What makes Ellen so special?

James Boyd analyses Ellen MacArthur's solo sailing success

The team

Aside from Ellen's routers, of considerable importance are her shore team.

By far the most influential of these is Mark Turner who with his background in singlehanding has a profound insight into what Ellen goes through. On races such as the Route du Rhum where routing is allowed he talks through tactical options with her and acts as sounding board as well as being on hand to discuss how to solve breakages if Ellen needs advice. Significantly being sleep deprived, singlehanded and in the middle of an ocean can be disorientating and Turner has a great ability to put matters into perspective and be effectively Ellen's sentient mind while she is at sea.

It is fair to say that success in singlehanded ocean racing directly correlates to how good your shore support is and this covers everything from working out the maintenance schedule of the boat - ie the fitting of Kingfisher's new rig and keel - to good pre-race preparation. It is then down to the skipper to push the boat hard enough so that it goes fast, but not so hard that it breaks - as breaking gear has such a profound effect on boat speed when singlehanding.

There is an argument that the Kingfisher v Ecover fight during the Route du Rhum was won over gear failure alone - both lost two spinnakers - but Kingfisher had a third downwind sail in reserve while Ecover didn't.

Both Mike and Ellen had to go up the rig - Ellen to replace the lashing on the genniker halyard, Mike to try and free a gruesome spinnaker wrap - causing downtime to both. Mike broke one of his daggerboards, although this only would have hurt him for a day before Ecover entered the downwind rollercoaster ride that took them to the finish. Kingfisher broke one of her two autopilot systems, a new unit under test from B&G that provides a more rapid response for the helm - had this been working maybe Ellen may have been able to handsteer less in the last days.

So tribute can be paid to Kingfisher's shore team of Jonny Malbon and Nick Black, along with Anthony Merrington, who have been at the core of the team that got Kingfisher race ready.

With the Route du Rhum being Ellen's last singlehanded race on board Kingfisher, it will be interesting to see if she and her team can apply the same success techniques to their next projects.