Sustainable Sailing Comes to Newport
Newport-based 11th Hour Racing has partnered with IMOCA to enhance environmental sustainability and diversity in the sport, including new technology that can prevent collisions with marine mammals.
One of several IMOCA boats docked at Safe Harbor Newport Shipyard last week that demonstrates the new hazard button technology. (Photos by Lauren Clem)
Picture this — you’re the skipper of a sailing vessel, speeding across the Atlantic toward New York Harbor. Behind you, a dozen or so boats follow the same route, all competing for a coveted first-place finish. Suddenly, a dark shape looms in the water up ahead, and you alter course to avoid it. Passing by, you witness the majestic shape of a North Atlantic right whale. With fewer than 400 of this endangered mammal left in the world, vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglements pose a real threat to its continued existence.
Collision averted, you run to your navigation display and quickly log the animal’s location, marking it as a hazard for other skippers to avoid. Now, the race’s other competitors will be on the lookout for the animal, and the endangered whale can continue peacefully on its way.
Thanks to new technology and a recommitment by sailing organizations to environmental sustainability, this scenario is now reality for dozens of boats around the world. IMOCA — the sailing class that governs standards for such events as the Ocean Race and the New York Vendée — debuted the technology on its boats last year and expects most IMOCA boats to be equipped with hazard buttons by November 2024. It’s one of several steps the class has taken in recent years to reduce its environmental impact.
Earlier this month, 11th Hour Racing — a Newport-based organization that has long advocated environmental sustainability in sailing — offered a boost to these initiatives when it announced its sponsorship of IMOCA. The partnership will further the two organizations’ efforts to enhance sustainability and improve gender diversity in the sport.
“Our collaboration with IMOCA reflects our dedication to sustainable innovation and furthers 11th Hour Racing’s objective of setting new standards for inclusivity and equity in sailing,” says Jeremy Pochman, CEO of 11th Hour Racing. “This partnership raises the bar for standards within sailing and reinforces our shared mission towards a more equitable and sustainable future, both on and off the water.”
Those initiatives were on display last week in Newport, where several IMOCA boats were docked in between races at Safe Harbor Newport Shipyard. Marie Launay, a communications manager for IMOCA, offered a tour of a boat sponsored by L’Occitane en Provence newly arrived from the Transat CIC solo ocean race. Clarisse Crémer, who holds the record for a solo circumnavigation by a woman in this type of vessel, sailed the boat from France and will depart again this week on the New York Vendée. The boat’s cramped hull serves as the living quarters for sailors who can spend more than a week on the water during transatlantic races, and well over a hundred days during circumnavigation races like the Ocean Race.
“Comfort is the last thing they think about building this boat,” Launay says.
Comfort may not be high on the priority list, but, thanks to new rules adopted by IMOCA over the past several years, environmental sustainability is. According to Imogen Dinham-Price, sustainability manager for IMOCA, those rules take several forms. The “Green Sail” rule — defined as a sail crafted to reduce emissions to 30 percent per kilogram compared with standard sails — requires every IMOCA boat to have at least one Green Sail onboard. In addition, a new regulation requires boats built between 2025 and 2028 to reduce carbon emissions during the building process by 15 percent, or approximately 60 metric tons of CO2. One of the ways this can be accomplished is by using alternate building materials such as flax instead of the traditional carbon fiber, she says.
Another focus, accomplished through the hazard button technology, is to reduce the potential negative impacts of sailing on marine mammals. In addition to alerting other skippers of marine mammals on the course in real time, the technology will be used to establish exclusion zones — areas boats are not allowed to sail during a race — in the future, Dinham-Price adds.
“We understand that our playground is, of course, the ocean,” she says.
The partnership is a good fit for 11th Hour Racing, which was founded in 2010 to focus on fostering environmental responsibility in sailing. Since then, the mission has expanded with the introduction of the 11th Hour Racing Team in 2019 to inspire positive change for the ocean among sports fans and coastal communities through competitive racing. Last year, the team became the first United States-based team to win the Ocean Race in its fifty-year history, featuring a stop in Newport that helped raise awareness of environmental concerns related to the ocean.
11th Hour Racing and IMOCA are also partnering on diversity initiatives, which include IMOCA’s support of the Magenta Project to develop and promote women in sailing. Dinham-Price says the initiatives will help increase accessibility in sailing, where women skippers are regularly outnumbered despite being able to sail in the same races and crews as men.
“It’s one of the only sports in the world where women and men compete on the same playing field,” she says.
The hazard button technology allows skippers to mark the location of marine mammals in real time using their navigation systems.
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