Dalts second, Neal third

Comments from the silver and bronze skippers at the conclusion of the Volvo's sixth leg

Neal McDonald' s Assa Abloy put in a creditable third on this leg, although a win on this leg with illbruck coming in fourth would have had more effect in narrowing the gap between first and second-placed boats.

At the start Assa Abloy was one of the two boats to get away cleanly and McDonald quickly overhauled his wife Lisa on Amer Sports Tooto move into first place. "It was one of the most bizarre starts I have ever seen in ocean racing," commented McDonald on his arrival in Baltimore. "We got stuck in and we were always aware that people could be over. One of our goals was not to be over, and Chris (Larson) did a great job not to be over and that is what put us in good shape".

Rounding Cape Hatteras some technical problems on board Assa Abloy had caused them to lose ground to the leaders and at one point they were almost 30 miles astern. It was a remarkable feat considering the closeness of the racing that they were able to catch up.

McDonald puts their losing ground down to their playing some of the storm clouds badly. "We always talk about good and bad luck and we felt we had bad luck in the middle of the race. Under one particularly bad cloud yesterday morning, we lost 15 miles in two hours, which is very frustrating. We got out of positioning, got into a bad eddy in the current and lost a lot of ground, which we never really made up, and I have to take my hat off to the two boats who did incredibly well. Grant and Jez; they did a great job to take opportunities and make them stick".

McDonald complimented his crew for sticking with it. "One the things I think our programme has shown is that we are going to keep pushing to the end and it does make a huge difference. We could have easily come back yesterday and said, "20 miles - we're not going tocatch them" but we always thought 'this is a strange place'. We spent last weekend looking around up here and I think some of those things really paid off. We had a couple of new sails, which we developed particularly for these light, flat water venues and it made a huge difference".

Neal (with champagne), boat builder/crewman Jason Carrington and the team, pop the bubbly