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Displaying items by tag: Patagonia

#AlexThomson - A remains of a yacht abandoned by sailing superstar Alex Thomson a decade ago have been discovered on a remote stretch of South American coastline.

According to Yachting & Boating World, the Hugo Boss skipper was forced to abandon the IMOCA 60 after a broken keel caused a capsize just five weeks into the first leg of the 2006-2007 Velux 5 Oceans offshore race.

But a decade on, Rolex Enterprise Award winner Cristian Donoso was kayaking in the Patagonia region of southern Chile recently when he found what remains of the Hugo Boss hull, located for the first time after it was set adrift in the Southern Ocean.

It's thought that the yacht travelled around 20,000km from the spot off South Africa where Thomson and crew were rescued by fellow Velux racer Mike Golding – moving east across the Indian and Pacific Oceans – to the shoreline at Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, north-west of South America's most southern city Punta Arenas.

Thomson, a regular visitor to Ireland whose replacement Hugo Boss Open 60 stopped off at Cork Harbour in April 2014, is now making arrangements for the boat's retrieval. YBW has more on the story HERE.

Published in Offshore

About Brittany Ferries

In 1967 a farmer from Finistère in Brittany, Alexis Gourvennec, succeeded in bringing together a variety of organisations from the region to embark on an ambitious project: the aim was to open up the region, to improve its infrastructure and to enrich its people by turning to traditional partners such as Ireland and the UK. In 1972 BAI (Brittany-England-Ireland) was born.

The first cross-Channel link was inaugurated in January 1973, when a converted Israeli tank-carrier called Kerisnel left the port of Roscoff for Plymouth carrying trucks loaded with Breton vegetables such as cauliflowers and artichokes. The story, therefore, begins on 2 January 1973, 24 hours after Great Britain's entry into the Common Market (EEC).

From these humble beginnings however, Brittany Ferries as the company was re-named quickly opened up to passenger transport, then became a tour operator.

Today, Brittany Ferries has established itself as the national leader in French maritime transport: an atypical leader, under private ownership, still owned by a Breton agricultural cooperative.

Eighty five percent of the company’s passengers are British.

Key Brittany Ferries figures:

  • Turnover: €202.4 million (compared with €469m in 2019)
  • Investment in three new ships, Galicia plus two new vessels powered by cleaner LNG (liquefied natural gas) arriving in 2022 and 2023
  • Employment: 2,474 seafarers and shore staff (average high/low season)
  • Passengers: 752,102 in 2020 (compared with 2,498,354 in 2019)
  • Freight: 160,377 in 2020 (compared with 201,554 in 2019)
  • Twelve ships operating services that connect France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain (non-Covid year) across 14 routes
  • Twelve ports in total: Bilbao, Santander, Portsmouth, Poole, Plymouth, Cork, Rosslare, Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Roscoff
  • Tourism in Europe: 231,000 unique visitors, staying 2.6 million bed-nights in France in 2020 (compared with 857,000 unique visitors, staying 8,7 million bed-nights in 2019).