One horrific night

40+ knots of wind on their first night, but Virgin Money is still on track to break Mari Cha IV's record says Mike Sanderson

Now into the depths of the North Atlantic, skipper Mike Sanderson updated us on Virgin Money’s progress on her record attempt between New York and the Lizard.

“Next time I tell you I’m going to take a 100ft sloop out into 30-40 knots in the North Atlantic I want to you push me into a room and lock the door to be honest. It has been a pretty wet, wild and bumpy 24 hours. We have got good pace. We are just having to monitor the boat’s performance through the waves. If you let it loose it would be doing 30 knots the whole time and I’m not sure how long it would last. We are going fast, we are heading the right way and so far so good.”

As we mentioned in this morning’s report, Virgin Money, Juan K-designed 100ft supermaxi formerly known as Speedboat, has been tackling conditions to the southwest of an intense depression.

So are the conditions what he expected? “They are. The boat hasn’t done a whole lot of sailing in this stuff. We are learning it and its learning us. We’re learning what it can do. The boat has been beautifully built and we have had no issues - it is all hanging in there. It is one big piece of kit, when you have got reefs going in and out in 40 knots of breeze and you are trying to furl fractional code zeroes and that sort of thing.”

The game he says is all about managing down time or, specifcally, avoiding it. But in the conditions this is difficult. “The boat is very quick and the things which we are battling with are the sea state, which is short and nasty, and just trying to limit downtime from little bits and pieces. It is windy and the daylight hours aren’t that long. They have certainly shortened up a bit. So it has been quite tough.”

Being on the tail end of a depression behind a wind shift from southwest to north has not helped the sea state. Then there is the Gulf Stream pushing northeast against the northerly breeze that is also not helping the sea state. “We have got a bumpy short nasty thing,” describes Sanderson of the se. “You are banging into the back of them. You go down the back of a wave at 37 knots and are charging into the back of the next. So it is a hard little sea state and all and all it hasn’t been that pleasant. It is a very different trip to 2003 on Mari Cha IV when we had the pleasure of running across the top of a high.”

To give some idea - typically on a 100ft supermaxi one would imagine the size of the beast means it shouldn’t get that wet back in the cockpit, particularly when the crew are at least the length of a Volvo 70 back from the end of the bowsprit. However last night in the big conditions with the sea pretty much beam on green water was regularly rolling back down the deck.

On their first night at sea the wind piped up well into the 40s he says, made all the harder as it was puffy. “It’d be in the mid-30s and you’d get set up with the J4 and three reefs and then 10 minutes later it would be back to 25 knots. So it has been hard work. But it was always quite a complicated weather system we were leaving on. It is quite disturbed. It is as much as of a challenge as what we knew it was going to be.”

Thankfully over the course of today both sea and wind have abated slightly (at the time of our conversation they were in 25-28 knots sailing at 90deg under three reefs and J4). “We are back into spray territory rather than sheer green water rolling down the deck. Even in this stuff we are doing 20-28 knots of boat speed, and every now and then you latch on to one and off you go into the 30s. So it is all go.”

Despite the northerly breeze, Sanderson says it isn’t that cold…however this is just a matter of time. “We got driven quite well south when it was up in the mid-30s, so the temperature actually isn’t too bad. But for sure it is going to get worse pretty quickly. We are now starting to get some northing back as the breeze is going left on us a little bit and the water will start dropping quite quickly which is when it will start to get wet and cold downstairs and cold up on deck.”

Up on deck he has been taking turns on the helm with ocean racing legend Earl Williams and of course his TeamOrigin hot shots Ben Ainslie and Rob Greenhalgh.

And the Bransons? Daughter Holly and son Sam are standing watches with the rest of the crew while Branson senior is out of the watch system with Sanderson, the boat’s owner Alex Jackson and navigator Stan Honey.

“They’re enjoying it! They are remarkable!” says Sanderson of how the Bransons are taking to their washing machine experience. “The kids have grown up with hearing all of father’s adventures and Sam’s been on adventures recently to the North Pole and so they are great. They are into it, amazingly so, to be honest. There are a fairly few of us hardened Volvo sailors who might get off given a choice, but they are loving it!”

Back to the nitty gritty and while in this morning’s update we saw one trough Virgin Money would have to get through before she could get onto the ‘motorway’ of southwesterlies that could potentially take her to the finish, Sanderson reckons there are two (we’ll have to re-examine our forecast charts). Having headed so far south to date, they urgently need to get some northing in, which he reckons they should managed after they have crossed the first trough. “We are going to be finishing in a northerly, so we need to get back north now so that we can go east in the northerly and not northeast.” This process has already started and their course is now due east rather than southeast.

So they are still on track for the record? According to their routing they are. “At the moment the routing has still got us ahead of record pace, but it is going to be tight. We are not talking about any king hits, but we knew that was a pretty tidy passage we had [on Mari Cha IV] in 2003. We really did think it was going to take a while for someone to beat us - that was a good enough trip to stop people attacking it too hard. So this is going to be a fair battle and if we could get cross ahead of that time we’d be pretty damned excited about it.”

The problem, says Moose, could be the troughs. “They are on our hurdle list at the moment, but with both of them it looks like we can get through with reasonable pressure but they are a way away and the odds are on that they will take longer than the router thinks. So it is going to be tight. We are a day into it, and the router still thinks we have as much time as what we left on so percentage-wise we are better off. It is not optimum for us for sure, but if we can scrap across any time faster than the Mari Cha time on this weather pattern that we’ve come across on then we’d consider that a pretty large success. It is an interesting challenge. We’ll go and give it heaps.”

Fingers crossed. If they can break the record with such a rotten forecast one wonders what they might achieve with the same forecast Mari Cha IV had.

Read more about the former Speedboat here