Leopard's story

Mike Slade recounts his Rolex Fastnet Race and Ray Davies gives his impressions of racing the 100ft supermaxi

With a few boats set adrift now from the Queen Anne's Battery marina, so Mike Slade's Rolex Fastnet Race elapsed time winner ICAP Leopard has managed to find a 100ft long space to berth in.

Slade stepped ashore in understandably buoyant mood having not only won the race over both Neville Crichton's race favourite Alfa Romeo and the older water ballasted Alfa Romeo, now George David's 90ft Rambler, but also to have done so in such a new boat in her first major offshore race. With Leopard winning the race, so in a private wager, so Neville Crichton must donate £5,000 to the Ellen MacArthur Trust...

"We’ve sailed against each other for seven years but up until now he’s always been in front," Slade enthused of his Sydney-based Kiwi rival. "We were side by side all the way up the Solent and we dropped a genoa in the water off Portland Bill, so we had to give up the lead to him and then we overtook him going into the dark off the Lizard and then we all had a six hour shut down as we came in at dawn and then there was no Neville Crichton. I wonder what the hell happened - it’s not like Neville to disappear?" says Slade of what they was going through their mind at the time. "But sadly Neville dropped out - that would have been one heck of a struggle all the way around and I don’t quite know what the result might have been because the conditions and point of sailing favoured us, but it would have been a really struggle all the way around. But to have his old boat come and pip us wouldn’t have been sad - it would have been tragic!"

Slade said that the breeziest part of the race was between the Lizard and Land's End. "All that was pretty nasty and of course it is at night and it is so hard to guage when it is at night. We saw 40 knots and we were seeing more in the gusts and that is clearly when Neville decided to pull out. It was nasty."





In the big conditions Slade says ICAP Leopard is just really solid. "When it really blows you can put water in the back, you can lift the bow and you just power away... It is almost a different form of sailing. It is like on a motor boat - the transom sinks and off you go. According to the designers it makes the boat think it is longer. She is very wide and sinks on her chine and she is off..."

At no point in the race even in 40+ knots did they have to back off: "In fact quite the reverse," says Slade. "The worse it gets, the more you pile in, it will take it. We didn’t back off once. You can really push the boat, she likes being pushed. You have a genny, a staysail, two reefs in the main and you can still be with that in 40 or 50 knots, she can take that, she is very solid. She is heavy. She is 40 odd tonnes and Neville’s is 28-30. We take some time to accelerate which is why I was so pleased to be leading out of the Solent because it wasn’t that strong a breeze there."

After the big breeze getting to Land's End in the early hours of yesterday morning the wind crapped out. As Slade recounts: "It was a complete transition area and you have to be prepared for that. We were doing about 28 knots and suddenly we were into zero. It was quite extraordinary. And Rambler came up. And the Open 60s came up. And we sat there for six hours - a long time to sit there. And when we got started again... The record is 11.3 knots average, and up until then at the end of the six hours our average was 11.07, so we were under the record having had those six hours, because we’d shot down the coast with Neville alongside."

Once the breeze filled in and crossing the Celtic Sea, Rambler was able to make her break: "She got the new breeze quickest and off she went and it was a question of trying to catch her up. Now she is very very quick and on that angle of sailing she was going very very nicely indeed."

There were also a few incidents. Aside from the J4 pulling out of the headsail off Portland Bill, as they headed for the Rock a 5ft shark impaled itself on the rudder.

"We all had to draw lots as to who was going to go over the side to remove it," continued Slade. "But in the end we nominated a young Australian surfer who was on board [Adam Hawkins]. We had to dislodge it, because it had complete creased over. So that stopped us for 10-15 minutes as we had to back off. The guy was in the water going ‘Jesus Christ, that’s a shark’."

As they backed down so an oil pressure valve went and they dumped all their hydraulic oil into the bilge. "So everything shut down, you haven’t got revs or your hydraulics. So that took 20 minutes to get the oil feed transferred. So we had our fair share of incidents."

After that they were once again in the hunt. "We were catching her up and then the Rock - three seconds, that was great! Then we were on a beat out to the transition point [Pantaneus mark], which we took quite easily and then we were off. But we were always looking over our shoulder. And coming in we hit 33 knots surfing…

They were lucky with the widn direction as they headed back across the Celtic Sea towards Bishop Rock: "The trick was to get around it because we expected it to go more southerly than the southwesterly we had coming back. That meant you were going to be beating all the way back so that didn’t find favour with me certainly because I normally get sick when we are beating in these boats, but luckily we got the southwesterly when we came around."

While Alfa Romeo is heading off to the Med, ICAP Leopard is staying in the UK until she is shipped to Sydney ready for the Rolex Sydney-Hobart race on Boxing Day.

Sailing on board Leopard was Emirates Team New Zealand strategist and Mean Machine skipper Ray Davies. In this audio file Davies gives his impressions on sailing the Rolex Fastnet Race elapsed time winner....