The reluctant hero

madforsailing talks to Neal McDonald about the Volvo and his plans thereafter

So where does Assa stand now? They have what many suspect is potentially the fastest boat in the fleet - Assa is believed to have the lightest hull and therefore the biggest bulb and most stability, so they have the right tool to develop. And McDonald says they are in good shape when it comes to the all important sail wardrobe, where numbers of sails are strictly limited by Volvo race rules.

"We've been quite frugal in the way we've kept sails going," McDonald says. "For example we're still on our third mainsail - it was brand new for the last leg - so we've got the opportunity for another mainsail. We don't know how many buttons other people have used, but we've got a fair idea and we feel we have more left than most - we haven't lost any. We haven't wrecked any sails. I think of all the boats we probably have the least sail damage and I think that is a credit to the sailors on the boat, but probably more so the sail design team. They've made us sails which we can push hard and use".

Having sails 'in the bank' can only help them in the legs to come, particularly as McDonald feels they lacked time to development the sail wardrobe for the latter part of the race prior to the start. "The emphasis of the race is changing. We're going into light air, inshore mode and for me Rio marked that change. It changed our whole attitude on the spares we take to how much weight we take on board in terms of food and we've become much more critical. For example we've got light weight sail bags on now. It's a step up. Likewise with the sails you're changing from sails you’d use in 40 knots to sails you’d use in 10 knots.

"So we've held back a bit for two reasons. Firstly because there is this change and secondly because we realised we're going to learn from other boats and I have no qualms in telling you that we've copied other people's ideas. We look at these giant sails and we've developed sails and some of them are better than what they have - they're sails that we weren't familiar with and weren't very good at predicting at the start, but now we know what we want. So we feel we have a little bit left up our sleeve".

Significantly Assa seems to have taken a different approach to their sail wardrobe than illbruck. While Kostecki's team seem to have a more rounded performance across the spectrum, Assa have more 'specialist' sails. "We have 16 sails on board and the danger is you have lots of overlaps, so you don't know which sail to put up. Some of our sails are particularly specialised so you end up sailing angles that other boats don't like sailing. This can be an advantage, it can be a disadvantage. It worked both ways on the way in here with illbruck. You have sails designed for a particular window and sometimes it does mean you are sailing slightly different courses to boats around you".

McDonald admits there are downsides to this approach as occasionally it prevents them from engaging the opposition."It does constrain you from a tactical point of view. In a way that is how illbruck managed to get back ahead of us. We were keen to stay in the same bit of water as them when we were ahead of them and we were sailing with a sail that performs well at a different angle to the sail they had. It tied us up in knots a little bit and they got ahead of us at Great Isaac. You do get stuck with that a bit. But we know we're better off than we were and looking at the boats around us, we're slowly catching up".

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