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Une Aventure Extraordinaire! Annapolis Solo Sailor Crosses the Atlantic in a Classe Mini
Y
ou can sail solo across the ocean for 19 days fueled by mostly 12-minute naps and not hallucinate. You might even be able to communicate by telepathy. But things go sideways. What you hope to be an astonishing feat may feel like a failure along the way. These are among the lessons I learned from Peter Gibbons-Neff, the only American to cross the finish line of the 4050-nautical-mile La Boulangère Mini Transat Race on November 15. What’s “mini” about a trans-Atlantic race? The boat: a 21-footer built for racing across the ocean. Sailors who find their way to the “pocket rocket” they call the Classe Mini 6.50 tend to be experienced ##Photo by Manon Le Guen
By Molly Winans
solo ocean sailors and/or French. Gibbons-Neff was neither. Born into a Philadelphia sailing family, Gibbons-Neff started as a kid racing around the buoys on his parents’ Farr 395, notched his first (rough) Annapolis to Newport Race at the age of 13, and raced 420s out of Severn Sailing Association in high school. He sailed for four years as a Midshipman on the U.S. Naval Academy Varsity Offshore Sailing Team, with a highlight being skippering a TP 52 in the 2010 Newport to Bermuda Race against his family. Following his graduation from USNA in 2011, Gibbons-Neff served in the Marine Corps for a decade. Once off active
duty, “I wanted to get into the offshore world and figure out how to get into professional sailing,” he says. “Covid had shut everything down, so it wasn’t a great time for it.” Although he had no solo or doublehanded racing experience, he found a Mini for sale in Annapolis by Vernon Hultzer, a seasoned yacht racer who had completed numerous ocean races onboard, including a number of doublehanded Bermuda 1-2 Races with his sailing partner and wife Heather. (He coined the expression “pocket rocket” in a previous SpinSheet interview). Gibbons-Neff’s own sailing partner and girlfriend, Jane Millman, was game to take the new Mini for a spin. “Jane and I sailed the boat a few times that fall. Once I bought the boat, I committed to doing a Mini Transat.”
Terminal Leave en France
Extensive boat work plus logging miles onboard proved to be the bulk of the preparation for the race once he had the boat—now named Terminal Leave— shipped to western France, the Mecca for Minis. “I wish I could have done more training but couldn’t stay in France more than three months at a time since I’m not a resident… The best training was the 2600 nautical-mile SAS: Les SablesAzores-Les Sables Race.” 52 January 2024 SpinSheet.com