Marcus Hutchinson will be joining Golding as co-skipper on board ECOVER for the Transat Jacques Vabre race which starts in Le Havre on 3 November, 2001.

Hutchinson, a yachting writer and sailing consultant, who lives in Paris, has been racing in short-handed and singlehanded races since the mid 1990s and raced with Golding earlier this year in the Figaro Class in the two-handed Round Brittany Race.

In this 4,340 mile two-handed race to Bahia in Brazil, Golding and Hutchinson will be sailing Golding’s Open 60, ECOVER sponsored by the Belgian based manufacturers of environmentally friendly cleaning products. The sponsorship is a natural continuation of Golding’s Open 60 campaign which saw the ECOVER team take ECOVER’s ecological message around Europe and across to the USA in the EDS Atlantic Challenge. Golding and crew were third overall in the five-leg event.

This race will be the fifth Transat Jacques Vabre, a two-handed trans-Atlantic race featuring three classes – Open 50, Open 60 and multihull. The multihull class starts a day later and sails a slightly longer route to ensure that all competitors reach the finish in Bahia around the same time and enjoy the Brazilian celebrations together.

2001 is Mike Golding’s second Transat Jacques Vabre – in 1999 he raced with Ed Danby and the pair finished third in the Open 60 class.