If the subject is most often taboo in offshore racing, several sailors have expressed their concern to Libération des shocks avec des cetaceans.
No such collision has yet been recorded this year in the Vendée Globe. However, the subject gets people talking. What to do to avoid collisions between boats participating in the round-the-world race and cetaceans. Before his departure for the Vendée Globe, skipper Fabrice Amedeo denounced the silence on collisions with whales, often killed by boats.
« An OFNI, an unidentified floating object, is often a whale and we don't dare say that we hit whales or that we kill whales because when you hit a whale, you generally kill it,” he was moved a few days before setting off on his third Vendée Globe, adding : “Because if forty boats sailing the Vendée Globe are not capable of going around the world once every four years without hitting one, two or three whales, what about the world trade fleet, with every day, thousands of boats which are all over the surface of the globe?. I think we need to change our posture, break with this omerta and say that on the contrary we are whistleblowers.”
“We cannot continue to kill marine mammals”
The former journalist reiterated his emotion to Liberation. “In two thirds of cases, accidents with OFNIs are impacts with cetaceans,” he said, adding : “we cannot continue to kill marine mammals and whale sharks while modestly mentioning clashes with OFNIs”.
Fabrice Amedeo was not the only sailor to step up to the plate. “It’s very traumatic, it does a lot of harm to the animal, said Roland Jourdain, who himself collided with a cetacean in the Vendée Globe in 2009. I openly said that I felt bad for the animal because I came to play on its living space. » And the Breton added:
“Nowadays, it’s more complicated for a boat that has sponsors to take on a large cetacean. This can have more consequences in terms of good or bad image for the team. »
The Vendée Globe is well aware of the problem and has set up exclusion zones in order to avoid bad encounters as much as possible. “ We are starting to know the migratory routes of cetaceans in particular, so it is good that the race excludes certain areas, such as in the Azores, to avoid collisions between cetaceans and boats. underlined Hugues de Kerdrell, the founder of the NGO Over the Swell which aims to better understand and protect the whale shark.
