Sailors face the sleeping challenge

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’"

Setting an alarm clock... or not!

The rhythm at sea is unique to each sailor! For rookie Benjamin Ferré, the subject of sleep had also been well thought out beforehand, with “a custom-made footstool with a very specific weight, which allowed me to sleep comfortably on my belly”. But the rhythm evolved along the way. “I was so dedicated to my boat during the race that it was often difficult to go to sleep. But as the race went on, I realized that when the wind is stable, you contribute more by resting”, explains the skipper of Monnoyeur - Duo for a Job, who finished 16th in this Vendée Globe. This observation has gradually enabled him to replace his fixed alarm clock with “AIS alarms and above all alarms to warn me of changes in wind strength or direction”. “In the Pacific, ahead of a front, I once slept for nine hours straight - it was crazy! I woke up in a panic, had to zoom out the tracker because I'd done over 200 miles, and realized that I'd been averaging over 19 knots the whole time.... I told myself I should have slept more!”

The body is an incredible machine anyway,” agrees Damien Seguin. Very quickly, you get so into the rhythm of your race that you always wake up a few seconds before your alarm, which is a very aggressive fireman's siren...”. “Sometimes it's just a change in his behavior, or an unusual mini noise that wakes you up when you thought you were in deep sleep,” adds Benjamin Ferré.

But what do you do when conditions are insane, or the intensity of the race is such that sleep seems impossible? “What you have to do is condition your brain to believe that you can turn off the lights,” explains Damien Seguin, who makes extensive use of mental imagery. “Since my Olympic years, I've always used the same image: that of one of my friends' gardens, in the mountains near Briançon. I see myself in this meadow, with the lake below, and it's become a signal for my brain. A process he also applies “when it's hard to wake up, I think of another image, which allows me to emerge even when it seems impossible”.

For his part, Benjamin Ferré applies “square breathing”, which consists of breathing in and out on four beats to relax. “I also listened to podcasts. I hope he won't be offended, but Fabrice Drouelle's voice in Affaires Sensibles, on France Inter, is effective. I also had a recording of a sophrologist, made especially for me. I listened to it a few times when things were really tough in the boat, when I was in pain and wondering how I was going to get through it. In fact, it's often anxiety that stops you falling asleep.”

“It was unbearable but I fell asleep”

Even if the Vendée Globe solo sailors are used to it, fatigue is still omnipresent. And while Benjamin Ferré didn't experience any “blackouts” or hallucinations, there were still “big moments of physical exhaustion”. “I was convinced I was with my co-skipper Pierre Leroy, and I'd ask him to do the manoeuvres, but he'd never do it, the big slacker! I remember waking up each time a little disappointed, “Oh no, it's true, I'm sailing solo”. His worst memory? In the trade winds on the way back up the South Atlantic, “those were the worst conditions since the start of the race, it was impossible to sleep until you were exhausted. I was hypervigilant, and I remember falling asleep right on the carbon, with the boat pounding. It was unbearable, and I finally fell asleep."

For Damien Seguin, the final days of the race were the most exhausting. Without radar, VHF or AIS in the busy Bay of Biscay and Atlantic coast, he had to stay alert for over 48 hours to avoid taking any risks. "I've never done this before in the Vendée Globe,” he says, ”and I'm always amazed to see how adrenalin helps us push our limits. You always tell yourself that after more than 80 days on the water, you won't be able to push yourself any further, but in fact, as long as you're clear-headed, your brain is able to inflict so many things on your body.”

The difficult return ashore

But how does one recover from such physical and mental conditioning? Hardly, according to our solo sailors! “The first nights ashore were weird. I was waking up all the time, curled up like a worm, with spasms all over my body”, says Benjamin Ferré, who had "never experienced anything like that before - it usually comes back much quicker". After this initial phase, the skipper of Monnoyeur - Duo for a Job experienced nights that were “short but super good, I was still doped up on adrenaline and I had the impression of recovering quickly, until I really settled down and then the worst of it really hit, I was hyper-tired, I was having big leaden nights and naps.” A month after his arrival, the sailor admits to feeling “still enormously tired, not the kind of fatigue that makes you yawn, but really a chronic inner exhaustion”.

For Damien Seguin, the arrival of this second Vendée Globe is no easier despite his experience - on the contrary. “I seemed to sleep well at first, then I started having restless nights, with spasms and jerky breathing, which has never happened to me before,” explains the sailor, who sees this as "perhaps the consequences of his physical injuries". The skipper of Groupe Apicil suffered serious damage in the Indian Ocean, and was thrown violently around his boat. “I've since learned that I've fractured my cervical vertebra and torn a posterior cruciate ligament, so that can't be helping,” admits the sailor, who "especially feels sorry for [his] partner for having to put up with it'" On this World Sleep Day, the Vendée Globe team sends its sweetest thoughts to the forty sailors, but above all to those who share their lives, and their insomnia...