Exhausted - elated

The Daily Sail spoke to a disorientated Miranda Merron newly finished from her first solo transat race

As the dawn came up yesterday over the Caribbean, Miranda Merron aboard her boat UUDS cruised across the Guadeloupe finish line to take eighth place in the Route du Rhum's Open 60 division. Not a headline result maybe, but for Merron it was highly significant marking the end of three tense weeks at sea, alone, sailing a 60 footer in her first ever singlehanded offshore race, and an event which saw almost half the fleet decimated.

"I find it hard to believe I’ve been at sea for three weeks and that it’s over, but I am probably mentally blocking out the last three weeks at the moment," commented Merron, nestling a well earned Heineken soon after her arrival.

Miranda sounds remarkably coherent, still abuzz from the euphoria of her arrival, considering she has been up for most of the last three weeks: "Just before sunset yesterday I had two half hour sleeps which were prearranged with my weather router who was going to ring me and wake me up and before that I had been up since four hours before daylight."

In St Malo prior to the start she had demonstrated the electronic alarm used to wake her up and aside from it leaving a ringing in our ears that lasted a day, we felt sure it could be heard in Paris. Remarkably during the later stages of the race Miranda found she was able to sleep through it, such is the fatigue of solo offshore racing.

For Merron, the last 200 miles were frustrating in the extreme when the wind died. In the light winds her autopilots weren't effective and to make reasonable progress she had to hand steer. Then there was the annoyance of having to round a mark on the west side of Guadeloupe before returning back up the south coast to the finish line off Pointe a Pitre.

"I went to this mythical waypoint – I have no idea what this race organisation has in mind. But they put the RIB on the waypoint, so I saw Alex, Tony [her shorecrew] and the guys from Ecover – that was very nice. And then I went off on this 40 mile coastal race. That was the biggest – I was going to say joke, actually it was pretty dangerous – you go around the south of Basse Terre and you go to a mark that is 800m off the beach, there is no wind and it is beneath a volcano. There is loads of wind on the approach then nothing… It is extremely dangerous.

"It was 1am," she continues. "The whole of Basse Terre was out there and they had someone on the speaker and there was loads of cheering. I only passed it [the mark] by virtue of the fact that there was enough current to drag me past it. I was going round in circles before it. Then basically you’ve got to go and find the wind again and then beat all the way up to the finish. So it was one bit too many on top of what was already a particularly tough solo transatlantic race. But the good thing was that it took so bloody long that I finished in daylight..."

Fortunately it was a beautiful morning, there were lots of familiar faces to greet her despite the early hour of her finish to wash away the frustration of the last few miles.

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