Dalton speaks

The old master is hurt but not yet mortally wounded

You can be sure that Dalton would swap every single sunrise
like this for just one more point

How do you feel about the short legs?

Dalton - I think short legs are probably good for us, because on the long legs in the highways, we are going to get rolled. On the short legs we are quite strong. I think in the legs like the Hobart leg and the leg onto Auckland, we were fast. You don't get that roll on where a guy can just roll you down if you get 12 miles in front of him. We are looking forward to the next leg. We have got no work to do to the boat except the entire electronics package - the entire boat was completely fried. Not one thing, other than my calculator, which is solar-powered works·

What happened?

Dalton - We were in an electrical storm and there were some quite violent electrical storms and it was decided that we should be hit once more. I don't know if were actually physically struck as these boats are earthed quite well but it certainly cracked right on our heads and everything went. Even our Satcom B which wasn't even switched on is fried. When we tried to get our instrumentation working yesterday with spares, it just smoked. It's pretty bad.

Are you glad that the long legs are over now?

Dalton -Yes and no. If I was standing here with a good result, it wouldn't have worried me, but in that respect, now that we are reaching so slowly and I'm not sure why. We didn't see it in our testing otherwise we wouldn't have done what we've done. But we have to get out and do two boat testing here. We've bought some new sails and we might have actually slowed the boat down. We've changed concept on our reaching sails a little bit and we might have slowed the sails down.