In at the deep end

Madforsailing spoke to Amer Sports Too's new chartmeistress, Miranda Merron

After a couple of relatively quiet years, as part of the Pindar team with Emma Richards and most recently with her own French sponsorship Miranda Merron is now one of the busiest people in yachting.

She was in London recently for the launch of Tracy Edwards' Maiden II project and is down as part of that team. She has Un Univers de Services, her French sponsor, with whom she is in the process of negotiating a deal that will include her taking part in the 2004 Vendee Globe on board a new second hand Open 60 - if she can find one available. In the meantime there is the small matter of her taking the hot seat as navigator on board Lisa McDonald's Amer Sports Tooin the Volvo Ocean Race.

Merron only joined McDonald's team in Auckland. It was both her first major role as navigator - although this is part of the job spec of a singlehanded offshore sailor - the first occasion she has spent any time racing a Volvo Ocean 60 and her first for some time sailing as part of a big crew. Quite a daunting prospect...

"I haven't sailed with a big team for a number of years now, but it's nice to be back with a big team," Merron told madforsailing. "They're a really good bunch of girls and they work very hard and they've been very welcoming. But the responsibility of taking decisions for that number of people is a bit daunting."

Alone making such calls would be a huge responsibility. Any errors would cost miles on the fleet, would cause the crew to lose confidence in her, not to mention the Amer and Nautor sponsors, general public and the horrid yachting press. Fortunately Merron works closely with Lisa McDonald and it became a two person role. "Nobody wants to make mistakes and if it's just two of you, you've taken that decision together usually and you live with the consequences if you've got it wrong. But if they're trying so hard on deck I don't want to mess it up for them by making a bad call."

McDonald and Merron knew each other well prior to the start of the race and are both part of the 'Hamble mafia'. "I've improved the way I work with Lisa. We work very well together. We do sit down and discuss things for quite some time. We look at different options and then talk each other out of them, play the Devil's Advocate and I think our decision-making has got better."

Even so there were teething problems. "It was very much in at the deep end. It took quite a few days to get into the job. The first few days of the race I was overloaded with information. We get an enormous amount of weather information in and being new to the job I spent too much time trying to analyse it and take it apart and find things in it and as time went on not only did I get better at the reading the weather, but I learned to simplify everything a great deal which has made making decisions easier. There was one stage when we had no information in and it was paradise!"

In the depths of the Southern Ocean the Inmarsat satcom terminal was occasionally out of range and they, like all the other boats, were unable to surf the net.

"Having that amount of information is good, but you've got to know how to use it," Merron continues about her navigating role. "And similarly with the routing, there is putting a lot of store in the routing, because that's what you do. But I started using it less and less. Often I would try to take decisions and then see what the routing would say and see whether we agreed or not and then find out if we didn't agree why it seemed to think we should go a different way and then make a decision based on that. I've since discovered that quite af few of the other navigators use it just as a guide, after all it can't be right all the time."

Also involved with the decision-making process is crewwoman Willemiem van Hoeve, who conveniently is a professional meteorologist and the watch captains, Emma Westmacott and Katie Pettinbone, although Merron says "in the Southern Ocean they had enough on their plate. There's more jobs to do in the Southern Ocean, more bilging out to do at the end of a watch, etc. At times we all have a discussion because I know what I want to do, but I don't know the boat that well and what the best sail set up is. So I'll discuss with the girls on deck - 'do we want to bear away by 10 degrees or do we change sails?' And they'll tell me. They know the boat well - they've been sailing it since September."

As navigator Merron is out of Amer Sports Too's rolling watch system. "I tend to do long watch and stay up 10-12 hours and then sleep for a few hours while Lisa takes over," she says. "My sleep varies. If I'm up for 12 hours or longer I'll sleep for five hours or something, but I find that's too long if new weather's come in I feel a bit out of touch. But it seems to work well. And I do work closely with Lisa - it's not a solo job."

