Among the many challenges facing skippers in the Vendée Globe, sleep management is one of the most crucial, as it is so decisive for safety and performance. Sleeping little but efficiently, remaining lucid without falling into extreme fatigue, knowing one's fatigue thresholds to better control them and avoid the danger zone, regulating a cycle completely disorganized by the intensity of the race... each sailor must find his or her own balance.
A mattress “a bit like a coffin”
Sleeping on a boat in continuous motion, and even more so on increasingly fast and noisy foilers, requires training, appropriate equipment and excellent self-knowledge. Damien Seguin (Groupe Apicil) put a lot of thought into all these aspects in the run-up to his second Vendée Globe, including “real reflection on how to sleep safely on board”.
He explains that he has been “lucky enough to have always slept very well at sea”, but has noticed the difference when switching to foiling boats. On a transatlantic race in 2023, he was in the bunks when the boat crashed, and he was ejected 2.5 m further into a bulkhead with a good scare. “For this Vendée Globe, it was imperative that I could fall asleep serenely and without the stress of finishing like that,” explains the disabled sailor, who therefore designed ”very precise specifications for my mattress, on which I worked with the French mattress brand André Renault.”
The shape is specifically adapted to the sailor's morphology, and shaped to hold him on his side. “A bit like a coffin,” admits Damien Seguin with a smile, who could also ‘strap himself in at chest level’. The mattress is also waterproof on the lower part, to enable him to keep boots and jackets rolled up over his ankles, but breathable on the upper part so he can “sleep easily even when it's hot”. The prototype is completed by a specific pillow to “hold the head, because when you're muscular atony, you can really hurt your neck when you're thrown”, with a “fleece cover that I could easily change for the smell”. A little extra home-made touch: “the edges of this pillow go up over the ears, to attenuate the noise, without cutting me off completely from this precious information on the boat's behavior”.
The result? ”I think I managed my sleep well during my race, and in any case I always had the confidence to be able to relax,” explains the sailor, who always sleeps in "40-minute slots maximum’"