Double whammy

Mari Cha IV adds the west to east transatlantic record to her 24 hour record

Mike Quilter - navigator

New Zealander Mike Quilter is probably the most seasoned ocean racing navigator on the planet having sailed numerous Whitbreads on boats such as Steinlager 2 with Peter Blake, on New Zealand Endeavour with Grant Dalton and subsequently The Race on board Club Med. Quilter was also a long standing member of Team New Zealand. On board Mari Cha IV he was tied into his rally car seat at the giant schooner's well appointed nav station.

Despite having sailed on so many of the top ocean racing boats, Quilter was bowled over by Mari Cha IV. "It is a big monohull. I think the whole concept of this boat is pretty ballsey. It is pretty remarkable and to be as big and as fast and as well balanced and didn’t break and was successful straight up was, I reckon, pretty good."

Crucially for someone of Quilter's 'experience' the boat was remarkably dry. Not once did water come down the main hatch. "I could take my seaboots off and walk around without getting my socks wet. Nice dry boat, nice big bunks!" Photos from the voyage show Quilter in shorts - he says it wasn't even that cold.

Quilter explains his role on board: "My job is that I’m paid to worry. I go up for the sail changes but beyond that I don’t spend a lot of time on deck. They don’t worry about where we’re going and I don’t tell them how to trim the sails or steer. I don’t try and steer. My job is to worry about the weather."

During the voyage he worked with shoreside routers Roger 'Clouds' Badham in Australia and French meteorologist Pierre Lasnier in France. "The boat has a long standing relationship with Pierre, so we got information from both those guys. It is always good to have someone sending you stuff. You can’t have too much stuff coming in."

As the boat was on standby in Newport this trio were running the weather models against the boat's polars. "You get all the forecasts and you sail your boat through the weather and it gets there in the right time and eventually that walks towards you over time. It holds up and holds up and it got weaker and firmed up and then you decide to go," explains Quilter.

The traditional way of going about a west to east transatlantic record attempt has been to hook into a low pressure system that takes you across the Atlantic at the right speed. Instead with Mari Cha IV, Quilter says they were more interested in the high pressure system mid-Atlantic. "You need a strong high pressure system set up in the Atlantic otherwise you’ll never get any westerlies. And it’s the high pressure that creates the westerlies, that creates everything, so without the high pressure system you’re not going to have much wind in the Atlantic.

"We left just behind a front and followed that front out towards Nova Scotia. We reached out behind the front in fresh northwesterlies and then that front stopped and became an occluded front which we had to beat through and we knew we had to beat through that to get to the high. We had to go on the wind for half a day to get through the front, hook on to the high pressure and then we sailed around the high all the way to England.

"The problems we had were getting out of New York, getting across that occluded front and some of the models had quite soft winds around the top of the high. All those three didn’t prove to be problems. It all just fell into place. Luck beats skill everytime!"

The giant daily runs occurred once they'd passed through the occluded front. "They were on the back of the high, with nice low pressure up to the northwest, lots of isobars, nice angle, flat water and off we go. Beautiful multihull conditions!"

Following his exploits on board the 60ft trimaran Steinlager 1, sailing round Australia two handed and with Dalts on board Club Med, Quilter is a much-capped multihull sailor. Because of the speed of Mari Cha IV, he treated the navigation much like that of a big multihull where you have a greater ability to dictate your course and to choose your conditions.

"Because there’s a high pressure and nothing in the middle of the high and way north there is 35-40 knots, you had to pick your line according to how much breeze you want and what angle you want. The more north you went the more wind you had, but also the more possibility for more damage and carnage. So we picked a middle of the road course - 28 knots of breeze, nice angle - and smoked it. It worked really well."

For a majority of trip around the high they were broad reaching with the true wind angle at 120-130degs. "The boat was smoking along. I would sit and watch the speed over the ground on the GPS and it would be 25 knots, 30 second averaging for a long long time.

"I reckon that sometimes in your life you are lucky to sail on really good boats. I thought I was lucky to sail on Steinlager 2 and Club Med to sail on that boat and I thought I was bloody lucky to sail on this. It is a remarkable boat, the right people, the right place, the right weather, the boat is smoking along and didn’t break." It is 15 years since Peter Blake Whitbread maxi ketch Steinlager 2 demolished the opposition in the Whitbread Round the World Race. Quilter says that the best day's run they ever did on her was 355 miles..."That’s how far things have come along and that was a fast boat in its day. Now we are sailing 8 knots quicker."

Quilter has said in the past that he has retired from round the world racing. But if ever Mari Cha IV were to attempt a round the world record attempt or The Race, this might be the boat that brings him back. "If any boat can do it, this boat can," he says. "You’re a long time dead you know. If you do a race like this it is a pleasure to be alive, to be above the ground. I think it is a pretty special boat."

A sentiment echoed by all the crew.