It’s time to cast off the moorings from the port of Quebec City (Canada), exit the lock and navigate the St. Lawrence River. The 10th edition of the Transat Québec Saint-Malo is scheduled to start on Sunday, June 30 at 8:00 pm Italian time (2:00 pm local time), with rain, large-scale weather instability and winds between 12 and 15 knots.
“The weather conditions”,commented Alberto Bona,skipper of the Class40 IBSA, “are rather uncertain. At the start, there will most likely be rain; we hope to have a good wind to get out of the most complex area, along the first 140 miles”.
In the days of preparation, one particular issue surfaced very clearly: the “sharing” of the river – but also of the Ocean, as seen during the previous Transat CIC, where some passage areas had been forbidden – between navigation and presence of cetaceans. The organisation of the Transat Québec Saint-Malo dedicated an entire briefing to the topic, during which it emerged that further work needs to be done on this issue, in order to find the correct balance between nature and sport, while it’s clear that, compared to the years past, there is much more focus on the protection of whales, thanks to a new sensitivity on the part of the public and institutions.
Thus, in Quebec City, the hundreds of whales swimming along the St. Lawrence are called by name: there is Gaspar, which is considered a bit of an acrobat whale and can be found off the coast of Tadoussac, one of the main marine reserves where cetaceans come to feed and reproduce; but there is also Tic Tac Toe, the whale that came down from the North this summer, probably in poor health. Precisely for this reason, the managers of the cetacean monitoring scientific programme asked sailors for help in sending photos of the whales they will encounter along the river during the race.
Back to sport, on Saturday afternoon the propitiatory rite according to the traditions of the First Nations was also carried out, and now it’s time to concentrate.
There will be 25 Class40s at the start, three of them Italian: the Class40 IBSA, Alla Grande Pirelli and Acrobatica. However, Italian sailors are more numerous than that: on board Dekuple is Pietro Luciani, vice president of the class, and – within Amelie Grassi’s all-female crew of La Boulangère Bio – we also find Claudia Conti. A little “azzurro” amid the always tight blue French monopoly.
