Cautious approach

Jonny Malbon may be among the tailenders in the Vendee Globe, but, as he points out, he is still in there...

Deep in the Southern Ocean, Artemis Ocean Racing skipper Jonny Malbon had just been on Sky News when we spoke to him recently and the news had finally sunk that he was missing Christmas with friends and family.

“I got to watch some TV but the worst thing was that they had lots of Christmas adverts with big fat turkeys on them. Its just rammed it home. It’s horrible…”

With this Vendee Globe approaching devastation levels not seen in the last two races, with only 50% of the fleet that started actively racing now, so Malbon admits that the pummelling he has received from the relentless depressions are wearing him a bit thin.

“Certainly towards the back we’ve had more than our fair share. They are thick and fast and horrible,” he says, comparing it to when he went around with Brian Thompson on the Oryx Quest when they pretty much stayed with one system all the way through the Southern Ocean. “This time round we are just getting rolled by lots of them and it’s getting a bit dull now. We’ve had three lots of 60 knots and tonight it is a solid 30-40 and there is a nice big one brewing which I think we’ll be out of the way of, but if you look at the forecast its saying 80 knot gusts and none of that sounds that nice to me. So hopefully the Pacific will be a bit kinder.”

To date Malbon says the top wind speed he has seen has been 64 knots in big Southern Ocean depression no.2, but despite having less wind the last one, he says, was nastier because of the hideous sea state. “The sea state has been getting progressively worse and it means you have to slow down which is a real killer because you just want to get out of it as quickly as possible. There is a huge confused cross sea and it is quite frightening because the waves are strong enough to spin your boat, so to be quite honest I’m not enjoying that side of it.”

A fine raconteur, Malbon says that so far scary moment number one was the broach followed by a crash gybe he experienced a couple of weeks ago, which incredibly, he emerged from unscathed…

“We have to wind a lot of vang on to pull the mainsail off the rig and if you are in the wrong set of waves, that are trying to turn the bow to weather, sometimes the pilot, try as it might, just can’t cope with the acceleration. So I was down below and we went down a particularly big wave with a gust as well and I basically threw myself through the hatch as we were hitting 29 knots. I got to the wheel – I didn’t have a jacket on or anything, I’d just shaken a reef out – I’d taken about 40 minutes to decide whether it was too windy or not! And then it was… So I got to the wheel and the cockpit is completely underwater and I am completely underwater as we broach. I was on my hands and knees spinning the wheel, trying to get her to bear away at which point we accelerate massively and crash gybed under main and jib top, but luckily we were going so fast that there was very little apparent in the sails and I managed to turn the wheel back and they both popped back over and we were back off at 20 knots! So I instantly put the reef back in and then had a chuckle to myself. But it was pretty scary. You think about the repercussions and how you might deal with that on your own – it is pretty mental…”

Scary moment number two was his iceberg encounter. “That was pretty bad. It was the first time I’d seen an iceberg. There was a huge squall and the radar was blacked out and as the squall cleared there was a blip on the radar screen and it looked very much like a ship. So I went up on deck and couldn’t see anything and went back down and it was getting bigger and closer and then I went back up and out of the remains of the squall, this bloody great chunk of ice comes out - - it was probably half a mile long and 80m tall. I was four miles away, but it was big. It was amazing, but quite sobering when you suddenly see that drifting around. And the satellite hadn’t seen it despite it being a fairly sizable chunk of gear. I was to leeward of it so I bore away as hard as possible because in the squall you get lifted and headed all the time and I wanted to stay as far away from that as possible.”

