Miranda's madness

James Boyd spoke to Miranda Merron about the Route du Rhum - her first singlehanded handed offshore race

Despite having sailed many miles two handed with Emma Richards, the Route du Rhum is Miranda's first singlehanded race and the first time she sailed the boat was for her 1,000 mile qualifier.

"I was quite lucky with the weather," she recalls of her inaugrial solo passage. "I had the most breeze at the beginning, then unfortunately on the last few days it was very very light, which was good from the point of view that I actually spent seven days out at sea and did 1,300 miles." The trip began in Ouistreham near Marco Lefevre's boatyard at Caen, and then went around the Fastnet Rock on to a waypoint at 13degW and back to her base at Royal Clarence Yard in Gosport.

"I had shipping lanes both ways for a bit of added fun. So I’m not quite as scared of ships as I used to be - I know my lights quite well now," she says.

Fortunately during the trip she didn't face any technical problems. "However I did hit a lobster pot and caught it around the keel," she admits. "That took me a couple of hours to sort out and that’s when I realised I was very much on my own. It was quite breezy when it happened."

At the time she was off the Scillies. "Unfortunately it was while a front was going through – it was blowing over 25 knots. I dropped the main and backed the boat down using a little bit of mainsail. I realised we were drifting towards land again - so it was not a very comfortable position to be in. But it was fine. The problem is that it takes much longer to do everything by yourself."

She says that she copes with singlehanding a big boat like an Open 60 by preparing everything in her mind in advance. "I always talk through manoeuvres in my head - possibly out loud, I couldn’t actually tell you! – before I do them and make sure I’ve got the order right. I’m quite methodical."

During her trials she has also been experimenting with different ways of doing manoeuvres to see if any are faster or make her life easier. "Some things have worked and some things definitely haven’t. I’ve just got a pattern for manoeuvring and for getting gennikers up. I’ve discovered that no matter how light the wind I cannot gybe the Code 0 inside sheeted because of the masthead forestay. And I tried that and it was like “YOU IDIOT”. Because there was no wind I thought I’d be able to pass it through, but it’s still quite a big sail. So I should have furled it. Short cuts are not necessarily a good thing…"

She also discovered the benefit of using the waterballast to change the displacement of the boat. "I was in a really rough seaway after the start and the boat was really all over the place and really unhappy and I put the aft ballast in. And it really made a big difference – it was a thing we didn’t use very much last year because I was still learning how to use it."

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