Doug Esterman in his Cavalier 39 Fair Winds crossed the finish line at Southport today, the last of the remaining competitors to do so. Third-time hopeful Kevin Le Poidevin and his Open 40 Roaring Forty didn’t quite make it. Le Poidevin was close. So close.
Boating New Zealand caught up with Le Poidevin from the cockpit of Roaring Forty while he was still about 120 nautical miles out from Newcastle. Over the previous 13 days he’d made decisions, improvised repairs, and spent a night bouncing off a Lord Howe Island beach with a failed anchoring. The most demanding sailing of his life, he said. He would not change a moment of it.
Le Poidevin and Roaring Forty departed Ōpua on Saturday 30 May with the rest of the 2026 Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge fleet into a calm harbour and light winds. The fleet made their way up the east coast of Northland. Once the boats had rounded North Cape, they sailed into exactly what the forecasters had promised: high winds, higher gusts, squalls, and whatever else the Tasman chose to add. While other competitors chose a more south-westerly route, Le Poidevin’s plan was to hold close to the rhumb line. The weather had other ideas. Two days in, he found himself tracking the same south-westerly arc as the rest of the fleet, hoping to go around the worst of it while maintaining a reasonable DMG. There was no good way through. Conditions worsened.
“That was towards the shit,” he said, “and there was no way around it.”
The wind, gusts, squalls and storms kept coming. Then in the early evening of day six, just west of Balls Pyramid, a brief hole opened in a squall: 45 knots dropping back to 10 or 11. He tacked through it, now heading north-west, third reef in the main, J3 on the inner forestay, making seven to eight knots in breaking seas. Then the boat slowed.
“I came up on deck, still daylight, about three or four in the afternoon. I looked forward and went, that’s not my jib top. I saw this black and white furled sail lying on the deck and thought, oh, my bloody jib top hadn’t broken. And then I looked again and went, oh, that’s not my jib top. That’s my actual structural stay that holds the mast up.”
He bore away and dropped the main before he had finished the thought. The runner was already tight. The inner forestay was under load. The mast held. His forestay had come down neatly, almost folded, draped against the stanchions. The stay and furler were undamaged. A quick search found one of his eight-ton shackles in two pieces. Years of hard miles and the gusty conditions of this Trans-Tasman had fatigued the metal. The $150 mistake.
His 2026 Solo Trans-Tasman was over. What followed was not.
He motored through the growing dark toward Lord Howe Island, arriving five hours later on the more sheltered eastern side in pitch black. The local authorities strongly advised against anchoring in the prevailing conditions. With no other option, Le Poidevin spent the next day and a half in a loop, motoring up under the lee of the cliffs, setting his alarm, letting Roaring Forty drift back while he caught what sleep he could, then waking to the alarm and doing it again.
“Motor up, drift back, motor up, drift back. That was the plan for as long as I could manage it.”
When conditions eased enough to try anchoring, he headed for Ned’s Beach. The hold was terrible and at 9pm the anchor alarm fired. He surfaced from below to a thump-thump-thump and found he’d drifted too close to shore. The keel had found the sandy bottom and was working against it. In full reverse, throttle wide open, using the lift of each swell to gain inches, he worked the bow around until he had a line to open water, then drove off the bottom with a three-point turn on a keel stuck in sand. He got out.
Needing rest, he found a second spot, a little offshore and close to the cliff face. Anchor down, feet up. Then sometime later the alarm went again. The anchor rode had chafed through on reef during the night. Pitch dark, cliff to one side, reef to the other. He ran his pre-planned escape heading, forward two minutes, turn right, and came out into clear water with nothing on the end of the chain. Back to drifting.
When the wind clocked enough to allow passage to the western side, he was gone. A mooring had been made available. Joel, the local marine officer, drove to the mooring patch and used his car headlights to guide him in. Le Poidevin hooked up, did his checks, put his feet up. Seconds later the anchor alarm was ringing again. The buoy had not been properly set, and it had come with him.
Joel came back out. Le Poidevin had picked up the neighbouring buoy. This time Joel and the rescue crew came out in a dinghy, found the right one, and made it fast. Then Le Poidevin slept.
The next day it rained. When it stopped, even with the wind still up, he climbed the mast. The carbon fibre spar was slick from the rain, and the repair was intricate: a substitute forestay fabricated from 11mm Dyneema, using a large turnbuckle tensioned incrementally against the furler attachment. At the masthead the mast was swaying two metres side to side, a giddy pendulum with the added bonus of sharks working slow circuits around Roaring Forty.
“I climb the mast myself a lot, so I’m quite comfortable up there. But trying to stabilise yourself to do the job, I put an eye on the stay with some Dyneema, chafe sleeve around it. I was hoping to luggage-tag it through the clevis pin, which was still in there. Because if I dropped it, I was stuffed.”
He couldn’t thread it. So he lashed it, Dyneema wrapped five or six times through the eye and around the clevis, snugged tight, leather and zip ties over the damaged bracket for chafe protection. Bottom end next: cranking halyards, loosening the turnbuckle, shortening the lashing, repeating until the stay was solid. Then he pointed Roaring Forty at the Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club and drew the straightest line he could.
What carried him through was not luck. Le Poidevin had very little of that. It was 15 years as a mechanic; 31 years in the Royal Australian Air Force, including cross-training in avionics, radar, instruments and radio; nine years as an Air Sea Rescue skipper working the Gold Coast bar before the seaway was built; three years with the ambulance service; and a career that ran through project management, aviation maintenance risk assessment, and a deployment to the Middle East in 2003.
“Dealing with stressful situations in a calm, controlled manner, with critical thinking applied to every step. That’s where I think all of those things come into play.”
Exhaustion and frustration came through in the telling. Panic never did, and neither did any thought of quitting.
At the time we spoke he had around 120 miles left to Newcastle, motor sailing with the J3 on the improvised forestay, beanbag out in the cockpit, sun on his face, the drone of a Volvo beneath him. He expected to dock around nine the following morning, wash Roaring Forty down, pack up, and fly to Southport for the finishers’ party to be held this Sunday.
Roaring Forty came off the beach undamaged. An underwater camera inspection the morning after showed no damage to the keel, sand rather than rock having absorbed the impact. Total structural damage: one failed shackle and a slightly chewed forestay fitting at the masthead, to be replaced. The mast will be pulled for NDT inspection, though Le Poidevin is not concerned. The cap shrouds remained tight throughout. The rest is planned maintenance already on the schedule.
None of it has put him off a fourth attempt. He has a solo round-Australia record attempt to reschedule, a double-handed Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race to race, a Cape Horn rounding ahead, and a possible return to the Global Solo Challenge.
We’ll track his adventures along the way.