Aside from these tales of daring do, Malbon admits he is sailing a very conservative race. We ask him how the boats dropping out of the race has affected him and he says this vindicates his approach. “It has affected me in as much as it has made me continue to sail the way I’ve been sailing. I can push the boat harder, but I know that it will lead to problems. I know that I’m not as fast as I should be and I certainly don’t feel competitive at the moment, but all these incidents that happen push me up the leaderboard. I am in 14th at the moment and if I can get around and be in that position when I finish that would it would be absolutely insane. I think anyone in their right mind would have laughed at me if I’d said I’d been in that position prior to the start. But there is obviously a hell of a long way to go. There is so much experience and so much time and effort and the guys with so much time on their boats having problems – it does make you be ultra cautious.”

He has not been without his own problems. Artemis has suffered some superficial damage to her mainsail – for some reason the scrim has blistered off on one side leaving the fibres exposed, forcing Malbon to take extra care when reefing or unreefing.

The only race threatening breakage so far has been the PUR Survivor watermakers. “I spent about two days in total trying to fix it. I got down to the point where I had three litres of water left and I was starting to get quite desperate for a solution. We tried plumbing into the ballast tanks, taking feeds from all sorts of places. Now I have got it working just straight from the feed direct to the pump, so it is not going through any filters or anything but it is producing lovely water.” Malbon had just produced 10 litres of H2O, but says he doesn’t know what the problem was, only that both watermakers packed up when he arrived in the south.

One of Artemis’ many features is her interceptor. Unlike the Owen Clarke boats like Ecover and Aviva, this is fitted on to the transom, fortunate as it has become stuck. Malbon can still move it, but it involves him hanging off the transom. “Quite often I find myself hanging off the back of the boat in 30-60 knots pulling the trim tab back up a bit because it changes the attitude of the boat dramatically when you are surfing downwind.” With the interceptor down it causes the boat to nosedive when the breeze is up.

Other than that the mast rotation controls have broken a few times and the traveller sustained some damage shortly after the start, but has got no worse. “That happened in a crash tack as that vicious front came through it looped around one of the traveller stand up blocks and gave it a bit of a nudge. But we are 40 days on now. I am keeping my eye on it. Its cracked and the laminate is damaged, but it doesn’t seem to be moving.”

Artemis’ giant wingmast also seems to be surviving well (touch wood). “I have been sailing around in 60 knots with the main down and just the staysail up, doing 20 knots on the surfs and feeling relatively comfortable. The pilot has been able to control the boat. I won’t know until I try it, but I don’t think you’d want to go more than that. But in any boat when you are getting up to 60-70 knots, you are need in of bicycle clips anyway.”

As to lifestyle on board, Malbon says that his sleep pattern is erratic – he sleeps when he is exhausted or when conditions are stable such as in the warm sector between warm and cold fronts. “But I spend a lot of time sat looking at numbers and at the pilot from down below, with gear on ready to jump into action. And that is one of things I have got to learn not to do. I could spend eight hours just watching numbers and not sleeping when in theory I could have had eight hours sleep because nothing happened. But that is down to confidence, experience and time.”

Despite being as he describes it ‘overly vigilant’, he has had time to read a book and says he is not overly stressed or tired. “I haven’t been hallucinating this time or imagining things, which indicates I am not too tired.” While his sleep may be hapzard, he says he is religiously eating and drinking at the right times.

And the isolation? It is not often you get to spend a month and a half on your own. “Yesterday I got really down because I gybed again. The sea state was so crap on one gybe that I thought that ‘right when I gybe it has got to get better’. And when I gybed it was atrocious. So you are getting pooped, a quarter sea and slapped on the beam by massive breaking waves all from different directions, all about 6m high. And you download a wave model and it just shows you in a big pile of red horribleness which seems to stretch all the way to the Pacific. So yesterday I had a bit of a mood on in the morning, but when we stared moving again I was fine. I haven’t felt too isolated or too lonely yet and I hope I won’t now. When I get to the date line then in my mind I am on my way home and every mile I knock off is a mile closer.”

While he is enjoying the challenge of the Vendee Globe, Malbon admits that it is making him realise how much he also enjoys life at home in Cowes. He hopes that the next ice he sees will be that floating on the top of his rum and coke in the Pierview.