Ellen

by Ed Gorman

To judge by the Feedback column on this website, one hardly needs to draw the attention of madforsailing readers to the achievements of Ellen MacArthur. But what the hell, why shouldn't we indulge ourselves to mark her successful rounding of Cape Horn?

I suspect that had you asked her before the start if she would have been happy to round that feared headland in second place in her first Vendee Globe, she would have taken it with both hands. There is, after all, a quantum leap between winning a mainly upwind transatlantic race and holding your own over more than 60 days and through the Southern Ocean to boot.

But MacArthur - the youngest competitor don't forget - has underlined that her stunning win in the Europe 1 New Man Star last summer was no flash in the pan. In the Vendee she has again demonstrated she has the courage, the determination and the skill - both as a sailor and a tactician/navigator - to hold her own with the very best in the world in single-handed offshore ocean racing.

It is an achievement in itself just to be still racing at this stage of the event. But MacArthur is not just going round to complete the course. She is credibly racing to win and has lived in some very exclusive company for the past 60 days - Yves Parlier, Roland Jourdain, Thomas Coville and Michel Desjoyeaux to name a few.

In the end Parlier could not cope with his own pace and self-destructed. Coville fought Ellen for days and then fell away with rig and pilot problems while Jourdain held Kingfisher at bay for weeks before he too succumbed to problems with damaged gear. Only Desjoyeaux, "le professeur", has managed to keep his race on track and keep ahead of Ellen.

Now Ellen must fight off the charge by Marc Thiercelin in Active Wear as the two begin the tactically tricky and mainly windward passage north up the Atlantic. While Ellen awaits warmer weather to try to repair her broken gennaker, Thiercelin has only minor rig problems to sort out and, save for the lack of a spinnaker, his sail wardrobe seems intact.

This could end up being the toughest part of the race for Ellen as she battles with the man who finished second in the last Vendee Globe. She has the faster upwind boat, but Thiercelin is hungry for the fight against "invincible" Ellen, as he referred to her the other day, and he is desperate to overcome weeks of frustration at what he perceives to be his poor performance to date.

Looking back on Ellen's race, one is struck by her consistency. She often scolds herself for making silly mistakes in sailing technique or routing but, taken in the round, she has never appeared to be struggling when matched against skippers with vastly more experience. Early on she served notice that she was willing to sail her own race when she went hard west into the Doldrums. This was risky and could have won her the race or lost it. (Consider how badly Catherine Chabaud's Vendee went off the rails a couple of weeks later when she stayed east on her own and got too close to the centre of the South Atlantic High). In the end Kingfisher escaped the Doldrums in almost the same race position as she entered it.

In the Southern Ocean the word courage sums it up. When Ellen saw her race threatened by gear failure, she had no qualms about climbing her mast there and then. She did not divert nor stop and, as a consequence, her position remained unaffected first by batten damage and then by a broken gennaker halyard. Later the logic of sailing the best angles in a westerly flow saw her stray into real danger among icebergs and after one memorable if frightening day, she went into the night having skimmed past 10 whoppers, each of which could have sunk Kingfisher in seconds.

Sailing is a complex sport to the uninitiated but one of the best aspects of Ellen's Southern Ocean passage is that the wider British public has started to cotton on to what she has been up to and, at last, her reputation is beginning to develop in her native land. The French spotted Ellen long ago. Now the Brits are catching up.