Doubts, what doubts?

Ed Gorman looks back on Ellen's Vendee and how the pre-start doubts proved unfounded.

In assessing Ellen MacArthur's Vendee Globe, let's start by listing some of the doubts which were widely held about her before the start.

She was thought to lack experience against sailors with long CV's in solo racing and particularly on the Figaro circuit in France.

She had never raced round-the-world before and there were question marks about her ability to cope over months at sea, especially after her win in the Europe 1 Star single-handed transatlantic race which saw her reach the finish in a state of total exhaustion.

Weather routing was perceived to be a potential weakness, despite the long hours of study put in by Ellen in the months before the start. She was, after all, coming up against some of the best in the business, like Yves Parlier and Michel Desjoyeaux.

There were the doubts, too, about Kingfisher. We knew she was a fast upwind boat - we saw that in the transat - but there were questions over how well the Owen/Humphreys design would fare in downwind conditions against the Finot hulls.

There was also a general feeling of anxiety among those close to her. Her whole life had led up to this, but even she must have been surprised how quickly she was realising her ambition of racing round-the-world. Was it all happening too quickly? Was she ready for this? These emotions were best summed up by Turner just before the start when he confided: "To be honest, all I really care about is that she comes back safely."

The doubts and theories of three months ago make for interesting reading don't they - now that we know what has happened.

Running through them, the experience shortfall never seemed to kick in. It is hard to think of any incident or phase in the race where Ellen looked naive or out of her depth.

Pacing herself and lasting the course has not been a major problem. There have been times when Ellen ran her batteries dangerously low, but she also showed that she could recover - catching up on sleep or stepping back a bit - and, equally important, she managed to cope with the pressure and stress of sailing a competitive race far better than she did on the transat.

Routing and weather is one area where Ellen will tell you she made big mistakes and there were many days when she struggled to come to terms with options or the consequences of decisions made. But, taken as a whole, Kingfisher's race stands out for having no major routing errors to compare with Parlier, for example, who sailed himself out of the lead prior to his dismasting or Catherine Chabaud who paid dearly for getting too close to the centre of the South Atlantic High and never recovered after that.

One of Ellen's last episodes of self-doubt centred on the day she climbed her mast for the fourth time. This was in the Doldrums when Kingfisher was steadily creeping up on Desjoyeaux's PRB to the south and west where conditions looked good enough for Ellen to perhaps get ahead and stay ahead. Exhausted after climbing the rig, Ellen collapsed in her bunk while Kingfisher inadvertently slipped to the east, haemorrhaging those vital
degrees of longitude.

When Ellen awoke the damage had been done. Steering to wind-angle, the auto-pilot had tracked the breeze round to the east and Kingfisher had gone from 15 miles west of PRB to at least the same distance east. The young Englishwoman castigated herself for this "mistake." Who else but Ellen could reasonably put that interpretation on those events?

Kingfisher's downwind performance has not been a major issue, set against the Finot and Lombard hulls. "I think it's hard to be certain about that," Turner sold madforsailing. "Sill (Roland Jourdain's Marc Lombard design) is proving to be very fast off the wind, but Kingfisher has held her own pretty well against the other boats."

When it comes to the timing of this race in Ellen's career, this, in my view, is where she played her trump card. So keen, so young and so uncomplicatedly committed to the simple goal of getting round and even winning was she that, through sheer enthusiasm and youthful grit and determination, she burnt off almost all her older and more experienced rivals.

The key episodes were the five times she kept her race on track when faced with serious setbacks which would have defeated some, if not all, of her rivals. She climbed the mast four times, twice in the Southern Ocean to sort out battens and re-run a halyard and twice in the Atlantic to swap over a defective masthead wind unit. On each occasion, she accomplished this without slowing Kingfisher. Then, off the Cape Verde Islands, she
worked for 36 hours to recover after Kingfisher hit a container, managing to extract the broken port daggerboard and then swap the starboard one across. And then just days from the finish there was the broken forestay and the need to nurse the boat home.

Ellen has put the doubts to rest and achieved much more than that. She has shown that she is a true racer with the ability to master the bewildering variety of challenges which single-handing offers. The most exciting part of it is that the girl is still learning and the best may be still to come.