“I am not looking for first place, which has a significant ecological cost.” Romain Pilliard is a French skipper, taking part this year, for the second time, in the Route du Rhum. This solo sailing race takes place every four years. The participants leave Saint-Malo, this Sunday, November 6, to reach Guadeloupe. But Romain Pilliard is leaving with a special boat. “It is the former trimaran of Ellen MacArthur, the famous English sailor, who won the round the world record in 2005. And this boat has unfortunately been abandoned for a few years and we have decided to give it a second life.”, he explains.
The sailboat, named Use It Again, is completely ecological. “I have three means of producing green electricity, which are the solar panels, the wind turbine and the hydrogenerator. The solar panels, which are behind me, I have three on each side, on each edge, they are reconditioned. Then, at the back of the boat, there is the wind turbine, also reconditioned. And then finally, at the stern, under the rudder, there is a propeller at the end, and this propeller will produce electricity for me. When it all works, well it’s absolutely brilliant, I’m oversupplied”, details the skipper.
The navigator’s objective is not to win the competition. “When you want the fastest boat, the most recent too, it goes with the latest technologies… We draw on resources, we are consumers of these resources. With my twenty-year-old boat, I reuse sails, etc., so I can’t necessarily aim for the same performance. But we’re going to demonstrate that it’s possible to sail on an old boat alongside bigger ones, like those behind me, and more efficient.”