The world's fastest Anglo-Saxon

James Boyd spoke to Orange's Australian crewman Nick Moloney

Over the last few days Orange has been behaving like a 110ft racing catamaran, reeling off 500 mile days in the strong north Atlantic westerlies. But yesterday afternoon it went light and the ETAs for their finish at the line kept going back.

"We knew it was going to get light for a while but we carried breeze for a lot longer than we thought we would. It was one of those things where we knew we couldn't be disappointed because we had as much wind as we did."

For Moloney and the crew, as the vicar might say, it was a time for reflection. "It was a good period for all of us to regroup a little bit and we stayed up on deck together and talked a lot becasue we'd been quite focussed on just staying in the routine, the watch system, so last night was a bit of breather for us in some respects. And then we were looking for land for 60 miles..."

Moloney is currently catching up with his girlfriend, his parents, his loyal followers at Offshore Challenges - Ellen is here - and has said that he wants to be on board Kingfisher for the first leg of the Regate de Rubicon. However it is expected that he will get on board in the Canaries when Ellen steps off to go trimaran racing in the Course des Phares with Alain Gautier.

Tonight however Moloney and the crew of Orange are letting their hair down - deservedly so. A party is in full swing and there are some extraordinary old faces who are appearing. These include Olivier de Kersauson, his rival skipper from the trimaran Geronimo, who earlier greeted Peyron on board Orange when they tied up and has since presented him with a model of the Jules Verne Trophy (the full sized version - a fantastic model of a hull by American sculptor Tom Shannon, that is tethered at one end and is impressively suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field).

Then there is the gaunt figure of Eugene Riguidel who in the 1980s skippered the world's biggest racing trimaran, William Saurin and there is Florence Arthaud, the most successful ever female offshore sailor in France who is threatening to buy de Kersauson's old trimaran Sport Elec for a non-stop round the world attempt...singlehanded. There is Jean-Yves Terlain, Bruno Peyron's uncle who was a leading Open 60 skipper in the 1980s.

So I must go...