Meeting the Open 60 skippers

In St Malo Ellen, Mike Golding, Nick Moloney and Roland Jourdain got together to give their views on the Route du Rhum

Mike Golding on the weather at the start:
“Obviously, there are differing weather reports for the weekend and quite fairly big changes but clearly its going to be potentially strong for the first few days and it is going to be a westerly airflow so clearly your job is to get as far as you can against it before you get the shift.

Mike Golding on the spectacle in Saint-Malo:
“I don’t think in all the racing I have done, including the Vendée Globe, I have ever been to an event where the start is so clearly big with the public. From a competitive standpoint, apart from the Vendée where we had 24 starters, I have never seen anything bigger. It is clearly a huge and amazing event.”

Nick Moloney on the spectacle in Saint-Malo:
“I just can’t believe  it when I survey the dock and the crowds. It’s amazing to see the boats, particularly the investments that have been made. There is so much invested in this side of the sport even though in the rest of the world it isn’t really as accepted yet. 

You walk into the marina in Saint-Malo and it is full of Formula One teams and Formula One sailors. The investment is based in most cases on the resumé of the supporting company, in my case Offshore Challenges, and the single resumé of the skipper and that’s incredible when you look at other events I have done in the past [America’s Cup and Whitbread round the world race] where the funding is drawn on the resumé of some incredibly high profile person, like Dennis Conner, and a crew of up to 22.

The rest of the world, the Volvo Ocean Race included, need to be present at these events and see how these events are organised and how the campaigns are run.”

Nick Moloney on his thoughts for the start:
“For me, this is just like the start of the  Mini-Transat [in 1999], the reservations I have for the start [with the forecast] is huge, but we have worked really hard over the last few months on Ashfield Healthcare at sailing upwind in strong breeze [the expected forecast] and I know the boat is great at that.  

The big fight for me won’t be the course as I’ll sail and race everyone but it will be trying to keep it together in my head as this [solo sailing] is totally new to me.”

Mike Golding on how the profile of this area of the sport has been raised in the last two years:  
“The last Vendée was the seminal point for this class of boat in the UK and, undoubtedly, Ellen’s success has raised the profile and made it more apparent. The golden era of solo racing in the UK was around the time of Robin Knox-Johnston and Chay Blyth and we kind of lost the thread slightly and the French took up the baton.  

That stemmed from Eric Tabarly winning the single-handed transatlantic race and when he won that he came back as a national hero and was paraded through the streets of Paris. People in France took him to their heart and the whole of the sport changed. What Ellen did was raise the profile of this type of sailing [in the UK] and make it easier for the likes of Emma Richards [sailing Pindar in the Around Alone] and others to find support.  

None of us competing here are capable of funding these campaigns on our own. These projects are driven by sponsorship and sponsorship demands a return and increasingly we are seeing the possibility to give a valued return to sponsorship in this arena of sailing.” 

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