Thomas Coville’s Christmas dinner must have tasted good

On Christmas Day there was a remarkable event, hardly reported in the UK. The Frenchman Thomas Coville completed a single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation of Planet Earth in his 105ft trimaran Sodebo Ultim. He had sailed 28,400 miles in 49 days, an average speed of 24 knots (28 mph – fast waterskiing).

That world-record speed is truly amazing for a sailing boat. It confirms boats with three hulls as the vessel of choice for high-speed blue-water sailing – after a terrible history of breaking up mid-Atlantic – and trimarans are less likely to turn over than catamarans (with two hulls). Moreover, Coville’s time was only 4 days longer than the record set by a 14-man (mostly French) trimaran. Just reflect on that for a minute: Coville had to sleep, cook, navigate, live with his vessel crashing along relentlessly at speeds unknown to sailing boats until recently.

Of course, many things have changed since Francis Chichester caught this country’s imagination by his 226-day circumnavigation in 1967 (with one stop in Sydney) in Gypsy Moth IV. I happened to meet Chichester as he and my father were pilots together flying DH60 gypsy, tiger and hornet moths – after which Chichester’s boats were named. Chichester had a major task navigating his way round the world with a sextant, in which he excelled, and his map company still exists. Coville relied heavily on electronics, GPS and a shore-based support team and probably did not have a single chart.

But if you are zooming round the world in 45 days, you don’t need the quantities of food and water which Chichester had to carry. His 53ft single-hulled yacht was stacked full of tins, such that there was only really room for one person anyway and all that weight would have slowed him down.

It was Robin Knox-Johnston who completed the first non-stop circumnavigation in 313 days in 1969: but since then the field has been dominated by the French setting record after record – with a 3-year break in 2005 when the splendid Ellen MacArthur seized the record with 71 days, the only woman to have done so.

Coville used the latest breakthrough in sailboat technology – hydrofoils, as in the America’s Cup (due to be raced again this year). Those AC72 yachts can sail over twice as fast as the wind and have reached an astonishing 44 knots (50 mph). After he crossed the line at Ushant, Coville was reportedly too exhausted to go ashore so his support crew went aboard Sodebo Ultim. Christmas dinner with champagne must have tasted good.