Ecover diary

Golding's crewman Marcus Hutchinson gives insight into life on an Open 60 after a week at sea in the TJV

We got off to a pretty good start in no wind! We managed to anticipate a bottleneck at the Committee Boat and got out of the way at around six minutes to go with a shove from our tender around the back of a moored warship and back to the line

We got a little puff of wind and were able to keep steerage way as we approached a gap near the Committee Boat. Then the wind did a big shift and we snuck through a gap reached down the line with better and better speed, tacked to leeward of Dominique Wavre on Temonos and accelerated away just to weather of Armor Lux.

The first beat up to the Paul Vatine buoy in front of Le Havre proved delicate in the very light winds, we needed to keep cool as first one side and then the other payed. Through a combination of a great start and good speed we managed to keep the boat just about moving and snuck around the first mark inside Temonos in second place.

Stamm's Bobst Group had got around several minutes ahead of us but the rest of the fleet was still wallowing behind in the fickle winds.

Our course away from Le Havre to the north west gave more and more stable NE winds as we left the coast and any threat to us from Temonos was soon put behind us as Ecover always seemed to accelerate away from the boats behind.

Sunset fell as we approached the Cherbourg peninsula and the turning tide... Spring tides meant that there was going to be as much as five knots against us depending on where we tackled the headland. Our race strategy was to be looking a bit longer term than just this headland and we had decided we wanted to be furthest west when we got out of the Channel, so sailing further offshore around Cherbourg as opposed to looking for some tidal advantage was what we did.
Ecover leaves the docks in Le Havre