MADRID, 4 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish sailor Alex Pella does not doubt that he would have “loved” to have been born in the 16th century like sailors like Juan Sebastián Elcano, “a great unknown” to whom he will pay tribute in 2025 with the attempt to achieve the world record of the round to the world towards the West within the ‘Desafío Victoria’ project that arose because he was running out of “new challenges.”
Pella, holder of the record for circumnavigating the world to the East, the Jules Verne Trophy, and winner of the Route du Rhum, among many other challenges, will face a non-stop route around the planet, against the prevailing wind and currents, emulating what Ferdinand Magellan did and completed Elcano 500 years ago, leaving from Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) and passing through Cape Horn, the Torres Strait, the Cape of Good Hope and the Azores, before returning to the town Cádiz.
“I would have loved (to have been born in the 15th century), of course I do, that feeling of going for the unknown seems incredible to me. Bridging the distances and differences, in my sporting challenges I always try to go, for many years now , for new things,” said Alex Pella in an interview with Europa Press.
The Catalan recognizes that in his house there has always been “the spirit of the sea.” “I am the second of four brothers and the four of us have made sailing boats and the sea our lives,” remarked the sailor who began to learn about “these great” oceanic adventures “in his adolescence and in the books at home that he These first great solo ocean races and these great challenges that in the end are planetary challenges count. “I loved understanding how these sailors embraced the environment with their boats and went for it,” he added.
For this reason, Pella still “loves doing these challenges and these regattas that go from one place to another and in which there is a story in between, whether it be a trade route or that event itself.” His experience supports him since he began, “successfully,” at the beginning of the 21st century, to do ocean sailing, with the Mini Transat being “the beginning of all this.”
“From then on I told myself that I had to continue growing and always do new things, that has been one of my secrets, to go for new things because the learning curve is very big. It’s all a bit of the restlessness of doing things.” challenges, when one ends, look for another, and in fact, this ‘Victory Challenge’ comes because I have reached a point where I have run out of new challenges and it also happened to me that when I went down the street people told me, what now? are you going to do?” he said.
But although he has “no obligation to do anything”, in 2019 he realized that the record of traveling around the world to the West “has no sporting value like the fast one”, to the East, a Jules Verne Trophy that already had done with a record in 2017 (40 days, 23 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds).
For this reason, I knew that something had to be done, with the added bonus of being able to do it “from home” and as a tribute to Juan Sebastián Elcano, after whom this trophy is named, and who “is a great unknown to both the Spanish and international public.” . “It is not known outside, it is known because of the Navy training ship, but not so much is known about that trip and, above all, the consequences that that trip had for the history of Humanity,” he admits.
THE DIFFICULTY OF PASSING THROUGH CAPE HORN
His estimate for this trip around the world is “100 days”, twenty less than the previous mark set by Jean Luc Van den Heede in 2004. “It is difficult because there are many unforeseen meteorological events, with the passages through South America, North from Australia and southern Africa, where there are certain uncertainties about how long it will take you to overcome them. 80 percent of this challenge is preparation and we can foresee that now, but then there are breakdowns due to impacts with floating objects or. animals, and that is very difficult to predict,” he warns.
And on this route is the always complicated passage through Cape Horn, “not only because of the legend but because that legend is true.” Pella details the difficulty of passing through the “small space” that is the Drake Strait, which “above it meets the presence of the Andes mountain range, which is a wall, so the wind bounces there and accelerates.” “. “The pass is very complicated even with a favorable wind, with a headwind you cannot pass,” he warns.
“You can only do this in the southern summer due to the ice coming back and even then you have to choose very well to do it against that window to be able to pass because if not, you don’t pass. This is one of the challenges or one of the motivations , and although it may seem strange, it is a new thing for me. Whenever I have done challenges, you always look at the best trajectories to try to go faster, but it is rare that the element stops you, but here you have to stop because if not we will break the ship. or they have to take us out. The beautiful thing here is that there is a moment when the natural element is facing it and it can stop you,” the Catalan noted.
For this challenge he has chosen a MaxiCat, former ‘Club Med’ and baptized ‘Victoria’, “a large oceanic multihull, with history and pedigree”, 33 meters long, 17 meters wide and 41 meters wide. “There aren’t that many of these boats. It has 25 years of history, which is super cool, we have recovered a boat that was abandoned for an approved round-the-world record,” she noted.
“It also has a peculiar story because a Qatari sheikh recovered it for fun and they loaded it with a lot of weight, luxury and comfort. Between the fact that they did not use it and the fact that it is not adapted to our challenge, we have spent almost eight months recovering it for this new record,” explained the Catalan.
“There is ONLY ONE PLANET”
Along with him, he will take three more sailors, the Frenchman Lalou Roucayrol and the Spanish Alejandro Cantero and Alberto Muñoz, with whom he will live a kind of maritime ‘Big Brother’, whose coexistence he will know how to lead “through experience.” “This time I have chosen a crew and I think I know how it has to work, I say I think because we will see it when I return,” he said with a smile. “The people who come for the challenge have to be enthusiastic, but quite calm, respectful and polite, with this mix we will all be able to understand each other with a common objective,” he confessed.
This ‘Victory Challenge’ has a total of “four milestones”, which will begin “in spring” for the record of the Tour of Menorca and “linked to the project of making the island self-sufficient” and is also “close to home and very well received there”, and then, “on July 15”, they will look for the record of the Vuelta a España between Bilbao and Barcelona, which makes them “very excited because it is a route that is not a very well-known one but with a beastly value and even level of navigation is super interesting,” he indicated. And to finish before the trip around the world, “starting on November 1,” they want to set the record for the Tour of Discovery, “Columbus’s original voyage between Huelva, La Gomera and San Salvador.”
All these challenges, moreover, with a sustainable message because “there is only one planet and resources are finite.” “The ocean sail support is perfect. Our circuit is the planet and there is a very big concept of globalization in this project and the good use of this globalization,” explained Pella.
“During the entire journey we use the energy of the wind to move the boat, the waves and the current, and to use our equipment, both electrical and pilot. Even for the water we consume, we manufacture it with a desalination plant, from which we also We manufacture electrical energy with solar and wind panels,” said the Catalan.