Long hard road

Singaporean sailor Elaine Chua explains how she comes to be sailing in the Mini Transat

Taking on an event such as the Mini Transat is a daunting prospect. There is the challenge of racing a tiny, over-powered 21 footer across an ocean on your own, the longer leg to Brazil taking around three weeks - 20+ days of waterborne solitary confinement with no communication with the outside world. And this is bearly half the story - beforehand each skipper must raise the finance to buy and run their boat and then, in the case of the Mini Transat, they have to get qualified to earn themselves a place on the start line. If you are European this is perhaps challenge enough. But if you are a 27-year old woman from Singapore...

Despite the prospect of a long uphill struggle Elaine Chua has managed the impossible and last week arrived in Lanzarote successfully completing the first leg of the Mini Transat from La Rochelle aboard here Marc Lombard-design Zero one design, Feng, racing in the Series class.

Chua does not come from a sailing family, nor she admits is her family even into sports. She graduated with a degree in marketing and ended up working for the importer of Topper dinghies in Singapore. Originally she was selling jet-skis, but when some staff were laid off, she found herself selling dinghies. To become more professional at her job she felt she needed to learn how to sail and the discovery of her new-found sport coincided with the arrival of a Challenge boat in Singapore, on a promotional tour for the round the world race. "I went ‘wow’," says Chua of her reaction at the time. She applied to sail in the 2000 BT Global Challenge and after a year of being on the waiting list finally got a slot finding herself part of Nick Fenton's crew on Save The Children. Chua sailed the entire race, the only Asian to do so. "What caught me first was more the adventure and the chance to travel - not so much the sailing," she says. "It was only in Cape Town that I really thought I can’t go back to a 9-5 job."

After the BT Global Challenge she returned to Singapore but spent increasing amounts of time sailing both locally and around the world. It was while she was in Australia that a friend mentioned the Mini Transat to her. She went to the start of the 2003 race and became hooked. "I went back to Singapore and started searching for sponsors. I worked first to save enough money because with Minis, half the time you end up with no sponsor, no budget, nothing." And I managed to get a sponsor in April 2004."

In April the following year she found a private benefactor in a past Commodore of the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club, under who's colours Chua is competing. "He asked how it was going," she recounts. "And I said “it is hard: I have no track record in solo sailing, I haven’t got a boat, the race is half way around the world and no local sponsor will say ‘right, we’ll sponsor you’. So he said, 'okay I’ll buy you a boat on the condition that it becomes a training boat back in Singapore.'"

Chua says she chose a Series boat rather than a more competitive Proto as she was new to solo sailing and she wanted something simple. Marc Lombard's protos have always been competitive and his Zero - built by the Fast Zero yard in Spain - was one of the latest series boats available. Chua's Feng was the last boat Fast Zero built in Majorca before they moved to Tarragona. She was in Majorca for the construction. "I wanted to learn how to fix things if they break. So the best thing was to go to the yard and help with the build of the boat. I hate to be helpless when I break something and I can’t do anything about it and you are on your own out there."

Two Zeros are competing in the Mini Transat - the other being Hugo Ramon's Mallorca et Tus. The boat has a good all-round performance, but she says in the Mini it is the sailor who makes the biggest difference.

Feng was finished in September last year and with the help of her sponsor APL, was immediately after completion shipped back to Singapore to be presented to her sponsor and the yacht club. While back at home, Chua competed in all the top local regattas - the Raja Muda, the Singapore Straits Regatta and the King's Cup in Thailand. When the local season finished she shipped the boat back to Spain in order to start qualifying for the Mini.



In order to get more offshore sailors to compete in the Mini Transat, Classe Mini offer something called the 'Derogations to the Qualification Calendar' or DCQs. DCQs are limited to five but this year Chua was the only person to get one on the overseas ticket.

Back in Europe Chua refitted her boat and sailed her first Mini race - the stormy Odysses d'Ulysses race from Villefranche in the south of France around Sardinia and back doublehanded with German Hans Bergmann. "It was a very windy race. We finished 12th out of 21 and we were the last one to finish, but at least we finished," she recounts.

