The Saintes Maries de la Mer Speed Canal, known to windsurfers as The Canal, is a man-made canal or trench near the French Mediterranean coastal town Saintes Maries de la Mer, built especially for speed record-breaking sailing by windsurfers.[1][2]
The Canal, also called "The French Trench" by the English-speaking community of windsurfers, is 1,100 meters (3,600 ft) long and 30 meters (98 ft) wide, in a west-northwest/east-southeast orientation designed to take advantage of the Marin and Mistral winds that blow in that location.
In 1987, the idea of building a speed canal was thought up by British speed windsurfer Erik Beale and St Marie speed week organizer Michel Roussolet. The first version was 850 m long and it enabled Beale on 13 November 1988 to become the first sailor in history to officially break the 40-knot barrier, setting the Outright Speed Sailing Record of:
In the early 1990s the canal was lengthened to its final length of 1,100 m and four consecutive Outright Speed Sailing Records, measured on a 500-metre course, were set on The Canal by windsurfers in 1990, 1991,1993:
Later the same year (1993), The Outright record fell to the Australian sail craft Yellow Pages at * 46.62 knots sailing in the sheltered waters of sandy point, Australia [3] ending the 7-year reign of the windsurfers. That record would stand for 11 years until the next onslaught of the windsurfers in the early 2000s:
Three consecutive Outright Speed Sailing Records, measured on a 500-metre course, were set on The Canal by windsurfers in 2004, 2005 and 2008:
In October 2008, The Canal's leading position on the world sailing map was taken by the Lüderitz Speed Challenge in Namibia, when the "holy grail" 50-knot barrier of speed sailing was first broken by a kitesurfer.[6]