FULL CIRCLE SAILING
Kevin Escoffier was skippering the PRB, a 60-foot monohull sailboat in twenty-five knot winds and five-meter waves when the catastrophe occurred. The forty-year-old sailor from Saint Malo, France was racing in the 2020 Vendee Globe, an around the world, solo, nonstop, non-assisted race—a competition for only the bravest and most experienced mariners.
It only took four seconds between the time the sailboat nosedived into the wave and the hull folded in half. The bow bent upwards 90° and the stern sank below the surface of the raging sea. Escoffier had just enough time to send a MAYDAY text message before an oncoming wave fried his electronics. He grabbed his survival suit, but could not reach his emergency bag, already three meters underwater.
Escoffier was swept away when he triggered his automatically-inflating life raft. Sharp carbon fibers from his shattered hull threatened to lacerate his inflatable vessel.
Race officials immediately notified his nearest competitor, Jean Le Cam, a sixty-one-year-old sailor aboard Yes We Cam. The veteran mariner from Brittany, racing in his fifth Vendee Globe, was given the coordinates of Escoffier’s last reported position, 840 nautical miles southwest of Cape Town.
Two hours later, with the guidance help from an emergency beacon on the life raft, Le Cam spotted Escoffier and yelled to him, “I’ll be back.” But maneuvering a 60-foot sailboat in growing darkness and angry seas was not easy. Le Cam needed to use his engine. Due to race restrictions, use of an engine is only allowed for emergency situations. He had to break a seal on the engine, but then had trouble starting it. By the time he got back to the vicinity of Escoffier’s last position, the adrift sailor was nowhere in sight.
One can only imagine how Le Cam felt. He tacked back and forth five different times trying to find his fellow racer without any luck. Three other competitors, Borris Herman (Seaexplorer-Yacht Club de Manaco), Yannicx Bestaven (Maitre CoQ IV), and Sebastien Simon (ARKEA PAPREC) were called in to help. They set up a triangular search grid and methodically looked for the lost skipper.
At first, Le Cam thought it would be best to wait until daylight and calmer seas before he searched further, but then he thought that in the dark he might have a better chance of seeing the emergency light on top of the raft. Based on Escoffier’s last known location and predicted drift patterns, Le Cam continued searching through the night. Moving slowly through confused seas, at times he was pushed backwards.
Early in the evening the next day, eleven hours after the catastrophic destruction of PRB, Le Cam was on deck when he saw a light flickering off the waves. As he approached it, it grew brighter. Finally, he saw the raft. Escoffier heard the flapping of sails and poked his head out from under the canopy of his raft. According to Le Cam, Escoffier said, “Will you be back?” Not surprisingly, Le Cam replied, “No, we are going to do this now.”
After finding him again, Le Cam said, “You switch from despair to an unreal moment in an instant.”
Escoffier recalled that Le Cam was 100 to 200 meters away when they had this exchange. He remembered Le Cam saying, “I will come against you.” But his rescuer’s boat was moving “a bit too fast,” Escoffier said, “and it was five meters away, I don’t know exactly, where he threw me a line with the buoy at the end which I caught.”
Le Cam’s recollection was different. In the stress and excitement of the moment, perspectives differed. He recalled the raft being two meters, not five meters, off his stern when he threw Escoffier a line.
What is more certain is that Le Cam’s boat was moving faster than the floating raft when the line was passed. Soft Inflatable’s are not meant to be towed. They quickly buckle and roll. Escoffier recalled that with both pulling on the line, he was able to get close enough to the boat that he was able to jump into the ocean and catch a rudder bar on the back of Le Cam’s boat. Holding on for dear life, he wrenched himself aboard.
Escoffier said that Le Cam was “very happy” when he was safely on deck. He told Le Cam, “I’m sorry to disturb your race, Jean,”. He added, “We had a big hug.”
Le Cam knew better than anyone what it was like to be rescued by a fellow competitor. In 2009, during another Vendee Globe race, his IMOCA 60 sailboat capsized 200 miles west of Cape Horn. He huddled within his upturned hull for sixteen hours. He had no communication, and was close to dying from hypothermia, when he was rescued by a rival, Vincent Riou.
Riou’s boat was sponsored by PRB, Escoffier’s 2020 sponsor.
When Le Cam was interviewed by the New York Times and asked about his unique position of having been rescued and then being a rescuer, he said, “It’s part of the job of a sailor to go to the aid of another. He added, “Above and beyond—it’s human nature to go to the people in need and help them. It’s part of life, physically or psychologically, to help another human. I am just part of that.”