In a hurry to complete her 1,000 mile solo qualifier she set sail to tick this off five days after the Odysses d'Olysses but was again beset - initially - by stormy weather during which time she logged 18 knots sailing under trisail... She put into port but was allowed by Classe Mini to continue her qualifier from there. She has since finished 14th of 21 finishers in the Course des Lions out of Port Camargue and came 13th of 20 finishers in Mini Solo, her first singlehanded race, and 55th of 76 starters in the two-handed Mini-Fastnet - results unlikely to set the world alight, but which will pave the way for improvement.

"This is pretty much a decision-maker as to whether I want to carry on and it gives me a rough idea of where I am in the fleet," says Chua. "In the Mini scene there is a whole range of amateurs to professionals, so you can see where you are. For here I could come back in a proto or move up to a bigger class, but it depends upon money and sponsors. And I need to find out if I like sailing on my own."

While most Mini sailors are no different from other singlehanded offshore sailors in complaining about the food and lack of sleep, Chua says she is okay with little sleep. "I am alright with the sleep, because I am a fairly light sleeper anyway, unless I am really tired. Other than that - if I manage to sleep a little bit every day, I am okay."

What really gets her goat is no wind. "You can’t go anywhere and you are not going fast, so you get frustrated - I should be used to this coming from the Equator," she says. "And there is always this sense of ‘I’m last, I’m last’. But so far, so good. I’ve not had too many no wind situations, except for my qualifier when I had three and a half days without wind - when I moved about 100 miles [Minis have no engines obviously]. I thought I was never going to get there. For the last day and a half I had no food left and I was surviving on vitamin sachets."

Aside from bad timing with the qualifier, first having too much wind and then when she set out again, having none, the qualifier was also the worst moment in her Mini sailing to date because of the solitude, not so much on board, but on the water. "I left on my qualifier on my own, which was a big mistake. Racing in the Mini with a lot of people, at least if it is bad, then you know it is bad for everyone else too. So the Mini Transat is less scary than doing your qualifier on your own. Even if you don’t see people, you know they are a lot out there."

One of the ways Chua gets around the loneliness is through listening to music and prior to the start of the Mini her friends back in Singapore bought her an iPod, as well as some hotel room time - this summer she has spent living on her Mini. The Zero although small inside, has a fixed keel and water ballast but fortunately no canting keel to take up the entire saloon area. "They are really cool," she says of her supporters back home. "I wouldn’t have got so far without them. At times you come back from a race and everyone else have shore crew here because they have friends who live so close. I have no one. So sometimes you feel you are alone, but a trip back home, rejuvenates your brain."



Her non-sailing family have also come around. "To start with they were a bit worried, but now they are very supportive. My mum is getting a lot of stick from my aunties and her friends. ‘Why do you let your daughter do this? She should be married by now, etc…' But she’s okay. She lets me do what I want to do."

To do the Mini Chua says has cost 55,000 Euros for a state of the art Series boat plus another 10,000 Euros campaign costs and that minimum budget, including living on board.

The high speed first leg of the Mini had its fair share of drama including a collision on the start line damaging Feng's port side. "I was a nervous wreck at the start as I had trouble reefing the new main." A downhill sleighride all the way to Lanzarote, conditions were perfect except that under autopilot the spinnaker has a tendency to wrap itself around the forestay, resulting in rips which she subsequently had to repair. She now realised how crucial to look after the kites as she reckons half the miles she lost on the first leg were taken up repairing kites or "taking the scenic route" when she gybed too early or too late.

Then there were the batteries, which refused to hold charge. She ended up having to run her generator endlessly and as a result ran out of petrol. "For the last four days I was steering the whole time during daylight so I could get enough charge to sleep a little in the nights."

Feng and her skipper arrived in Lanzarote 21st out of 29 in the Series and 56th out of 70 overall. Since then Chua has set about making repairs and on this occasion has had some help. Fortunately all of this is easily fixible prior to this Saturday's restart when the boats set off on the 2,900 mile second stage across the Atlantic and through the Doldrums to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.