Gordon Maguire - speechless!

News Corps' Irish watch leader was in a state of shock when he spoke to James Boyd about the leg from La Rochelle

The newsmen rock into Gothenburg in third place', 3 minutes and 56 seconds after ASSA ABLOY

After such an action-packed leg, Maguire said that the start, just six days ago, seemed like a lifetime ago. "We came down the English Channel really quickly. I have to say at the time, everyone was working really hard, but we always felt that the fleet would split up and you had to be in the split with the leaders. But that never happened - so we were basically giving it 110% all the way from La Rochelle".

The part tides played on this leg was very significant and the crews and navigators worked them like no one has ever worked them before in an 'offshore' race, making radical gestures to stay out of the counter current. "Dover was interesting. We were sailing along the wall at Dover, coming up to the entrance about 8-10 boat lengths in front of Amer One... And the car ferry came out...no one thought that at that hour of the morning a car ferry would be interested in going anywhere. We were coming to the entrance sailing along the harbour wall with the bow of the ferry coming out in front of us... which caused absolute consternation. We managed to bear off behind them but of course we ended up in his wash. We would have missed him by a boat length. And we missed a car transporter off the end of Denmark by about a boat length".

Trying to hedge the tide also made the trip along the Norwegian coast 'interesting'. "Norway was quite intense," continued Maguire flowing better now with the third beer kicking in. "The Norwegian coast line it is all the fiddly bits isn't it? It was that bloke from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you'll recall, who was responsible for doing the fiddly bits around Norway. I would say having sailed around the fiddly bits of Norway - he did a very good job of them. My God there were just rocks everywhere. They appear at random. There was no real pattern to them, just large boulders in the middle of the ocean.

"The big responsibility on those sections is the navigators. They have seven or eight hours upwind, of constantly calling laylines to within 50-100ft maximum to miss rocks and other things that could ultimately lead to a catastrophic failure if things had gone wrong. And all five boats navigated through the rocks.

"It was equally un-nerving because visibility was down to half a mile and it was raining. So the rock that he is talking about isn't visible until you're almost there...And when you're there it is only like two feet out of the water and there's nothing around it - just this rock right in your way so you have to bear away or tack and everybody was doing it.

"And unfortunately it paid to be inshore as there was current against us. It would have been very simple to have navigated around it if we'd had current with us because we would have just gone offshore and tacked for the mark. But of course the furthest inshore made the gains, but as you go more and more inshore you get more and more surrounded by denser rock formations. So it became silly - there became a point where we were tacking, setting up and then having to bear off round one rock and then come up around another one and then carry on again. This dodging and weaving was all quite stressful".

To sum up the leg Maguire concluded: "We were run over, crashed, blown up".

Of his predictions on the next leg he said, "it has closed it all up a bit. illbruck are now in a situation where they could lose. But an operation as professional as illbruck, don't lose a five point lead over a 200 mile leg. I still feel they will be race, ASSA will finish a very creditable second and there will be an absolute pony fight for third. How third place will go down at the moment I don't know. It's level pegging at the moment between us, Tyco and Amer One. Both us and Tyco suffered rudder damage during the race which caused us to lose a lot of points. I guess it will depend upon the weather on the day".