Huusela: Being at Les Sables-d’Olonne feels almost unreal

Sometimes when Ari Huusela is alone at sea he looks up to the sky and sees the vapour trails of aircraft flying across the ocean and imagines doing his day job as a captain of a Finnair Airbus 350.

“I see the lines in the sky left by the airliners,”said Huusela, aged 58 and a father of two grown-up children, “and I think how nice it would be to be up there in a cosy, warm cockpit drinking some coffee and knowing that we will be at our destination in just three hours time.”

© Niina / Stark

But Huusela loves the challenge of the ocean and, like so many of the solo skippers in the Vendée Globe, he is a remarkable character whose down to earth manner and modest style has won him friends and supporters not just in his native Finland but in France too.

You may not have heard of Huusela – who still describes himself as an “amateur” sailor – but back home in Helsinki he is almost a household name. The Finns have really got behind their very own solo sailor who is aiming to become the first skipper from that country to complete the Vendée Globe.

When he set sail from Helsinki at the end of August for France aboard his 2007-vintage, Owen Clarke-designed IMOCA named STARK (after Finland’s leading building materials chain), thousands of people turned out to see him off.

There were about 200 boats of all kinds accompanying him, restaurants on the dockside were full of cheering supporters, the coastguard helicopter circled above him and a DC3 aircraft flown by his colleagues from the airline came out to dip its wings in his honour.

“I felt like I was actually starting the Vendée Globe and in a way I was doing that, because I was beginning my trip to the startline,”said Huusela. “I have been amazed by this, by how many of those people are following me and how much support I have from them. They really want me to be on the startline and to be able to finish the race. It has been really nice to get that kind of support from Finnish sailors and Finnish followers.”

© Erik Lähteenmäki

The media back home have devoted much space to Huusela and he has had extensive coverage on television too, ever since his solo career started with the Mini Transat in 1999. “They have been quite keen to follow me because there has been no other single-handed sailor from Finland,”he said. “This is more like a human interest story for them. There are so many different angles to look at – health, food and the sporting and project management sides – and I have had a lot of coverage in economic newspapers as well as the mainstream media.”

His has been an interesting journey to the startline of the toughest race in solo sailing. He did not start sailing until he was 24 and throughout his career on the water he has held down his job with the national airline, first as a mechanic and then as a pilot. After his debut in the 1999 Mini, he has managed to find time to complete five transatlantics, giving him a good level of experience, sailing both solo and short-handed.

His first race in the IMOCA class was the 2018 Route du Rhum and since then he has completed the 2019 Bermuda 1000 Race and the Transat Jacques Vabre alongside the Irish sailor Mikey Ferguson. His watchword on this Vendée Globe is safety, a guiding principle that he follows both in the air and at sea.

© Transat Jacques Vabre

“It is my first priority – safety and finishing the race is the main goal and there are lots of things affecting that mindset,”he said. “It is the same kind of mindset when I go to work. Schedules and economics are far behind safety when we fly with passengers on board, and this is the same idea.”

Huusela will be racing against a handful of boats, of the same vintage as his IMOCA, which have not been upgraded with foils. He is aiming for a 100-day circumnavigation though he will have food and supplies on board to last over 120 days. He is taking plenty of spares and also an emergency water supply in case his water-maker fails.

“Of course 100 days will be hard to achieve and it doesn’t matter if it takes 120 days. I will do my best and focus on the sailing and keeping the boat in one piece and try to take care of myself,”he said. “The first goal is to finish and then see what my position is,” he added.

However Huusela is more competitive than he might be making out. In the 2018 Route du Rhum he finished 11th out of 20, a performance he is rightly proud of. It was during that race that he and the French skipper Sébastien Destremau crashed into each other in the mid-Atlantic, a shocking event that left its mark on Huusela which affected his confidence for a while afterwards.

“It was a terrible shock and I can still see that happening if I close my eyes and think about it,” said the softly-spoken Finn who was just waking up from a deep sleep at the time of the crash. “But of course those things can happen and we saw on that race one skipper hit a cargo ship and Alex Thomson ran aground – it reminds us how demanding this kind of sailing is.”

Since that incident Huusela has upgraded his radar and warning systems and says that in his recent races and training sails he has felt much more confident about sleeping on board when sailing solo.

Huusela’s Vendée Globe project is managed by his wife, Niina Riihela, who has managed all his sailing campaigns since 2007. His 33-year-old son is a former special forces soldier in Finland who now works in security, helping to guard places like the Finnish embassy in Kabul in Afghanistan. Huusela says his son’s friends tell him that his father is crazy but, as Huusela himself points out: “There are many kinds of craziness in this world.”

© Jari Salo

His 29-year-old daughter, who has been working and studying in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa, has told him many times that it is time for him to retire from this kind of sailing. But Huusela is taking inspiration from the American skipper, Rich Wilson, who was 66 when he finished the last Vendée Globe. So the Finn has a few years and a few more races in him yet.

Normally at this time in the build-up to the start, thousands of race fans would be thronging the pontoons at Les Sables-d’Olonne. The Covid-19 pandemic means numbers are limited, but Huusela says the atmosphere is still fantastic in the Vendée Globe capital.

“It’s such an amazing thing to be here after all these years since my first visit to these pontoons in 1996,”he said. “Now I am finally here with my own boat and I am going to be on the startline line, so it’s very exiting."

“The feeling is almost unreal, but I try to keep my mind focused and try to relax and tell myself that everything is OK and I have done my homework and all is good and that my boat is very strong and well-prepared."