At sea (AFP)

Impressive leader of the Vendée Globe for three weeks, Charlie Dalin came to a halt on Monday with serious damage, which he repaired at the cost of countless efforts.

The sailor told AFP on Wednesday how he was "touched", seeing himself abandoned before leaving, "exhausted" but "re-motivated".

Dark circles under his eyes, Charlie Dalin nibbles a little something to eat.

Installed in his cockpit almost completely closed, the marked face, he smiles and delivers the account of these very long last hours of an extreme race which he describes as "generator of quite exceptional emotions".

"Emotions, of course there are, there are many. With fatigue, we inevitably have emotions on the skin, more than usual. Yet I am someone fairly stable in my mind, even I have some slack, it's not always easy to manage all these emotions ", underlines the 36-year-old sailor who is now 3rd at 145 miles from the new leader, Yannick Bestaven in the score noon this Wednesday.

"It is true that this race is a generator of quite exceptional emotions. Being at sea for so long and for a long time and so far from everything, the mind is put to the test", recalls the skipper of Apivia.

even if he loses a little sense of time, Charlie Dalin went through a difficult test on Monday: his latest generation flying boat suffered significant damage to one of the two foils (lateral appendage which allows flying) .

- "It was finished" -

"I realized that I had a hold, that is to say a room in which my port foil passes, which had left. Suddenly my foil was no longer maintained, it was moving dangerously in its well and the well was under water pressure, that made water inlets in the boat. With speed, the well filled with water and the water ended up entering the boat.

"It wasn't great and I was obviously very touched, marked when I realized this problem. The first thing I said to myself was that the Vendée Globe was over for me. That's it. it was over, I was going to go to Australia, it's the end of the race, I really didn't see how to fix this problem, "he recalls.

"The team got together and found a solution and suddenly it was a long, long day of work. I worked almost from sunrise to sunset, here the days are long in this moment it is soon the austral summer. I re-made this hold with pieces of carbon that I had on board the boat ".

"I made a huge number of round trips, between the boat, the cockpit and the outside of the boat, I had to hang myself from a halyard to be able to access the external exit point of the foil to be able to position this wedge ".

- "Negative spiral" -

"I could see the hours ticking, the sun was starting to go down, I thought to myself that I absolutely had to manage to secure the room before it got dark. It was only an hour before the sun disappeared behind. the horizon that I managed to install the room and secure it, and I was able to resume my journey to the southeast. "

The trained naval architect then went to sleep.

"I was really exhausted, at the end of my strength after so much effort to repair the boat."

And then, the sailor set off again in the race while keeping a close eye on the reconstructed part.

His work seems to be rewarded, the repair is holding up.

"Today I still have to recover from all my efforts, but things are getting better, I feel re-motivated, I am happy to be racing again, certainly with a foil that I can no longer use, but (... ) with a seaworthy vessel ".

"I hope this is the end of the downward spiral I was in, between the storm, the light winds, the pursuers coming back behind me. I hope the last worry of the series is over," said he with a smile.

Charlie Dalin is now in the Howling Fifties, he has found the wind and is about to enter the Pacific Ocean off Tasmania.

"A few more hours of navigation to enter the Pacific and finish with the Indian Ocean which was so difficult," he promises.

© 2020 AFP