(Weymouth, England)- Brian Thompson, a J/24 sailor from England,
has been setting sailing records for a long time. Recently, he set a
sailing world record as crew on the 130 foot French trimaran BANQUE
POPULAIRE of under 45 days. Just this past week, Brian sailed the MOD
70 one-design trimaran class in a record for under 100 foot sailing
craft across the North Atlantic, going from New York to a mark gate off
Land's End, near Plymouth, England (about 2,900nm) in under 5 days!
Then, proceeded to take a right turn, literally, to head south to Brest
and still beat the record in 5 days 6 hours!! Brian Thompson on his
fastest Transatlantic yet- "It was a very nice finish, everyone is very
happy. This is my best ever-Atlantic crossing, just over 5 days from NY
to Brest. I was probably waiting for five months of my life on
PlayStation hoping for good weather and we never really got it,
certainly not this good. The weather was almost ideal, we did not take
the rhumb line past Newfoundland but went further south from the first
day and then it was pretty much a straight course from there. We sailed a
few more miles but we were always going fast, pretty much 25 knots or
more the whole time.
I
think I have done about 30 Trans-Atlantics and I think this is up there
with winning the Quebec St. Malo on Sergio Tacchini and the other one
was winning the OSTAR in 1992 on my own, my first Transat. This was a
great race. if it hadn't been the for the foil breaking up, I am sure we
would have been pretty close to the other boats.I think we really did learn a lot. It was much harder to sail without the foil. Very easy to overpower the boat and nosedive, and so we were fine tuning that. If you had too much power the leeward hull would bury and you would stop dead. We were doing a lot of nose dives. It was a really good exercise.
The crew were awesome. Mohsin is more experienced and did quite a lot of driving and ran the pit (halyards) and was a real stalwart, and Fahad we knew was a really strong trimmer, but he turned out to be a really good helmsman. He could go very very fast, now over the next few months - he has really got the knack for it - and that adds to his skills, how to trim the boat, how to balance the boat, working out where the limits are, all things which take experience, he has the good the helming ability he has just not got the miles yet because he only started sailing three years ago and he really has come on incredibly." For more MOD 70 sailing information
