11th Hour Racing en route to Narragansett Bay


Skipper Charlie Enright and his crew aboard 11th Hour Racing slice through the Atlantic Ocean onboard their IMOCA 60 foiling yacht en route to Newport from France. PHOTO BY AMORY ROSS

Skipper Charlie Enright and his crew aboard 11th Hour Racing slice through the Atlantic Ocean onboard their IMOCA 60 foiling yacht en route to Newport from France. PHOTO BY AMORY ROSS

The yacht scheduled to fly the American flag in the upcoming race around the world has departed from Europe on a course for Narragansett Bay.

Bristol native Charlie Enright is at the helm of 11th Hour Racing as it makes its transatlantic pass to Newport from Concarneau, France. The departure Saturday included three fresh faces to the crew: Englishman Simon Fisher, Aussie Kyle Langford and Bermuda’s Emily Nagel. The boat is expected to make landfall Wednesday at Fort Adams.

“We have pulled together a wealth of experience and talent for this transatlantic,” Enright said. “We are obviously itching to get miles and offshore training under our belts with the delays we’ve had this year. This is an experienced crew and a dynamic training group that brings together a broad range of skills.”

The trio came together in Brittany, France, with Enright, Amory Ross and Justin Shaffer to begin their two-year preparation plan for the next edition of The Ocean Race in 2022-23. That global circumnavigation, which will be the third consecutive edition for Enright, was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Veteran offshore racer Fisher, known within the sport as SiFi, was a Volvo Ocean Race trophy winner in 2014-15 as navigator of Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing and sailed alongside Enright and Mark Towill in the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race with Vestas 11th Hour Racing. Enright and Towill, a Hawaiian native, co-manage the 11th Hour Racing team. They were teammates and All- American sailors at Brown University.

Langford, from Australia, sailed every offshore leg with third-place finisher Team Brunel from the Netherlands in the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race. Prior to that, he was a member of Oracle Team USA in the 2017 America’s Cup after winning the 2013 America’s Cup with Oracle. In 2019, Langford captured the inaugural SailGP title with Australia SailGP Team as wing trimmer, and more recently has been on the podium at the International Moth World Championships.

Nagel is a trained naval architect who had her first taste of The Ocean Race in 2017- 18 as part of Team AkzoNobel. Hailing from Bermuda, Nagel has worked for America’s Cup teams and SailGP on the technical and design side and has also represented Great Britain at European and World Championship sailing events.

With oversight of special projects, Shaffer specifically focuses on technology, fiber optics and performance analysis for 11th Hour Racing, while Ross handles the role of onboard reporter as videographer and photographer, a key role during the nine months of The Ocean Race.

Langford, Ross and Enright were together for the team’s transatlantic sail from Brazil to France late last year. The addition of Fisher, Shaffer and Nagel creates a new mix of six sailors for this training in which the team will be put to the test a next-generation wing foil and other new systems from the boat’s recent refit.

“We have built a foil with the latest generation of technology,” said Towill, chief executive of the team. “The new T-foil design basically does two things: it creates lift and reduces leeway. During the transatlantic, we will be testing out the new rake system with different sail combinations.”

The current training boat is one of the first-generation IMOCA 60s to foil, which means its hull can lift out of the water at high speeds. The new foil has been designed and refined using computer simulation tools. The latest IMOCA rule provides for a “second degree of freedom,” allowing foils the ability to rake backwards and forwards several degrees.

The team worked closely with performance partner MerConcept and naval architect Guillaume Verdier to develop the foil design, and hopes to gain considerable insight in the next weeks of sailing. A second new foil will be installed later this fall.

“It’s very important to test these concepts in reality and validate the projected performance against actual data,” Towill said. “This learning process is very important in our efforts to have the most competitive platform for The Ocean Race in two years.”

Once the team arrives in Rhode Island, the sailors will base themselves out of Newport for a fall season of offshore training and sea trials.

“While the one-year postponement of the race has changed our timelines, planning and the location of our training base for the short term, we think having the next few months in Newport gives us a great jumping-off point to begin sailing and working together as a unit,” Enright said. “Our emphasis is on training safely and testing new systems with the goal of putting the best and fastest possible team at the starting line.”

The next edition of The Ocean Race, which will have two classes of boats, will start from Alicante, Spain, in October 2022 and finish in Genova, Italy, in the summer of 2023. The race was dubbed the Whitbread Round the World Race from 1973-98 and was remarketed as the Volvo Ocean Race from 2001-18. Along with the IMOCA 60, teams can elect to sail the Volvo 65 that produced close, compelling racing in the last two editions of the race.