The Coconuts have become the Coconuts Sail Team, we have evolved from a family whose love for the sea and traveling has brought our passions and skills together to form a company who now tackle the world of professional sailboat racing, in a place where no Americans have been able to leave their mark.
Jay was on a team preparing a boat for the Vendee Globe when his dream of racing in the Mini Class surfaced. The Class Mini6.50 is a type of class where many professional sailors start their careers in. The class has many races every year in the summer throughout Europe but the crème de la crème is the biennial transatlantic race the MiniTransat which sets sail from Brittany France to a French island in the Caribbean, either Guadeloupe of Martinique or sometimes to Brazil with a leg stop in Azores or the Canaries. To qualify for this race every solo sailor needs to complete a 1000nm qualifying voyage and another 1000nm of ocean racing experience all on the same boat they will use in the MiniTransat.
Conrad Colman, Foresight Natural Energy, Vendee Globe team 2016/2017
The boats are only 21 feet 3 inches long (6,50 meters) but with an extendable bowsprit half the length of the boat and a mast twice the length of the boat, making the sail area huge allowing the boats to even plane by reaching very high speeds (~25knots), this is what is known as the Mini Madness. The sailors get hooked and though they have no room to stretch and sleep and only a small camping like burner for "meals”, they love it so much they are willing to cross the Atlantic alone and unasisted with no modern GPS (only paper charts) and no satellite phones (only VHF radio).
Mini6.50 © MiniTransat
So, Jay got the Mini Madness Fever and began to look for a boat. In his search he heard of a mini that had been designed by THE naval architect of our times, Guillaume Verdier. The story is that Verdier had designed a prototype mini back in 2010 for Serge Viviand who made a mold to build multiple hulls that people could buy and finish building themselves. One hull was built and sold off but Verdier's brilliant yet complicated design made it very difficult and expensive for anyone to finish the construction following his plans. Viviand still had one of the hulls he had built in his possession, once foils made it to the scene Viviand decided to stop the construction of this boat waiting for the innovation to take roots. To make a long story short we ended up driving across France from Brittany to Morzine, near Geneva to pick up the hull we bought from Viviand, and a new adventure began…
Serge Viviand's Mini in Morzine
Bringing the Mini to Brittany
Thibault Reinhart from Ino-Rope, a die hard Minist
Once back in Étel with this Mini loaded on a trailer borrowed from another Minist, the Mini community is generous and tight, we got lucky and found a hanger right next to the stone house we were renting for winter. There Jay began putting in the hundreds, soon to be thousands, of hours of labor into a state-of-the-art Mini6.50. As soon as Verdier came back to his home in Brittany, not far from where we are, after months of working on the Emirates Team New Zealand America’s Cup boat for which he designed foils for, he came to our small hamlet to check out “his mini”, an incredibly humble thing to do for such a busy man. Guillaume and Jay spoke the “same language” as they hovered over the mini under the hanger, speaking about where to put reinforcements and figuring out how to make the foils he would now design for the boat fit into literally such a mini boat.
Guillaume Verdier Mini6.50 design
While Jay slaves away in the hanger I slave away in front of my computer looking for sponsors and keeping up with all of our communications and PR. So far we have found one awesome partner, a small one but one that has allowed Jay to continue construction on his boat. The company is Foret Adrenaline, an adventure part in Brittany with 2 parks, one in Rennes and one in Carnac with an incredible web of zip lines and courses up in the tree tops. The parks have activities for all ages, from toddlers to very difficult courses for adults. We also launched a crowdfunding campaign with GoFundMe as a nice way to get friends, family, and followers to participate in the project by literally buying a quote-on-the-boat. Once we have the boat completed and Jay starts to participate in races we will have everyones quotes printed and placed on the boat, our campaign will deliver peoples voices about world issues such as peace, equality and environmental conservation. Jump on-board if you haven’t done so already!
