Panic major

madforsailing caught up with Graham Dalton who has 10 days to get to Newport to qualify for Around Alone

Matters have been made worse by the clock ticking loudly in the background. Around Alone starts on 12 September - less than three weeks away - with a prologue from Newport down to New York. Under the race rules Hexagon must arrive in Newport before midnight on 1 September or risk disqualification (under rule 3.7 in the Notice of Race) or incur a time penalty of six hours for every 24 hours they're late. This penalty will be applied to their finish time on the first leg - as this time Around Alone is scored on a points system rather than accumulated elasped time.

Dalton is critical of Around Alone's organisers Clipper Ventures who he sees as having been at heart of these problems. His main gripe is over the obligatory qualification passage which he feels he has already completed when he sailed more than 2,000 miles from Auckland to Sydney prior to the boat being shipped to Europe. Alarm bells were not doubt raised at Clipper Ventures when it transpired that one week into his qualifier Dalton had managed to break four ribs and injured one of his hands when he fell over down below as the boat lurched.

Clipper Ventures maintain this qualification passage was invalid for a number of reasons, but primarily because it wasn't 'transoceanic' as stipulated in the Notice of Race. Clipper maintain that the implication of this is that the qualifier should be across an ocean, rather than sailing around always within 500 miles of land. Dalton says that this interpretation only came out after he'd completed his qualifier. "We had all the documentation to prove that Clipper knew of my voyage and they didn't stop us," he says. He has since appealed to an international jury protesting the race committee, but has lost. "The reasons for losing it I don't know, I haven't seen the ruling. In terms of 'did Clipper know that had I done the trip?' Yes - I have emails to that effect. There were the entry forms they had where I had filed my route for them."

So Dalton now has 11 days to reach Newport 2,750 miles away, not only to avoid a time penalty and possible disqualification from the race, but in the process must complete what he sees as his 'second' qualifier - and all this with a rig and sails that are not the boat's own. While the weather is looking okay for the first part of his voyage there is the ever present possibility of being becalmed or encountering light winds as Hexagon approaches the US' eastern seaboard. Emma Richards on Pindar who is some days ahead of Dalton but taking the southerly route to Newport has been held up in the Azores high.

When Dalton gets to Newport, the fight will again be on to get ready for the start. Fortunately Southern Spars were in the process of building a spare mast for Hexagon when the boat dismasted. Now this must be finished and shipped to Newport. Dalton expects the new mast to arrive on 5-6 September.

The upshot of all this will be that the team have an 11th hour panic to reach the start line and their preparation will far from what Dalton had originally conceived for the project. "It's pretty disappointing," he admits. "The situation we find ourselves in now - I believe we've been very well organised and shown attention to detail and we've been masters of our own destiny. But now destiny is controlling us."

Hexagon - in better days