Tales from the Daimler Chrysler

On board accounts from Ian Moore on Zephyrus V and Mark Denton on Team 888 PLUS the latest results

About half the fleet has now finished the DaimlerChrysler Transatlantic Race (see the latest standings on page three). While the American Reichel Pugh 66 Zaraffa was first home by a country mile she started one week before the big race boat fleet.

The fastest overall elapsed time for the Atlantic crossing was made by the brand new German maxi UCA, an 85ft Judel/Vrolijk design, who averaged 11.33 knots for the trip, while Mark Denton and Jonny Melbon's Team 888 (better known as Ellen MacArthur's Open 60 Kingfisher) were a close second.

On handicap, unless there is an 11th hour charge by one of the smaller better rated boats, the winners under IRC were Zaraffa, followed by Team 888 and UCA, while Zaraffa also won under IMS ( UCA and Team 888 having no IMS certificate).

Team 888

Despite some costly gear failure the result was a good one for Team 888. At 60ft long she finished just five hours behind the 85ft UCA. Co-skipper Mark Denton gave us his account of the voyage:

"Right from the start it was a tall learning curve for us. The first time we sailed together as a team was on the start line, just because in Newport we were so busy trying to fix the daggerboard damage we had on the way over and the mainsail damage. We only managed to get it all together on the race start morning. So that was fairly hectic, but we came good pretty quick and everyone really knuckled and the team has come together exceptionally well."

Aside from Malbon and Denton, sailing on board were Kiwi rigger and Maiden II crewman Frazer Brown, Richard Hulme, Nick Black and Will Oxley, a fellow Global Challenge skipper who has subsequently been in charge of the weather for Victory Challenge and was navigator on the Australian maxi Wild Thing for their Hobart-Melbourne record attempt.



Mark Denton gets his workout

At waypoint alpha, a mark of the course to keep the boats away from any iceberg action, Team 888 were only seven miles from the Reichel Pugh maxi Zephyrus V. "And that was in conditions which favoured their sail plan. It was quite light up to waypoint alpha, yet we still stayed in contention with them, so that was a testimony to what was going on on board. It was great to see.

"From then on it was a drag race up the north Atlantic for the next 1000 miles - very much in contention with UCA. Zephyrus managed to get legs on us and got away when we had some sail damage to our Code 5 which we needed to fix. This gave us 24 hours downtime when we could have been using that sail to keep up them."

Denton says it was an old repair that broke and fixing it was no easy task. It was too windy to unfurl and drop on deck, so they dropped the Code 5 furled down below and then spent 12 hours trying to unfurl it within the confines of the boat. "We fixed it and got it up only for another old repair to go. Sail repairs were a constant running battle for us but such was our funding that we really couldn’t afford to change the sail wardrobe."

Meanwhile Zephyrus V were having problems of their own (see navigator Ian Moore's account and page 2). "As it happens we were quite glad to drop into the system behind. They [ Zephyrus] rode a very intense low pressure system that span them off the course . Then they were out of the picture and we kept on duelling with UCA all the way up until we hit headwinds about 700 miles off the waypoint at Fair Isle off the top of Scotland."

During this time Team 888 was averaging 18-23 knots and Denton says the speed topped out at 27 knots. "I think they were quite surprised that we were managing to do that. One night we came screaming past UCA in a pitch black of the night, about 100m from where they were, literally just took them to windward and dropped in front of them, but over the next 48 hours the headwinds came.

"As soon as we hit headwinds we really battled against UCA - they could sail a lot tighter angles than we could. Team 888 really isn’t a boat built for going upwind, and that was when they ekked 100 or so miles that they beat us round the Fair Isle waypoint by - but it was no big deal. We kept on fighting and fighting hard and when we did finally get around the Fair Isle waypoint we managed to drag 40 or so miles out of their lead, five hours.

Having sailed upwind to the Fair Isles it was then a run down to the Cuxhaven finish line. "Again Team 888 doesn’t like dead downwind - we needed to play the angles, which meant a lot of gybing for us with pretty intense crew work, making sure we had the right spinnaker up for the wind conditions which were going from 15-22 knots - so we were changing that pretty often. It was a bit of a battle but it was the best we could do and the fact that we took 40 miles out of them was a pretty good thing. Obviously they are more suited to downwind running with spinnaker poles and everything else and we were still using our asymmetrics."

At the finish, UCA beat Team 888 by five hours. "The fact that we were managing to keep up with them with a much bigger sail plan and many more people on board, it is a testimony to the boat’s speed and the people on board [Team 888]."

Currently Team 888 is en route to France for the Open 60 class' Calais Round Britain Race. The sails meanwhile are being driven to the North loft in France for repair before Sunday's start. "We’ve got a bit of an uphill struggle, but we’re going to be AOK for the start," says Denton.

Financially the team are running into big problems. "It's pretty dire," says Denton. "Jonny and I have been financing this up until now. We’re fully committed, but money is running out. So rather than doing the delivery I’m staying here in Hamburg to try and leverage the success we got on the DaimlerChrysler and to keep in contact with the sponsors that were part of this race, to try and back someone to back us going forward. We’re still in contact with a lot of companies back in the UK and hopefully our success here will help us switch someone’s mind into thinking this is a good thing to do."

Their results in the Daimler Chrysler certainly bear out Denton's comments.

Read Ian Moore's comments about his passage on Zephyrus V on page 2 and the latest elapsed time, and handicap results on page 3...