An Aussie's view of the EDS - pt3

In this final part Nick Moloney talks about Ellen, sailing with girls and looks forward to the final leg

How to deal with Sill

We are constantly looking for an avenue to get through Sill (the current race leader). We both have different gears with the sail package. There are some sail configurations when she's faster and some when we are. At around 30 knots when we change down to two reefs and a staysail, we think her balance package isn't as fast as ours.

We also have to push harder. On leg two up to Dover we had set ourselves a target boat speed of 9.2 knots upwind. Then at Dover we thought 'we've got 80 miles to go and so let's attack from here'. We put the pedal down and increased our target boat speed to 9.7-9.8. She was just crashing away through the seaway. Physically we started to wear ourselves out, but the yacht was just punching away just like a real trooper.

We were under three reefs and a staysail for quite a period. Steering became a real problem. I felt I didn't have enough leverage sitting in the cockpit, but it was too dangerous to sit out on the windward rail. So we just had to sit out and steer as fast as we could and tie ourselves in with a few tethers from our harnesses and go for it.

In the transitional periods, when the breeze is going up and down it's really hard on the water-ballasted boats. They have to fill and ditch and fill and ditch, whereas we're just working the stability with the keel ( Kingfisher, like most of the modern Open 60s has hydraulically operated canting keel). It's quite quick and quite easy. But when you get solid, consistent gradient the water ballast guys can just tank up and can stay on one tack for a long time and balance the boat on the sail plan and just go for it. So maybe we'll see Josh move to the fore a bit more on leg three.

Continued on page four...