Merron is very much the outdoor type and one feels would prefer to be in the cockpit enjoying the wet, cold and fast experience. But she also likes a challenge and is intent on becoming the best at her new job, particularly as it will come in handy when she returns to the Southern Ocean in 2004 on the Vendee Globe.

"I spend and awful lot of time at the chart table," she says. "I'm not used to living down below. I have to get the weather in twice a day and then spend as much time as needed looking at it. Quite often I'll come up on deck for sail changes or manoeuvres and those can often be quite time consuming and then you think, 'I've got to go back and see where we are and what's happened and if any new information has come in'. Things change very quickly - in 2-3 hours and you have to re-assess where you are all the time."

Aside from the weather part of her job is analysing the four daily scheds which show how they are doing against the other boats. "Life is based around the scheds," says Merron. "It is great when you get to the finish and the scheds are more frequent. We look at what the other boats are doing, what speeds they're doing, how many miles they've covered - we have a spreadsheet to see who's got the best mileage in each sched, see how far we are from the other boats. Sometimes it's depressing, sometimes it's good. It is interesting to see how the other boats are sailing in the weather we're in."

As the other boats reported ice was the major hazard of the Southern Ocean. The race committee had the option of putting a waypoint in to take the boats further north and out of the danger area, but at the time they could have made the call there was no information about ice sightings in the area. "In the Pacific we didn't get any ice information apart from from the other boats. In the Atlantic there is a lot of iceberg sightings, but there was nothing in the Pacific because there were no sightings."

Fortunately one advantage of bringing up the rear Merron says is that the boats ahead were reporting into race HQ whenever they saw ice. She plotted the positions on the chart. "This gave us a bit of a guide as to where we might find ice."

For Merron ice was the major stress factor from this leg. "I spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the radar," she says. "The radar works very well. It sees big ones no problem and smaller icebergs, sometimes not until you're two or three miles away. Very often it doesn't see car-sized growlers or anything about that size or smaller. So during day we'll have someone keeping watch."

Another way they were able to predict when ice is in the vicinity was when the sea temperature dropped. "If it's sitting at 5 (degs C) and drops to 4 for sure you've just sailed into an ice area and very often a few minutes later something will pop up on the radar, so I'll go up and make sure someone's looking out for ice. And if it drops to 3, then... well it did. We passed pretty close to some stuff which didn't show up on the radar and it makes you wonder what you sail past at night, hurtling down waves in the black. The consequences of hitting something at speed do not bear thinking about."

There were many 'holy heart failure' moments in her new stressful position but for Merron one stood out. "I was watching the radar and it was quite a foggy day - it was quite revolting actually - and I thought I saw something on the radar a mile and a half ahead and we were probably doing 18 knots. Then I couldn't see it again as there was a lot of wave clutter on the radar and it never came up again, but I just had this bad feeling about it. So I said I thought there might be something a mile ahead. And Katie was on the helm and she said 'yup there it is something right ahead ' and it was a reasonable size block of ice. In the fog you can't see much, but I wasn't sure if I'd seen it and I wasn't sure if I should go up... What if it was a false alarm they're going to start not believing me. But it was there."

Generally despite the stress and conditions Merron enjoyed the experience. "There were some great moments. But it was pretty brutal it was very cold and very wet, but it is fantastic sailing, when the boat is absolutely honking along with the spinnaker up, getting awesome speeds out of it. There's a huge amount of work going on, all five people on watch are working non-stop, grinding, driving, trimming and it takes a lot to keep the boat on its feet - waves are big and not always predictable, so usually somebody is calling the waves, but they're a bit mixed up in that part of the world. I was very impressed by the amount of work going on on deck."

It has also been something of an eye-opener being part of Nautor Challenges and attending weather briefings alongside 'great' names such as Grant Dalton, Roger Nilson, Grant Dalton and Dee Smith. She, Emma Richards and Paul Cayard as the newbies for this leg had to all go off and do their Sea Survival course together which Merron says provided her with the former race winner as a captive audience.

It will be interesting to see if, as happened in the race four years ago, the girls start to get some mid-fleet placings as the race progresses.