An Aussie's view of the EDS - pt2

Kingfisher co-skipper Nick Moloney talks about life on board an Open 60 and the horrors for helm

Life on board

Despite the conditions, sailing upwind is relatively easy on the crew. It's not like sailing downwind in heavy conditions where you've got to keep a good balance package on the boat so you're not constantly tipping out at high speed and threatening the rig.

The boat's designed in such a way that if you're on deck and you're working with the mindset that the boat needs stability, then everyone's got to sit on the rail. But when there's any sort of sea up it's brutal. There's no escape. Every four or five seconds you get a jet of salt water in your eyes. So on leg two we sent people down to the bunk on the weather rail to get some sleep, but we never got to the stage where we didn't make a sail change because guys were asleep. When you got your head down it wasn't for any longer than an hour.

So, on leg two we were able to rest a lot, but we were still a little sleep deprived because we tacked so much.

On Kingfisher we run a three hourly watch system with two guys on each watch and Ellen floating. Ellen sleeps in the nav station - normally about 25 minutes per 3,000 miles! On the last leg I was with Mark (Turner). It came to light in the shipping lanes that we have a similar level of experience and understanding of what we can risk and what we can't, which the other watch didn't so we'll be on separate watches from now on.

I got about five hour's sleep a day on this leg.

Food

We ate really well on the second leg. We took four ready-made pizzas and a whole heap of Chinese food. I ate a lot more than I did on the first leg. Towards the end, the last 100 miles, you start to feel you're there. You think 'well, I'm going to wait until we get in so I can have a steak, just for now I'll have a chocolate bar'.

The Whitbread was a lot like that too. For the Aussie guys when you got within 630 miles of the finish we'd think 'one Sydney-Hobart race, we're there'. And so we wouldn't eat any freeze dried, we wouldn't brush our teeth or anything and we'd stay on deck the whole time.

Continued on page three...