of here.”
OV: How close did you come to ice?
Sébastien Marsset: I was sailing Foussier and was warned by the race committee of a possible iceberg whose calculated drift placed it to the north of my position. My radar alarm went off and I had an echo four miles ahead. I stuck my head out, and straight away I saw the iceberg. There it was, all hands on deck, because I was at 17 knots under small gennaker.
Not Built for Contact
Marsset’s boat was tearing along in the Southern Ocean at 17 knots at the time because Foussier is a foiler; a boat, like the present America’s Cup racers, that has appendages that act as hydrofoils and lift the hull off the water surface in the way that air flowing over an airplane wing lifts the plane or how a sail sends a boat forward.
The America’s Cup AC75s have vee-shaped hulls with no keel and are so radically designed as to lose the sense of being a boat. It’s hard to tell which tack they’re on because the sails are always sheeted in tight, and they can sail up to three times faster than the wind. They’re designed to sail windward/leeward courses around marks and have been known to make 40 knots upwind in around 17 knots of wind. American Magic once recorded going 53.31 knots.
By contrast, the IMOCA 60 foilers are designed for deep-ocean sailing and must be able to maintain high speeds and perform well in the differing wind and sea conditions and points of sail encountered in a round-the-world race, especially off the wind. Their hulls are essentially monohull sleds, they have long canting keels with bulbs, two rudders and two foils that can be extended or retracted into the hull. The latest IMOCAs weigh just between 17,637 and 19,842 lbs. (My fiberglass Peterson 44 weighed about 30,000 lbs. and cruised at 6 to 7 knots.)
Similar to early carbon-fiber boat construction being rethought after the disastrous Fastnet Race in which many failed, early IMOCA 60 overdesigning was reined in. Considering the low rate of failure in the Vendée Globe, the class seems to have reached an acceptable compromise between reliability and performance. Certain components like the mast and keel canting system are “one design.” The C-shaped foils add to stability as well as speed, keeping the boat’s motion more regular as the hull lifts out of the water and offering righting moment and acting as a kind of daggerboard. In 2023 Malizia-Seaexplorer, sailed by Boris Herrmann, set a record for the class, covering 641.13 miles in 24 hours on the transatlantic leg of The Ocean Race for an average speed of 26.71 knots.
In a peculiar synchronicity of circumstances, Marsset and Bellion, along with Guirec Soudée on Freelance.com, encountered their ice alarmingly near Point Nemo, an imaginary spot determined by mathematical calculation to be the furthest point from any land and named after the submarine captain from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Danger Zone
During a previous ocean voyage in a steel boat, Soudée hit ice going 4 to 5 knots; he was not eager to do so with his carbon boat. Any object in the water can be worrisome for the 60s, as Sébastien Simon found out on a different section of the course when an OANI, abbreviation of a French term for “unidentified object or animal,” broke his starboard foil. At Point Nemo such a collision could be disastrous. At 48°52S 123°23W its closest neighbors, near Pitcairn, Easter Island, and Antarctica, are 1451 nm away. None of these is inhabited. The area is outside the shipping lanes, no helicopters fly that distance and a rescue boat would take 15 days to arrive. The closest habitation is often the international space station, and a sailor in distress would most likely be rescued by a fellow racer.
Point Nemo is a dumping ground for global space programs since the 1970s. When the international space station is retired, NASA plans to program its descent to join the almost 300 craft already on the ocean’s floor.
Because of its remoteness, the sea at Point Nemo is relatively lifeless, lacking nutrients supplied by land. It’s also pretty much guaranteed to see very little human traffic, making a plunge less dangerous. The lifeless sea is supposed to mean that the space debris (after using up its fuel) won’t pollute, but experts debate this.
Ironically, the Vendée Globe is heir to The Sunday Times of London’s Golden Globe Race, the first non-stop single-handed round-the-world sailboat race. Of nine boats that set out in 1968, the single boat to cross the finish line after 313 days did so in a highly traditional hull. When the race concept was revived 20 years later under the name Vendée Globe by yachtsman Philippe Jeantot, it attracted visionaries in design and became known as the Everest of the seas; of 200 contenders to take the start previously, only 114 ever managed to cross the finish line.
Charlie Dalin on Macif Santé Prévoyance won the 2024-25 edition of the Vendée Globe, completing his circumnavigation in less than 65 days — 9 days and 8 hours off the previous record — over a course of 27,668 nautical miles. He did it at an average speed of 17.8 knots.
Bellion abandoned his race in the South Atlantic when his J2 forestay attachment broke, one of 6 out of 40 original starters to retire early. Despite losing his foil (only to find the break a clean one and not dangerous to his hull), Sébastien Simon went on to place third, which is quite an accomplishment considering the loss could potentially cost him 30% of his speed on the port tack. He crossed the finish line less than three days after Dalin and seven days ahead of the next racer. ν