Exhausted - elated

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

During the final days she was sailing in company with a French cruising catamaran and was stunned when a ship with the communication capability of the Marie Celeste came out of nowhere on a collision course with both of them.

"I was fully awake and had seen it. I was absolutely amazed - they were not answering the radio. I’d put my strobe and the ActivEcho [the active radar reflector which makes an Open 60 look frigate-sized on an enquiring radar set] was on. I just handsteered and stayed really low until they went past. I was tracking it on the radar and they were so on collision course. Then the catamaran which was two miles behind me had to gybe out of the way - it nearly got both of us in one go!"

In the end Miranda pulled into Guadeloupe eighth in class. She lost to the nipper Antoine Koch on the old Fila who did gybe in and out of the Azores high, as did ocean racing veteran Didier Munduteguy sailing Richard Tolkien's old Phil Morrison-designed Open 60. Patrick de Radigues on the old Aquitaine Innovations, now renamed Garnier, she says sailed such a southerly route that he was always going to pass her eventually. She feels slightly aggreived that she didn't take one of them out.

So it's a wrap on her first singlehanded offshore race, what did she learn? "I can see areas in the race where I could have done a lot better. One of my major problems is nutrition or rather making myself eat because not eating leads to hypo-glycemia, temper tantrums and lack of energy, and it is a vicious circle, because you’re not hungry and you can’t be bothered to cook but you need to cook. I think that was my biggest area of weakness."

Like Pete Goss, tea drinking is vital to life on board for her, except that in Miranda's case it is Earl Grey and not PG Tips with enough sugar to stand your spoon up in. She says she only got through about 110 of her 200 teabag ration and has trouble working out her consumption rate because the kettle wasn't staying on the stove too well as UUDS lurched around during the first week's storm.

Regarding her future plans to race in the Vendee Globe, she says the Route du Rhum has done nothing to dampen her enthusiasm, although it has made her wiser. "I’m still enthusiastic about doing it – particularly sitting here with a beer and the beach just outside my door. I did think about it a lot during the race and must not forget what I was thinking about – that’s key to this. Rather than not wanting to do the Vendee it is more wanting to work out ways of managing myself and the boat better."

There is some hardware which would make her life easier such as a coffee grinder – as Ellen has on Kingfisher and Emma Richards had fitted to Pindar prior to the start of Around Alone. There is also some PC-based radar software which pulls in the radar image and better at analysing squalls - most radar sets only see squalls containing rain. In particular there is her desire to get a new boat...

"I think we’ve done it in a fairly unsophisticated way, which has been excellent for learning and I think there are ways of sharpening up performance," she summarises.

This week UUDS will be heading for Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic from where there is a return race across the Atlantic fully crewed in January.