Ecover diary

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

And then there it is as the nav lights up front become lost under a couple of feet of water and everything goes dark for a few seconds. The lights break the surface, Ecover shakes the water off and it rolls down the deck and washes everything in its path. I filled the cockpit on several occasions and, as the cockpit drains were by now full of rope tails etc, it took some time for them to empty the tonnes of extra weight.

This went on for a night and a day and a second night. All Mike and I could do was steer or try and seek shelter and rest inside. For me it was a real baptism into the sea-keeping qualities of these magnificent boats.

At no time ever did Ecover show any tendency to want to broach or spin off to leeward, both would have been catastrophic in terms of gear damage on any other kind of vessel.

We had had the big ECOVER spinnaker up all day and decided to take it down before sunset as we were both too tired to keep that kind of pace on for a third night.

As the position reports came through we realized we had moved into the lead and were pulling ahead. Mike reckons that some of the other non-Finot designed boats, ( Casto and Sill) would probably not have been able to sail as safely in the big conditions and would have lifted the foot off the pedal a bit. Whether they all survived it or not without gear failure we don't know as we have no news of the fleet.

In the middle of all this it became apparent that Mike's health was deteriorating fast. He had got the flu and was living on Beechams, Lemsip and paracetemol and feeling absolutely terrible. There is no way I would have been able to do what he did in that state of health. Luckily now he is feeling much better.

Wednesday, was a time to recover, although tactically the race turned into a brain game as opposed to a brawn game. The positions come to us every two hours from 0300 until 1900. We were still running downwind and although the wind was dropping it was still quite fast with plenty of potential for gear failure.

Sill started to move to the right but, because we could see them on the computer, we were always able to stay to the west of them.

Gybing one of these things in the breeze is not easy. It takes about one hour from deciding to do it to being on the new gybe. First of all the aft windward ballast has to be drained, whilst a reef is put into the mainsail. One person helms while the other runs around doing all of this. With one reef in the spinnaker is then snuffed - sounds easy, but quite a dangerous occupation, especially at night.

Decks lights are on, but this kills the helmsman's night vision. With the spinnaker in its snuffer a second reef is put in the mainsail. Then the keel is put in the centre, then the leeward runner is brought up, the mainsail is sheeted in, the traveller centred and the now almost unsteerable boat must be gybed softly, with runners being the initial priority before swinging the keel back to weather and putting the rig back up again. It is really the hardest thing to do and I'm sure that without this much caution, plenty could go wrong, broken battens, snarled spinnaker, and plenty more.