Double whammy

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

Mike Sanderson - helmsman

For Mike 'Moose' Sanderson the records were particularly poignant as both he and project manager Jef d'Etiveaud were part of the team that conceived Mari Cha IV.

"It was cool. It really came together," says Sanderson, who admits that they were lucky with the weather for the voyage. "We were only on stand-by for a week, which was great. We had Roger Badham in Australia and Pierre Lasnier [their meteorologist/routers] who both did a fantastic job and Mike [Quilter] has worked so much with Clouds and Jef has worked so much with Pierre so we knew exactly what was going on."

Prior to the transat Sanderson says that they spent some time researching what it takes to break the transatlantic record. "You have to get out of New York. And then you have to get from what you get out of New York on to the high. And the high has to be in the right place."

Frequently in the past attempts on this record have failed due to running out of wind at the finish, but Sanderson says you have no control over this because the best you can do is leave on a five day forecast. "The things you can control are the first three days because the forecasts are good. We left with a really big high in place in the Atlantic and MaxSea having doing us in excess of 430 miles three days in a row. So you’ve got to go. That’s more than one third of the way across the Atlantic. And we averaged way over that."

Through good preparation and having the gear speced by those with considerable offshore experience, the breakage on board during the trip was minimal. "We broke one lock strop and the poor old code 3 genniker fell in the water and I think we must have hit it with the rudder as it tore itself apart. But it was repairable. We did miss it over the last 12 hours. We might have been here an hour faster with everything in place."

On board during the 24 hour record breaking days, Sanderson says the ride was just incredibly smooth. "To do a 400 mile day on a Volvo boat is pretty hard work and it is stressful and you know you are pushing the limit and you know you have got plenty on. I didn’t put my foul weather jacket on until we went two sail reaching. So I was up driving in a warm jacket doing a 525 mile day! It was just unheard of. The amount of waves we got back past the mast you could count on one hand. It was unreal. I can’t say enough about how good the trip was. The weather was good. The boat was awesome. The crew was awesome."

Despite weighing 50 tonnes - lightweight for a boat of this size - Mari Cha IV was planning. "It is smoking along," says Sanderson. "You get the greatest sensation of speed if you go to the bow or the stern. If you go to the stern you think ‘what, if I fell off…’ There you get the impression the boat is absolutely hauled. When we had to motor in at 8 knots and it was like we weren’t even moving…

"I’ve been starring at the numbers for three years, but reality hit home about how fast sitting at 25 or 28 knots is, day in day out. We were looking at the boat moving across the chart. That I hadn’t quite got jmy around. Seeing the boat move on a MaxSea chart is pretty new to me…"

Two months out of the box, there is still some way to go with the performance of Mari Cha IV, Sanderson believes. "The boat is capable of going faster. We just need a more solid 24 hours of breeze. During the 24 hour runs we had 25-30 knots but we’d always have a couple of sail changes in there and we had the breakage in there so that would have a been a few miles and we didn’t have any waves and we didn’t have any Gulf Stream."

Sanderson says that they did push the boat hard and there was no sense of putting the breaks on, although they did ease off marginally over the last few days. "We pushed it pretty hard with what we had. Once we’d broken the 24 hour record, in the last 48hours we had to average 11 knots to break the transatlantic record so we pulled back from sitting on 24 to sitting on 22. We put the word out ‘let’s tone it back’."

On board Sanderson along with navigators Mike Quilter and Jef d'Etiveaud and owner Robert Miller were out of the watch system. The remaining 20 were divided into two watches of 10 each with their own watch leader - Stu Bannatyne and Brad Jackson. These watches were further divded in half and rotated. "Every two hours there’d be a new group of guys coming on. What that means is you get this rotating system and that means you don’t have these drastic watch changes when everyone goes down and everyone comes up. It was a system that got used on EF in 1997/8 and then illbruck. It was new to me. Stu Bannatyne suggested it. I thought it was good and worked well.

Helming was mainly limited to Robert Miller, Sanderson, the watch captains, Sidney Gavignet and Robbie Naismith.

Steering the boat, says Sanderson - as he has always maintained - is easy, but still requires technique. "You can make the thing go three knots slower and still be on course. It is a nice mixture of driving a Volvo boat and a big multihull. It runs on massive apparent wind angle changes and bending the breeze."

Surprisingly despite weighing 50 tons Sanderson says that it showed massive acceleration. "Suddenly guys would be blown back with the acceleration. It was probably the most drastic acceleration I’ve seen. I think it was more than you get on a Whitbread 60. The feeling of being pushed back was incredible."

Sanderson says they were highly weight conscious on board - not only in terms of the way the boat has been fitted out but also the stacking of sails. Any crew no required would sit out, but usually with their legs in. "We raced it like a Volvo leg. That is what we all know and that was the easiest thing for us to set the bar at."

However they didn't need to change sails as often as a Volvo boat. "The boat doesn’t require that. Because it is going so fast, the apparent wind angle range you are sailing in is so much smaller. The boat sails from 85-30 degrees as it’s apparent wind angle range with the storm chute on at 110, whereas a Volvo boat is sailing from 30-135 or something. So you are always going to change sails less."

From Sanderson's standpoint as one of the principle sailmakers on board he says this makes for a different challenge. "It doesn’t make it easier. The sails are more all purpose. With the gennikers you are trying to make them as flat as you can get away with so that you don’t have to build out of Cuben fibre. Our two flying sails are the flattest sails we thought we could get away with made out of nylon. Everything else is Cuben fibre or 3DL."

From here Sanderson says they have yet to finalise their program. "The transatlantic record and the 24 hour record were at the top of the list. We didn’t know we weren’t going to have to be back in New York in April, so we haven’t scheduled anything in reality. Thinking out loud, I think the Miller family are keen to have the boat in Antigua to do Race Week. We should have a think about having a crack at 600 miles using the Gulf Stream and we’ll probably go back and do Pacific Cup, because the old boat go beaten by Zephyrus, so it would be great to come back with the ultimate boat for that. Jules Verne is certainly pretty high up the list. We are not going to be ready for it for this winter." However this could be a possibility over the winter of 2004-5.