In January 2025, Jamestown, Rhode Island, native Erica Lush moved to western France for an intense and immersive training camp to prepare for the Solitaire du Figaro, one of the world’s most competitive offshore one design races. This week she is competing in one of the final qualifiers for the event, hoping to secure her spot on the starting line.
”I think I’m the only person surprised that I ended up here,” she jokes. Lush’s parents are both sailors, and the family took a weeklong cruise around New England each summer, where Erica learned to love the adventure of being out to sea. It was in her blood. She went on to sail during college, worked on a 12 Metre in Newport for five summers, crewed on Tracy Edwards’ Maiden, and competed in the Ocean Globe Race, a modern spinoff of the Whitbread Round the World race. In all, she’s done over 75,000 miles at sea.
“I’ve already sailed around the world once, so I don’t need to do it again just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it with good results,” she says. This training cycle and competing in the Figaro are the next steps towards dialing in the performance. “I need at least a year on the Figaro, and then maybe a Class40 campaign, which usually comes in a three-year cycle.”
A French training camp was the best way to get the kind of experience she felt she still needed. There just weren’t opportunities to train regularly with a Figaro fleet outside of France’s west coast.
“The reason I’m here is that this doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world,” she says. “It’s an incredible development program for shorthanded sailing.”
The preparation has been intense, with three months of drills, speed tests, and debriefs with a cohort of other Figaro sailors. Her class includes 20 solo sailors and two coaches on the water at any given time. Because of the region’s status as a hub for shorthanded offshore sailors, there is a fairly well established international community, and speaking French is not a requirement of the program. However, it’s certainly a benefit.
“I really wanted to assimilate and work on my French, so I live in a house with other sailors and it’s really given me the opportunity to practice,” Lush says. “Anytime you move to a new place it can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. There are moments where you successfully do some small talk and feel great, and then sometimes someone asks a question and you have no idea what they said, and it’s discouraging.”
She says not being fully fluent in French has also meant that she’s had to adjust some of her learning goals.
“In the beginning, I went into every debrief intending to understand everything, but in this environment, that’s just not going to happen. Instead I now go in with the goal of having three questions answered, and if I need to ask the coach for help with those after the discussion, I’ll do that.” She’s a conscientious classmate and avoids making her peers sit through the lessons repeated in English.
Her ultimate goal for the training camp is to qualify for and compete in the Solitaire du Figaro. Founded in 1991, the Solitaire du Figaro is an important event in the shorthanded offshore racing calendar in part because the Figaro has become a feeder class for many pro sailing circuits. Competitors have gone on to compete in The Ocean Race, the Vendée Globe, and other grand prix events. The race is composed of four offshore legs and has been sailed in the Beneteau Figaro 3, a 35-foot foiling one design race boat, since 2018.
After three months of training, this week’s Solo Maitre CoQ (comprising two inshore days and an offshore leg that began this morning) is an opportunity for Lush to qualify. If this week’s racing doesn’t go to plan, Lush has one more opportunity later in the summer, but that would leave very little prep time for the main event.
“Even just being in the middle of the Figaro fleet is quite an accomplishment because in a class like this it means you’ve basically made no mistakes,” Lush says. “Since it’s a solo fleet, there’s so much camaraderie. There’s always someone to catch your lines or help flake a sail or go to for advice. It’s pretty incredible.”
Time will tell whether her hard work will be enough to secure a spot in the Solitaire du Figaro, but as the only American in the fleet, she’ll have no shortage of folks back home cheering her on.
For more on her campaign, visit lushsailing.com, and to check her Solo Maitre CoQ progress on the tracker, click here: https://solomaitrecoq.fr/cartographie/
