Ellen

Not the lesbian American TV star, but our own girl from Derbyshire Ed Gorman gets up to speed with the latest from la petite Anglais

"Alain has amazing experience on the boat," she said. "He has sailed it for four years and he feels the boat and is very at ease on board. We don't have the fastest boat, we know that, and we have not spent as much money on her as a lot of the others because Alain is getting a new tri shortly. So we've tried to concentrate on things like sails which we know we can have for the next boat as well. We're in the right configuration and we're in a configuration that we know," she added.

"I know I'm nowhere near as good a helm as Alain," she went on, "I'm not as fast a helm and I'm not as confident but we know that too. I'm not standing here on the dock in Le Havre saying 'I'm the best' because I'm not. But we complement each other very well and we are going to work on our strengths and try and eliminate our weaknesses. We are certainly not going into the race thinking we are going to blow everyone else away, we are going to do our absolute best."

"Doing her best" is a statement of extremes in Ellen's case. But even she has been impressed by the zeal and appetite her co-skipper and mentor Gautier brings to his sailing. During some of the inshore events earlier this year, she was thrilled by the drive and commitment the Foncia-Kingfisher team showed under pressure. "The biggest thing that we've had in this campaign is just the motivation of the team," she explained.

"That sounds like I'm spinning off something I read in a book or something, but honestly in the Challenge Mondial Assistance it was amazing. We got 50 miles behind the rest of the fleet but we kept pushing, we never gave up and we believed we could still get to the front and that belief took us to the front."